Bonus Episode: 4 Demands the Client of the Future Wants From You Now

Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, the Chief Content Officer at Commonsku. Today we have a special episode. I know many of you are regular listeners to this podcast, and on behalf of the team, thank you for your encouragement. I get notes and messages about how the SkuCast has helped you, and it's incredibly rewarding knowing we get to share in the challenges and successes of your journey. To that end, some of you might be regular listeners, but you might not be regular readers of our content that we publish at community.commonsku.com. And since we're starting a new series, we wanted to share with you here one article we've written that might be timely and also a time savings for you. The inspiration for this idea came from The Daily produced by The New York Times, which I'm sure many of you listen to. Most days they produce interview-style episodes, which we will continue to do as well, but on Sundays they read a substantial article from their archives or a recent article that addresses current events. We started a new written series, one of the most important series we've ever launched. Examining what the future world of work will look like. Through this series, we're considering every facet affecting our business, from the future supply chain to the future team, the future salesperson, and the future entrepreneur. Today, we'll share with you one of the first installments in the series about the future client, co-written by myself and CommensQ CEO, Catherine Graham. We will be back to our regular interviews. We just wanted to try this out. And do let me know whether this is helpful to you or not. You can email me, bobby@commonsque.com, or you can share it on the socials. You can find us @CommonSqueu everywhere. And now today's article, 4 Demands the Client of the Future Wants from You Now. On Twitter, Diego Monroy asked Elon Musk, "Does Tesla have a marketing department that focuses on the aspects of digital marketing, such as SEO and Google AdWords, or is that not a current necessity for the company due to you and Tesla's publicly well-known name?" Elon replied with 3 words: "I hate advertising." You know what Elon Musk does not hate? Advertising on branded merch. Elon believes in its power so much that when his new Cybertruck's bulletproof glass shattered during its live worldwide debut, he used the failure as an opportunity to commemorate the moment on a t-shirt. And when Elon wanted to raise money for his project The Boring Company—the Boring Company builds tunnels to alleviate traffic congestion—he sold 50,000 Boring Company hats and 20,000 branded flamethrowers. And after taking heat—sorry—for the flamethrower fundraising tactic, He then sold fire extinguishers and added, "You can definitely buy one for less elsewhere, but this one comes with a cool sticker." Think about that for just a minute. One of the hottest brands in the world, who doesn't believe in advertising, uses merch for identity, memory-making, inspirational moments, radical fundraising, and even as monuments to failure. And it's not just Elon's Tesla and The Boring Company, but SpaceX too. You can visit each of their company shops online. Something's dreadfully wrong with the thinking in our industry. While we are worrying about client budget cuts and allowing ourselves to get boxed in by habitual buying patterns due to our own short-sighted sales strategies, the leading brands prove time and time again that branded merch demands a primary place in their business. And it proves one crucial aspect about our future. There's not a lack of interest in what we sell. There's a lack of strategy to our thinking and a lack of boldness in our selling. It has never been about the product. It's how we've trained the client to think about us and our product. Moreover, you can't have lived through 2020 so far and not realize that the world is radically changing right beneath our feet. And this goes for our clients too. We can no longer afford to see the world as the way it was. We need to see the world as it should be, and in order to do this, we need to enter the world our clients live in now. If we do, we will lead our clients to a new future. Here are 4 ways we can respond to the customer of tomorrow today. Number 1: The future client needs an entirely new toolkit. Consider the revolution. Study after study shows that a majority of consumers distrust advertisers They opt out of virtually any form of it, employ ad blockers, ignore sponsored search results, and click on the "skip ad" button more than any other button on the web. It should be no surprise that traditional advertising is plummeting and digital advertising is largely ineffective for all but those with the deepest pockets. The client's toolkit has been shaken, overturned, and dumped out. Cancellations of conferences and trade shows are examples of how the old tools for business building won't work anymore., and we need new tools to build a new future. But while we are waiting for budgets to come back, the client is still looking for unique opportunities to connect with every single individual in their hard-to-reach audience. The client wants less advertising and more engagement. And what creates more engagement than a one-to-one emotional connection through branded merch? And engagement isn't just a buzzword for consumer brands anymore. A study by the B2B Institute revealed that B2B brands and B2C brands no longer operate on different wavelengths, such as B2C equals emotional, B2B equals rational. They now respond similarly, which means today's client, in whatever form, needs to focus on H2H, human to human. And no one excels at this type of intimate marketing more than you do. The crux is that ASI and PPAI have both produced studies that have proven for years our medium's effectiveness over other modes of advertising. But we're still not making even a dent in changing the client's mind by moving category spend from underperforming categories to useful and effective strategies with promo. Most of us aren't even trying to change the client's mind. Although the industry has grown every year, it's marginal growth that reflects average GDP growth. We are not taking market share from defunct advertising categories and expanding the pie. If we were to do this, our growth as an industry would be exponential. Today, we have been given a golden opportunity. Since the client's toolbox has been overturned, the client has more questions than answers. They are open to fresh perspectives, and now they are demanding a new type of relationship with you. Number 2: The future client needs you to have an opinion. Historically, the client had all the answers. They boxed you into a category and didn't allow you to budge. But since clients now have more questions than answers, they need your expertise. And what they want with that expertise is your conviction. They need you to express a strong opinion on what they should be doing, not just with their merch, but with their brand. In a recent survey conducted by Forrester Research about the future of B2B buying, clients responded that they want to be more connected with you. The customer of tomorrow demands that you understand their challenges. During our recent virtual conference, SKUCon at Home, the Chief Sales Officer at BDA, Barry Deutsch, said this in an interview with Jamie Mayer.

I go back to the first thing I said, which is know your clients better than, than you, than they know themselves. And when I say that, again, that means you got to understand their operations. You need to understand their business model. You need to understand their systems, because oftentimes we're, we almost act as a consultant on how they can navigate their own organization. And again, there's a lot of appreciation for that. But at the same time, we also know where they're going as an organization. And whether they know it or not, we— I expect that our sales force does know where they're going to go as an organization.

BDA serves some of the most notable companies in the world, Fortune 100 brands like AT&T, ExxonMobil, FedEx, the NBA, the NFL, and many more. And how many of us have taken that to heart and done something with it since SKUCon@Home? The client doesn't need you to be more educated about supply chain or the effectiveness of promo. That's table stakes. They expect that from you. They need you to be experts in the intricacies of their business. They need you to know the impact the current environment is having on their industry as a whole and their business specific. What Barry suggests is that we can no longer afford to wait. We need to lead. How do we do this? How do we form strong opinions about our customers and lead them to solutions? After thorough research, we unlock our potential to become better advisors by being bold with our investigations. Number 3: The future client needs you to ask the hard questions. To learn how to build a strong opinion, you need to do your research and then ask the hard questions.

Barry continued, the second thing I'd go back to is listen to it. Your clients will tell you everything. If you just ask a good question, a good open-ended question or two, and just shut up and listen. And really listen to what they're saying and try to read between the lines. They're gonna tell you X, and X is gonna be very real, and then it's what they don't tell you is what we're trying to pick up on.

I know, we've all heard this before, but are we doing it? Questions are the key to opening a new future. They force the client to reimagine their objectives. Hard questions like, what is your current client retention rate and how do you measure effectiveness? Or can you define your customer acquisition strategy and comment on the weakest elements you might need help with? Or how are you inspiring and motivating your employees and what's the most difficult part building authentic connections with them? The questions are endless and virtually any team can sit down and through your research craft a unique set of open-ended questions specific to your customer and their industry. According to the Forrester study, B2B buyers now demand an entirely different relationship with your organization. They expect to be treated as equal partners. Now, the term trusted advisor no longer cuts it. Neither does consultant. Everyone knows those are artificial words for sales, and even the word partnership is bland. What the study suggests is that your client wants you to stop viewing their business as something to extract money from. Instead, They view you as an ally, someone to grow with. It's an entirely different dynamic to focus on your client's outcomes more than yours, but by helping them achieve their most critical objectives, you create an alliance where you in turn achieve yours. Approaching our customers with problem-solving intent rather than product-selling intent earns a seat at the table. Once we first do our research and second ask open-ended questions, we can now help our clients rethink traditional uses of promo by looking at their business through the lens of outcomes. The fourth and final point: the future client needs you to rethink purpose. One way we can get our clients to rethink our role and the role of branded merch is to rebuild our client's toolkit. Most often, as a branding professional, you are an afterthought in your client's minds. For example, the buyer only thinks of promo after they've strategically planned the conference and now need a giveaway. The chilling truth is The sober truth is you're an afterthought because you've not given your client any reason for forethought. I know that's harsh, but it's true. Many of us still approach our clients with newest product ideas or the coolest items we saw at the 2020 expo, and as such, we unintentionally create a commoditized relationship with the customer rather than a consultative one. There's a chart produced by PPAI from a research study that shows which categories clients have traditionally spent their budget on for branded merch. You can find that at ppi.org. But keep in mind, these labels represent categories. They don't represent outcomes. The chart reveals what percentage clients spend in certain categories. For example, when the year this study was done, the research showed that clients spent about 18.5% on employee relations and events. 12.9% on brand awareness, 12.7% on business gifts, et cetera. But categories like employee service awards and wearables are only for the industry's consumption. The client thinks in terms of objectives. We need to learn how to reverse engineer these categories into results-oriented conversations. For example, now that you're armed with research specific to your client, now that you've asked the open-ended questions that show you where their most significant challenges are, Now that you've opened the conversation about H2H versus advertising, it's time to walk through reframing promo as a results-oriented solution. Here are just a few examples of how to take these categories and think like a client. Use these categories to ask yourself, are you embracing industry thinking and industry jargon, or are you thinking like a customer? Example number 1, customer referral category. If more and more buyers distrust advertising, and millennial buyers in particular value peers' opinions over providers, then your customer is thinking, how do we get more referrals from our raving fan customers? Or a category like internal promotions and communications. With large percentages of the world's workforce working from home and many considering it as a permanent alternative, communications and internal promotions inspiring employees is imperative. The customer isn't thinking, we need to send a gift to all our employees. They are thinking, how do we keep our workforce engaged through all of this turmoil? Or take the category of safety education. The customer isn't thinking, I need to buy more PPE. The customer is thinking, how do we create safe, secure, and comfortable work environments? Last example, gifts. The client doesn't think in terms of product business gifts. They think in terms of emotion. How can we show our appreciation to the most important VIPs in our network? How do we retain more clients? How do we expand the lifespan of our client relationships? How do we become more customer obsessed? You can use the charts that we have in the industry as an opportunity for you to meet your clients where they are at, but reframe the conversation around end goal, not product. The world is changing so fast, we can barely keep up with the velocity. And as such, your clients' needs are shifting quicker than ever before, and their demand for personal, informed service is the one unique skill that you can create own, and master by researching, asking the right questions, and thinking like a client. But mostly, this crazy economy that keeps shifting— we're now, as we record this, in a bull market— is still signifying so much possibility. We must fight the perspective that no one's buying, when the reality is clients have more questions than answers and are more open than ever before to opinions and perspectives. Moreover, They are waiting for us to arrive to help them at the time when they need us the most. If Elon doesn't believe in advertising but believes that he can still make H2H connections, engage his audience, commemorate failures, and celebrate successes all through branded merch, then we need to believe in the power of it too.