Converted: The Data-Driven Way to Win Customers’ Hearts
Neil Hoyne
Portfolio/Penguin (2022)
How and why strategic interactions with customers can build and strengthen relationships with them
Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell wrote a book in which they explain how to create what they characterize as “customer evangelists.” I was again reminded of that book as I began to read this one. For at least 4,000 years and probably longer, the primary objective of marketing has been to create or increase demand for whatever is offered. That is the WHAT. Prospects, customers, and influencers (e.g. lead generators) are the WHO. As for the HOW of marketing, it has become immensely complicated.
Today, the business world is more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than at any prior time I can recall. Companies need a new, better HOW. Neil Hoyne wrote this book for those who know they can’t be competitive by running the same game. They need a new way to compete. This book will help them to find it…and apply it effectively (i.e. profitably and consistently).
Consider: “Instead of optimizing to the immediate [and expedient, probably obsolete approach], what if you built a business around long-term relationships switch customers, using data to understand who the best customers were, and what products [and/or services] they wanted to buy, then building around them? What if you could leave your customers, with all of their data and their short-term thinking, just to poke around the scraps?
‘The answer: You can. And it works incomprehensively well.”
Over the years, I have read and reviewed dozens of the best marketing books ever written. However different their approaches to the HOW may be, most of them stress these points such as these:
1. When attempting to create or increase demand for what you offer, never make any promise(s) for your product and/or service that it cannot keep. Never.
2. Make an all-out, never-ending effort to know everything you need to know about your customers, their organizations, their markets, and their industry…and about significant changes when they occur. Pay special attention to your unknown-unknowns.
3. Success in digital marketing is driven by the data to which the previous point refers. These data must be accurate, sufficient, relevant, and constantly evaluated.
If there is a “secret sauce,” Hoyne has summed it up eloquently in the Introduction as well as anyone else ever has: “They say hello, they start a conversation. They ask questions, actually [begin itakics] listen[end italics] to the answers, and let things develop. They begin to build a relationship, one step at a time, and then they ask themselves, ‘Is this going anywhere?’ Their data tells them the answer — and they act on it.”
Later in the book, this acknowledgment caught my eye: “I learned something important that day: it’s better to help others find their own questions than it is to just hand them answers.” My Swedish grandmother woiulds agree with that, once pointing out that I had two eyes, two ears, and only one mouth. “Most of the time, Bobby, you should be watching and listening.”
4. Channeling Albert Einstein, make certain that doing business with you and your organization is as simple as possible…but no simpler.
5. Channeling Theodore Roosevelt, prospective/current/former customers “won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
These are among the passages in Converted of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to suggest the scope of Hoyne’s coverage:
o A Digital Marketer Walks into a Bar…(Page xvii)
o How to Start Simple (13-15)
o Directing/guiding conversations with customers (20-21 and 69-76)
o Embracing human nature (35-48)
o Behavioral science techniques (39-47)
o Hints and Signals (49-67)
o Guiding behaviors of customers (69-76)
o Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) 83-94
o Customer acquisition (95-110)
o Identifying and identifying with high-value customers (99-103)
o Amazon’s customer acquisition, and, proactive customer retention practices (95-97 and 122-125)
o Changes and disruptions (111-119)
o Customer retention (121-131)
o Small steps forward with high impact (147-153)
o Team members and collaboration (191-200)
Some executives (especially at the C-level) need to connect (or re-connect) with their prospective, current, and former customers after converting their approach to new realities). Cultivation is the name of the game and it should never end. Circumstances change, often suddenly and unexpectedly. Consequently, data change and so must HOW they are used to guide and inform effective responses to those changes.
Obviously, no brief commentary can do full justice to the quality and value of the information insights, and counsel that Neil Hoyne provides. However, I have at least indicated why I think so highly of his work. With all due respect to marketing strategies (hammers) and tactics (nails), they must be formulated and implemented with a data-driven mindset that can both connect and convert. Just about everything they need to know is in this book.