Step into my time machine, won’t you? I’m setting the dial for November 5, 1955…October 26, 1985…Ah, here we go: April 3, 1995: Amazon.com sold its first book, and the retail experience was about to be transformed forever. Now, truth be told, while the novelty and convenience of ordering online was immediately apparent, the original customer experience on Amazon was pretty rough around the edges. I doubt the booksellers at Barnes & Noble or Borders gave it much notice. Hindsight’s 20/20, but we know how that turned out.

So, no question that e-commerce changed the game. But neither has it been the extinction event for brick-and-mortar retailers that some predicted during the dot-com era. Consider premium shopping neighborhoods, where luxury stores retain undisputed brand status. The cachet of an Hermès Birkin bag is explained by the experience of securing one as much as by its tangible qualities. And on the other end of the price spectrum, stores like Uniqlo are succeeding by combining value with highly appealing design and in-store experience. 

Who’s been left out? A lot of mid-market chains that didn’t develop a distinctive customer experience, but instead grew by dint of being the default choice at shopping malls. But guess what? When it comes to convenience and cost structure, it’s impossible to beat online, and without a compelling customer experience, a number of undistinguishable brands very quickly became also-rans.

The unique ritual of finding a Birkin notwithstanding, another aspect of thriving sellers is that they embrace commerce on their customers' terms. The notion that retailers need to integrate their various online and offline channels is hardly new, but consumers are changing their expectations far faster than many retail businesses realize. For all the industry talk of omni-channel, customers care less about the means—the channel—and more about the end—the experience.

That’s not to say the ability to market and to conduct commerce across channels isn’t critical. Of course it is. But cross-channel coordination is just part of delivering the experience customers expect and reward with their shopping behavior. As Deloitte noted, “winning online is not just about getting e-commerce right. It’s about building a cohesive, consistent, and compelling experience across all touch points in the customer journey, both online and offline.”

I’m going to repeat that last part: the customer experience crosses all the touch points in the customer journey, not just the moments explicitly devoted to shopping. Throughout, there are short-lived opportunities for a business to engage with a customer in just the right place, at just the right time. Maybe it’s in a store, perhaps it’s online, or maybe it’s somewhere well outside the expected retail context.

Those “perishable moments” are fleeting, but they can be a powerful driver of great customer experiences. They’re a chance for a business to deliver a message that’s a nearly pure expression of the classic four Ps of marketing. 

The medium of those messages—email, texts, in-app notifications, or some other mechanism—will vary, though implementation details do matter, so that the message that’s sent is optimized for the user’s context. Effective marketing has got to reflect a deep empathy for the customer’s experience, driven by authentic understanding, true one-to-one personalization, and real-time feedback and analytics.

And that’s where we as an industry still have significant room for innovation (and a lot of work to do). But if we get it right, we can enable an entirely new level of responsiveness to customer engagement and empower businesses to deliver truly great customer experiences.

(I originally published this post on LinkedIn.)

A study released earlier this week (Narrator: It was 2003.) says web services are slower than many native protocols. It doesn’t matter. Simplicity and interoperability almost always trump raw performance.

The study’s sponsors have a horse in the race, of course—selling software built on those high-performing native protocols. They say, “If we’re inside the firewall, why rely on HTTP, which is a relatively slow protocol? Why do we have to parse all these verbose payloads? We know and control what’s at the endpoint—maybe right on the same box.”

And while we’re at it, why not also write these applications in assembly language?

The reason is simple: absolute performance matters in relatively few applications. In those cases, yes, optimize for a particular stack. In the rest, don’t. Barring specific requirements, simplicity and interoperability always trump raw throughput.

Something I learned from a childhood hobby—model trains—illustrates this point. When you think about toy trains, what do you imagine? If you’re like me, I bet you picture old-fashioned steam locomotives circling the track on the floor. And there’s a reason for that.

Steam traction powered railroads for more than a century after their invention. By the 1930s these massive engines could drive trains nearly 100 mph and haul vast quantities of freight. Yet within a decade after WWII, the steam fleet had been replaced by diesel engines that, in absolute terms, didn’t equal the peak performance of their predecessors until the late 1960s.

Why did railroads make such a rapid transition to what was, by all initial measures, a lower-performing technology?

The answer is simple: the gearing and engines that powered top-performing steam locomotives had become so complex that they simply cost too much to maintain. Diesel locomotives required a vastly simpler physical plant. Replacing a steam locomotive with a somewhat lower-performing—but far easier-to-maintain—diesel engine was an easy business decision. Reduced costs for parts, maintenance staff, and downtime created a more productive, flexible foundation that kept railroads competitive with new rivals such as the trucking industry.

Today we see a similar cost-benefit dynamic in software platforms. So, web services are slower than (insert your favorite protocol here). It doesn’t matter. Their performance will improve, but the benefits of simplicity and interoperability deliver far more real business value today than raw speed ever will.

I recently examined the challenges of B2B developer marketing. One area I touched on was the importance of really understanding stakeholders’ sometimes divergent “hot buttons.” That went hand-in-hand with another lesson: You’re not addressing just one target, but a whole lineup of influencers and decision-makers who have a say in the sale.

That’s because when doing any kind of B2B technology marketing, you’ve got to embrace the hard truth that one size *never *fits all when it comes to needs, value propositions and messaging.

One person’s idea of product value may be another person’s “meh,” to put it bluntly, even if they’re working within the same four walls, even on the same project. You just can’t assume your targets will all interpret your message the same way. That’s especially true when you’re trying to capitalize on marketplace trends. (That is to say, throwing out some buzzwords that sorta fit your product and hoping they stick.)

You think these buzzwords just sell themselves?

Let’s illustrate this with an example ripped from today’s tech headlines. What’s a B2B technology trend that’s on fire, where some providers might think their product practically sells itself? One that’s presumed to be on the Christmas list of every CIO, CTO and Director of Engineering? How about “microservices?”

I see you’re smiling in agreement. (Or are you smirking? It’s hard to tell from here.) “Microservices” isn’t just a bit of marketecture fluff. It’s a bit of codified shorthand that distills many of the architectural trends of the past several years. My own company’s offerings, like many of our customers’ (and maybe yours, too), are designed around a microservices architecture.

So, microservices are a real thing that real technologists do real work with. But that doesn’t mean that namedropping the term is necessarily an effective way to appeal to a B2B tech buyer. (Aha—you were smirking earlier!)

But what about focusing on the implicit functional and architectural qualities instead?

• Does your so-called microservice meet all the right mandates: small, each focused on “doing one thing and doing it well,” modular, elastic, resilient, minimal and complete unto itself?
• Is it a clean and complementary addition to their own enterprise architecture?
• Does it solve a specialized, difficult problem and deliver demonstrable ROI and payback?

That’s a little closer—you’re focusing on qualities and benefits rather than relying on jargon. But even then, going to market with the attitude of, “We’ve built a better mousetrap—isn’t that obvious?” isn’t going to move a lot of business beyond the first few customers who share your vision.

Even in the cloud, tech marketing is a lot like any other B2B relationship

If it sounds like you may be challenged to establish your bona fides on the most basic level, you’re right. Your target buyer isn’t about to make a snap decision. In fact, most aren’t in a position to make a unilateral choice much of the time.

In that way, B2B tech buyers fit the “typical” template of a B2B buyer:

• They don’t make impulse buys, but well-parsed purchases where an entire buying team might be involved, especially at a large enterprise running a sizable architecture. The buying process will have multiple stages, too, including torture-testing your pride and joy to see if it breaks.
• They’re smart and informed, and they’ve seen a zillion or two products in their time, some even pitching the same promises you are. They do copious research and have their ear to the ground at GitHub and other places where they’ll get the real skinny on you and your track record, have no doubt.
• They’re playing for big stakes, because failure can not only lose them their job but can result in their company taking a bullet, too. So they’re virulently protective of the infrastructure they’ve assembled.
• They’re harder to reach, especially the farther up the ladder you go, because real decision-makers studiously avoid taking cold calls or giving advertising the time of day. You reach them with relevance using tools like content marketing, advocacy strategies, participation in industry forums and events, and other more credible touch points.
• They respect relationships and the work you put into developing a sound and steady one with them by getting to understand their challenges and ambitions. It’s a long-haul effort, and it’s entirely about earning trust, often the hard way.

Just because they may share attributes across the board with other B2B prospects, though, you still have to customize your message and approach to suit the individual persona of each role-player who’s part of the buying process.

Another thing to remember: They’ve got the power, more than ever. Vendors, once upon a time, had more control, but the cloud blew up that paradigm. Part of what they expect from the entire buying experience you deliver is ease and convenience, too, just like consumer companies deliver. That’s why vendors with good brand recognition and easy-to-use trials beat out the competition.

All of this circles right back to where we began: Who, exactly, are you trying to convince and convert?

Who is your buyer? I mean, really?

As with terms like “microservices,” marketing and sales personas are a convenient shorthand for describing complex characteristics. But like buzzards, it’s all too easy to jump to the shortcut: “We have an enterprise buyer” or “We market to tech executives.” In reality, those personas are usually quite a bit more nuanced.

You’re obviously aiming to connect with key influencers and decision-makers. Thus, you’re obliged to do a huge amount of research, networking, social media and industry outreach to figure out who it is you need to target within each organization and what their hot buttons/pain points might be.

Remember, though, that the final decision-maker may not be the person doing the assessment and testing, and he or she may only have a momentary presence during the entire buying experience. They may kick off the process and show up at the end, but somebody else is doing the grunt work in between. Even so, you’ve still got to educate and sell them when they eventually show up.

You might be tempted to make the CTO or CIO a primary target, and that might make sense if you were selling an entire enterprise-scale microservices architecture solution to a company that’s migrating away from a monolithic approach or considering it. They’re concerned with big-picture work: How to update enterprise infrastructure without breaking the bank, planning deployment, network and system management, integration testing, risk management practices and so on.

If you’re only selling a widget, especially if it’s a comparatively small widget in the grand scheme of things, the CTO/CIO may not be the person buttering your bread, frankly. But it’s good to make sure that person has heard your name somewhere, in a good way: Attending top-tier conferences, showing up in the trades they read or doing traditional “awareness marketing” via advertising and PR can help with that.

The Software Architect is charged with articulating the vision behind whatever architecture is being deployed. He or she builds models, devises spec documentation for components and apps (like yours!) and validates and re-validates that architecture.

Depending on the company’s structure, the software architect may be a primary target, and certainly, he or she is a purchase influencer/ratifier worth keeping in the loop. But very often, they’re not going to be directly involved with initially assessing your product.

The Director of Engineering comes close to being your sweet spot, though. She or he is on the spot for ensuring proper execution to hit the company’s goals for its technology stack and has a hand in determining the tools that make it happen.

They’ve got the job because they love building things, so showing off the elegance and suitability of your app by talking engineer-to-engineer is the way to go.

The Developers underneath the Director of Engineering may be excellent targets if they’re in the right position to be recommenders or specifiers with enough juice to get your product formally bench-tested. They’re probably avid participants in the developer communities where word-of-mouth and code sharing rule, and proselytizing them can be an open door to real opportunity.

What good can you do them in return? Beyond solving a particular need and helping them build their own knowledge base, you’re giving them the opportunity to look good to their bosses—no small motivation.

Depending on your particular offering, DevOps and Security teams also are in the mix. They might be responsible for assessing your operational requirements and reliability and conducting security audits. And they’ll certainly be responsible for ongoing monitoring of your service when it’s in production.

Even in the age of the cloud, gatekeepers like Procurement or Sourcing Managers still play a role. They’re likely to at least be a formal part of the process for larger deals. They issue RFPs or bid requests, manage the evaluation process and attend to all the nitty-gritty of finalizing a contract or license.

They may (or may not) have a direct role in bringing you to the attention of others in the organization, but you should bend over backward to help them build a business case for your product, especially one that appeals to the multiple stakeholders they’ve got to satisfy.

The closer you get, the better you look

So, are these folks personas? Sure—but more than that, they’re people. And no amount of white-boarding value props can replace the power of genuine empathy and connection. That takes work, and there’s no shortcut.

Certainly, you’re working toward developing a replicable model to scale your efforts. It’s why constructs like personas and leveragable trends such as microservices are critical to B2B marketers.

But your long-term success is going to be built on actual relationships with people: prospects and customers. Forging those ties now and maintaining them throughout the years to come will bring you far more eventual reward than selling a customer a one-off app. Even if it’s a really great app.

This article originally was published at Marketing Land/MarTech Today.

If you’ve spent any time researching customer experience best practices for apps and services, you’ve probably read a lot about the ways sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest treat CX as a core differentiator for their brands and platforms. And it’s true — these social apps and other prominent consumer-oriented services ranging from Uber to Eero offer a master lesson about the power of leveraging CX in growth strategies.

But what about B2B products? Long (although perhaps unfairly) pigeonholed as the ungainly sibling of more glamorous consumer brands, business service providers are the real powerhouses behind today’s cloud economy.

Whether it’s a giant like Salesforce or disruptive innovators such as Atlassian and Intercom, the ways successful B2B services convert engaged users into serious, paying customers provide a lesson for other, up-and-coming businesses — B2B and B2C alike.

Grounding CX in B2B

You know the expression, “talk is cheap?” Perhaps it’s a bit glib, but the adage is worth remembering when we talk about the B2B customer experience. When translating CX best practices into a new context, it’s easy to get lost in generalities.

That’s understandable. For all the attempts business school thinkers might make to quantify an effective customer experience, it retains an inherently subjective quality. Indeed, a slide I use as an icebreaker when discussing CX baldly misappropriates US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous statement about a weightier matter.

“I shall not today attempt to further define what is embraced within the shorthand description ‘a great customer experience’ — but I know it when I see it.”

But let’s be honest. Most product leaders are more clear-eyed than that. They judge the effectiveness of their CX work just like any other investment in their product.

So how should B2B teams approach CX efforts? I’m going to go out on a limb — when you distill it down, there’s only one kind of metric that matters: growth (and its antithesis, churn).

CX is measured by conversion and retention

Measuring how user behavior affects growth metrics is a core aspect of how consumer platforms are managed today. Some of the social applications I mentioned earlier are pioneers of using data-driven experiments to tune every aspect of their user experience.

The impact of CX often is more directly understood for consumer products like these. After all, the connection between the in-app user experience and engagement metrics like visits, session lengths or monthly active users (MAUs) can be fairly readily assessed.

But for B2B businesses, which are paid for solving specific business process needs for their customers, metrics of this sort usually aren’t useful. Instead, the paramount measure of how a B2B business produces health is more hard-nosed: customer conversion and retention.

Naturally, B2B products are designed around that core business process need. Innovators are solving challenges from streamlining HR and recruiting to marketing automation to managing aircraft maintenance — among countless other industry needs.

There’s an old expression that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. And that may well be true — but even the strongest value proposition won’t ensure customer conversion and retention.

CX is leverage at make-or-break moments

“Build it, and they will come” is never a reliable business strategy — but for services that face the constant risk of customer churn, a disengaged approach to the user experience is downright foolhardy.

That’s why an increasing number of product teams building B2B applications and services today are focusing on CX to reduce friction at key moments where user activation is key to the success of their product.

Consider onboarding. As soon as your users sign up, you need to ensure they hit the ground running. That means helping them discover the most important features and making it easy to take key configuration steps like confirming an email address or setting up two-factor authentication.

And there are many additional times when taking action in the app is essential to their success — and therefore your product’s. Think about the user life cycle in your own application. Perhaps a team member is waiting for notification from a colleague about a maintenance workflow. Or a manager needs to approve a scheduled time-off request. Or a user can’t proceed until she acts upon a security notification or password reset.

Each of these represents a sort of make-or-break moment for your product. If the user successfully navigates the process at hand, the more likely they (and their business) are to realize the value your app is delivering. That’s the crux of ensuring continued use — and renewal of service plans.

Make-or-break moments hide in plain sight

Web apps and other SaaS products are multilayered things, and even the most well-designed have plenty of room for CX investments. That’s just the reality of bringing a product to market — no matter how well product teams anticipate market needs, it’s only when users begin using it in the wild that our assumptions and biases are proven out.

Ironically, one of B2B product teams’ real assets — deep vertical expertise — often can get in the way of the quality of their apps’ user experience. That’s human nature; specialized knowledge can lead to a sort of cognitive blindness. We assume that what’s obvious to us is clear to any user.

In reality, the opposite is usually the case. The very thing you know most about may well be the place your users need the most help — and perversely, the moment in your app’s CX that may be the most broken.

So what’s that one configuration step your users need to take? You know, the one that’s essential to your problem space? The one that everyone, from the product team to engineers to customer support, all can recite backward and forward?

Yeah, that one. That’s a good place to begin looking with a fresh eye on CX. Even an incremental improvement in completion rates at that key step will yield outsized impact on user success — and when repeated over and over again from customer to customer, a meaningful change in retention and growth.

CX’s B2B bottom line

B2B providers that focus on CX do it for a very concrete reason: They know that carefully targeted improvements to their user experience remove barriers that get in the way of customer conversion and that lead to churn.

And when you get right down to it, that focus on growth is how product teams working to build a great experience in any product — B2B or B2C—ultimately are measured.

This article originally was published at Marketing Land/MarTech Today.

I was lucky enough to experience totality during the recent full solar eclipse. Despite my knowledge, I could understand why someone might think it was OK to look right at the eclipse as it approached totality. The risk was deceptive—it seemed as clear as day (or rather, dark as night) that I could trust my senses to look straight up.

Good thing I had external data to contradict my sensory assumptions! But as I was thinking about it on the way home, I realized this experience reminded me in a way of something I’ve often noticed about marketing technology to developers (or to anyone, really). Let me take a step back and explain what I mean about the risk of confusing our own experience with the facts.

For every mythologized outsized success in Silicon Valley, there are many more also-rans and outright failures—even some spectacular bombs. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Risk and reward are central to the culture of innovation to which so many of us aspire.

But when risk-taking is confused with self-delusion, the odds of success go way down. And there’s no clearer form of this dangerous myopia than substituting our own point of view for that of our customers. That’s especially easy to do when our customers seem a lot like ourselves—as when we’re selling to other software developers.

Just consider a few notorious examples of self-sabotage in tech marketing.

It seemed like a good idea at the time…

Do you remember Iridium? In the late 1990s, Motorola pumped $5 billion into launching 66 satellites meant to deliver global wireless service to every corner of the planet. A seemingly elegant, macro-engineered solution to the challenge of global communications.

It quickly turned into one of the biggest tech fails of the last 20 years. Not just because its $3,000 handsets wouldn’t work inside some buildings or moving cars, but because cheaper, more prosaically engineered competitors—cellular phone networks—were busy growing international coverage while Motorola was putting Iridium in place.

By the time it was ready to go, Iridium only had utility for off-the-grid survivalists, oil rig operators, mineral exploration teams and the like. In other words, users who were nowhere near a cellular network, which by definition excluded 99.9 percent of the product’s potential customer base.

Iridium went bankrupt and was sold for pennies on the dollar to new managers who repositioned it to serve those exact types of users: the market Motorola should have been focused on from the beginning.

The lesson? Don’t confuse your own perspective on what the market needs with what the market really wants. Motorola’s very smart engineers thought people wanted mobile telephone service over 100 percent of the planet, and they came up with a brilliant solution.

But 99.9 percent of the consumer market simply wanted affordable mobile service that could reach the majority of the people they needed to talk to—most of whom were within easy sight of a cell tower, not off the grid in the Himalayas or the middle of the ocean.

The risk of universalizing our own experience

It’s a natural assumption for a marketer trying to reach developers that consulting with our own internal developers is a good proof point for ideas about our products and go-to-market messages. And it’s true—it’s a fine starting point for spitballing ideas.

That, though, is only one step in the process. No matter how much of a slam-dunk any product or marketing idea may seem to be, it’s important to remember that our own developers are not our customers. They’re too familiar with the problem space, they’re already emotionally invested in the product you’re building, and they may just be a quirky bunch. In other words, they have biases just like you.

Instead, do hard research with real prospective users to balance all that internal enthusiasm.

An inward focus can ignore a real market need while leading you down a dead-end alley. There are way too many Iridiums in tech history where the allure of an idea didn’t align with the realities of the market.

Always bear in mind that there are plenty of ways we can blinker ourselves to the reality of what’s going to succeed in the real world.

Confusing customer needs with your own white whale

Back during Steve Jobs’ exile from Apple in the 1990s, the company focused on trying to beat the Wintel competition at its own game. Most notoriously, that included trying to mimic the Microsoft business model and licensing Mac clones. But it extended to the developer marketing front as well, as Apple exerted major effort building and advocating its own technologies, like OpenDoc, that sought to answer Microsoft’s dominant OLE (Object Linking and Embedding).

None of these ideas moved the needle for Apple—because it had become fixated on beating Microsoft rather than understanding the company’s core value proposition to its customers.

Jobs’ push to refocus the company on its user experience and to discard an entire portfolio of “interesting” developer technologies—while seeking détente with Microsoft—might well be his key contribution to the company’s ultimate turnaround.

The innovator’s dilemma is a form of narcissism

It’s easy to assume that success with early adopters is scalable in the wider market. And it’s even easier to let our conceptions of what led to that success become a straitjacket. This strategic challenge—“the innovator’s dilemma”—is a classic lesson for business school students. And it’s at least in part rooted in thinking our customers see value in the same way we do.

Case in point? It’s a classic: Sun Microsystems. Sun was a hardware-first company, where its software offerings, like Java and Solaris, were meant to be “wrapped in metal”—Sun Micro hardware. Until the advent of the cloud, they’d had a long and profitable run.

But by failing to see past their entrenched mentality about selling servers and hardware first, Sun lost out on any chance to launch a standalone software business when their own innovations had given them a perfect opening. While Sun became hidebound to its own notions of its value, its core developer customers moved on to new approaches that made them more productive.

Java may live on as a vestigial foundation for the cloud, but Sun itself dropped 80 percent of its value in just one year and was snatched up at fire sale prices by Oracle.

Getting out of a bubble

Even my company, SparkPost, has had to confront this natural tendency to assume our experience is generalizable to our market’s needs. We’re pretty progressive with our own use of technology, and our developers do some pretty amazing stuff building features that leverage state-of-the-art development frameworks.

Along the way, our team developed its own point of view on app development. But when we’re assigning marketing resources to reaching potential customers, we’ve come to understand that the developer community is a pretty diverse place.

Take Microsoft’s .NET stack. It’s enormously popular among a diverse group of developers and IT shops. When an opportunity arose for SparkPost to participate in a .NET conference, we paused for a moment. After all, our own developers didn’t use much .NET; would it be a good fit for us?

But we realized that many of our customers did. And the response we drew from being part of that event validated the notion that our customers’ point of view was the essential one. .NET is a framework used by developers in thousands of mainstream enterprises. Our service works beautifully well for developers in the .NET environment. Why wouldn’t we show our support for them?

Empathy for customer needs is the true north

No surprise: The solution to any of these pitfalls circles back to nurturing empathy for your audience. By having a richer understanding of what drives them, you’ll know how to serve them the right way.

Having a strong vision for your business is important. But don’t confuse vision with meeting customers’ actual needs. As we’ve seen from some of these case studies, internal biases about technology—or anything else—can get in the way of understanding what your customers themselves understand clearly.

This article originally was published at Marketing Land/MarTech Today.

Championing the power of great customer experience (CX) to improve key benchmarks and business results is becoming a core part of how businesses operate today — and a differentiator for those businesses that do it well. That’s no article of faith; real data supports this premise: better experiences lead to better performance.

Like any strategic undertaking, improving how customers experience our products isn’t a single, big-bang event — in fact, it’s quite the opposite. CX is the sum of myriad small interactions, from first-touch onboarding to deceptively powerful notifications, that form a constant, and essential, process.

But the incremental nature of CX improvement also suggests why it’s sometimes easy to put it off for another day, especially when faced with immediate competing goals like speed to market or dealing with technical limitations. That challenge is compounded when CX responsibility falls between the bailiwicks of different teams, as it nearly always does.

The space between

That shared responsibility is why I often think of CX as the “dark matter” of successful products and services. Even though astrophysicists estimate that dark matter makes up something like 85 percent of the total mass of the universe, it can’t be directly observed; it can be detected only through its gravitational effects on the visible matter we do see.

Like dark matter, experience is difficult (if not impossible) to assess directly. CX can feel like an intangible something that exists between all the concrete features and discrete responsibilities that make up a typical product offering.

Maybe that seeming ineffability explains why CX can be so hard to get right — even though it’s as clear as day when it’s missing. I recently experienced an example that illustrates how effective focusing on the space between features can be.

Meshing form and function

WiFi wireless networks are ubiquitous and indispensable to our everyday experience. And in most regards, they simply work — that is, unless you’re the poor soul responsible for setting one up. Whether it’s navigating stone-age UIs or fussing with base station placement to get good coverage, configuring a network hasn’t often been something most of us love.

Coverage is a particular challenge I long faced in the San Francisco Edwardian flat in which I live — a long, skinny space made up of a series of rooms off a single hallway. So when I learned that a new generation of wireless “mesh” networking products from companies like Eero, Google, Netgear and AmpliFi employ multiple small transmitters with the ability to monitor usage and signals to optimize their coverage automatically, I was more than ready to give it a shot.

And so far, the performance of my new Eero network delivers just what I’d hoped: great coverage and speed in the various nooks and crannies of my flat. And even better, it didn’t require a lot of fussing with networking bands or channels or other technical configurations. (But I’m not here to sell you on mesh networking. Go check out any of these various competing products if you’re interested.)

From function to experience

What I am here to tell you is that this product actually was a delight to set up. As a marketing and customer experience champion, that caught my eye in a serious way. What did the company do to spark joy in what should by all rights be a mundane task?

In many ways, I was struck that there were several things along the way that were not part of the core product — but that were essential to my overall experience of it — that actually made the setup and configuration process a delight.

• First impressions. An Eero is a lovely piece of hardware that’s shipped in Apple-like packaging. Does it actually work better because it arrived in a carefully designed box or because the device itself has a pleasing form? No, of course not. But that “unboxing” impression matters when a user is developing her or his first emotional impressions — and it reinforces the notion that this is something different from a run-of-the-mill wireless router.

And there’s even a hidden functional benefit: A better-looking device is less likely to be hidden behind a closet door. Do you think the Eero team considered that a wireless router that’s placed out in the open actually will deliver better performance? You bet they did.

• Core product activation. Setup, or what a pure software business might call onboarding, is very carefully designed to reflect the core Eero brand promise. It’s clear the company put a lot of thought into not just the function, but also the experience of setting up its devices.

In fact, I would not be surprised if the company invested almost as much time and financial resources into designing its software and setup process as it did in solving some the actual rocket science of networking physics.

• Transition from channel to channel. I’m sure you’ve had the experience with some businesses of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing. Classically, the customer support call center won’t know much about your web-based help requests. Or perhaps the web marketing page and the in-app dashboard look like they were designed by competing factions.

Eero’s account confirmation emails, landing pages and in-app screens all feel like they were designed with a cohesive identity — and they don’t force me to engage in the effort of context-switching. It shouldn’t matter to me what channel or platform a particular message or screen represents — it’s all Eero, whatever the platform for the task at hand: marketing, configuration or support.

• Defining its offering as a single experience. Perhaps most telling of all is how Eero refers to its products and offerings. Whether it’s in the box or the app, there’s no Eero XVA5421 or Eero Wireless Router Pro Plus Ethernet and Toaster Oven. There’s just Eeros.

Sure, that’s easier to do when you’re a small company with just one (or perhaps two) offerings, but there’s a core lesson in this approach to branding: Products and plans are just artifacts of an overall brand experience. Either Eero delivers a great experience or it doesn’t.

Note that none of these qualities are actually necessary to how the Eero devices work. It’s very easy to imagine a utilitarian product manager who’s seeking to shave excess cost eliminating them all. So I think it’s telling that these “dark matter” CX qualities are what took my experience with my Eero out of the realm of everyday networking products and into another space altogether.

Feel the force of CX

To be sure, the “killer feature” of mesh networking — great coverage with minimum manual configuration — is key. After all, if the Eero (or any other competing product) didn’t deliver on that core promise, I would have been left disappointed and frustrated. Conversely, even a clunky approach to solving my networking challenge would have left me satisfied, if not euphoric.

But by doing all of these things — 1) addressing my core functional need and 2) focusing on the experience “between” core product features — Eero left me feeling not just satisfied, but delighted. And that’s a powerful emotional asset for any brand to leverage into increased engagement and growth.

Don’t let CX’s often intangible nature lead you to be fatalistic about your ability to shape it, or to abdicate ownership of it to teams with more direct implementation responsibilities. Indeed, paying attention to the space between the features we see makes all the difference between a great customer experience and a lackluster one. And recognizing the impact of that dark matter — and then acting upon it — is the mark of an empathetic and empowered CX leader.

This article originally was published at Marketing Land/MarTech Today.

It’s nearly the end of 2016, and I see you’re a time traveler, just joining us from 2006. First, welcome! Second, here’s a cheat sheet for what you need to know about the past decade in the business of building and marketing tech.

• The iPhone not only transformed our experience with mobile devices, but it also reshaped how we experience nearly all of our digital interactions.
• The cloud and API-driven web services have become the dominant technology architecture, regardless of whether users interact via the web, mobile apps or otherwise.
• And the way we consume all manner of software has inexorably shifted from up-front purchases to various flavors of recurring revenue, be they subscriptions, consumable in-app purchases or advertising-driven models.

By itself, each of these patterns is a leap from the status quo of a decade ago. Taken together, they add up to a sea change in our customers’ expectations for technology. And that means the way we marketers interact with our customers has changed as well—or, that is to say, it should change if we hope to be successful.

In the beginning, there was customer experience

When I see how marketing’s changed in our industry, I’m not speaking of the hegemony of Google AdWords or the emergence of social media as a marketing powerhouse, though those are indeed consequential shifts in advertising.

What’s changed for marketers of cloud services, both B2C and B2B, is the two-part recognition that customer experience (CX) is essential to a service’s success, and that it’s a fundamental responsibility of marketers to work with our product management colleagues to shape CX.

This lesson can and should be applied to other software-based interactions as well—such as websites, ecommerce experiences and brands’ mobile apps—but I’ll focus here on SaaS offerings.

When I think about apps and services that have become an ingrained part of my own life at work and at play, I, of course, consider the functional value that they deliver. They help me accomplish something I need to do!

But I also know that the emotional and subjective qualities we call “experience” are equally important factors in determining whether or not I stick to a particular service—and share it with friends and colleagues. That’s why the teams behind successful apps and services spend a lot of time building something that feels great to use.

Now boarding on Platform A

But it’s not just fuzzy, happy accidents that lead to this success. In fact, a key realization among growth marketers at pioneers like social media platforms is that very specific aspects of the experience during a user’s first interactions with a platform represent key “make or break” moments that can determine whether a service thrives or withers on the vine. Some teams call this process “user activation”; many others describe it as “onboarding.” (There may be fine distinctions between the two, but for our purposes, let’s use them interchangeably.)

Onboarding is a multi-faceted occurrence that encompasses a range of functional and qualitative experiences. It spans the very first welcome screen, account creation, introduction of features and alerts that prompt specific tasks in a workflow.

When done right, each of the steps represents an opportunity for increasing user engagement—but, if poorly implemented or introduced with little forethought, they become hurdles that risk turning a customer away for good.

Missing the boat

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been tempted to sign up for many more services than you actually can use. Maybe I’ll log in once, then get back to whatever I was working on, thinking to myself that I’ll check out this great tool a little later.

Or perhaps I’ll get intimidated by a complex setup process for which I just don’t have time at the moment. Or, worst of all, the basic workflow for a site will be lost on me, and the payoff for figuring it out seems unequal to the effort.

Unfortunately for the teams behind these apps, each of these scenarios is a potential death-knell for my engagement with their products. Every time I delay taking a step with an app or service, it becomes decreasingly likely that I’ll become an active, paying and profitable customer.

That’s why getting onboarding right is so crucial—the first few moments with an app can make or break an entire customer relationship.

Key moments in the onboarding experience

The most successful apps find a balance that makes it easy—seductive, even!—for users to incrementally increase their engagement in a way that feels natural and self-paced, all the while capturing data and other indicators that feed behavioral models that identify profitable audience segments.

While there’s no magic bullet to solving the onboarding challenge, there are best practices that have emerged over the past decade.

First and foremost, make it easy to get started, and that means less is more when it comes to onboarding.

Forget the idea that onboarding looks like a linear wizard from the days of Windows 95. With each step a user must take to begin realizing the value of a service, the harder it is to get her or him to stay. Do you really need a user to verify an email address or pick a profile nickname before she or he can do a thing? Or what about the radical idea of not requiring him or her to create a password until they’ve already had a taste of the experience?

A great way to keep the onboarding experience simple is the onboarding email. Once relegated to a simple transactional message that essentially said, “Hey, you joined, here’s a confirmation of your username,” onboarding email has since matured into a fundamental piece of the customer experience.

Email’s asynchronous nature allows a user’s first interactions to remain focused on the emotional cues that drive engagement, while still nurturing completion of key onboarding stages. The most successful onboarding emails are designed as a series of carefully timed and triggered messages that help to accomplish key activation goals.

Finally, the most successful services realize that onboarding can go beyond the individual user and actually start to drive growth. That requires identifying the key metrics of new user activation that make a service go viral.

For example, Facebook realized that the point of no return is when a user makes seven friends in 10 days. At Slack, it’s after a team sends 2,000 messages. At Dropbox, it’s when a user has shared a file with someone else. Nurturing users to reach these critical thresholds should be a major priority for marketing teams.

It’s never as good as the first time

As marketers and product managers, we never have a better chance to influence our customers’ relationship with our product than the very first time they use it. We invest time and effort in building a great product. We spend planning and money on customer acquisition.

But that’s all for naught if we don’t make the onboarding experience a genuinely great one. I don’t know about you, but as a product marketer, I sure don’t want to throw away my shot to make a difference for my customer experience and conversion. Do you?

It’s self-evident that designing and delivering a product or service that your customers want to use is the best route to business success. But the way marketers help companies get there has changed dramatically in recent years, as products and services increasingly live in the cloud of web and mobile apps.

There was a time—not so long ago, really—when marketers and product managers operated in very different spheres. Product managers built stuff. Marketers sold it.

Of course, that’s a simplification of an interrelated relationship between marketers and product managers. Even if we had clear boundaries, to be effective, we’d work together to understand market needs, and we’d periodically touch base to get aligned with product road maps and strategic priorities. But we each lived our own side of the house, and our responsibilities were pretty well separated. Almost sounds quaint, doesn’t it?

If you’re a marketer or product manager, think about where you are today. I bet a lot of us find the boundaries between these job responsibilities to have grown quite a bit more ambiguous.

Depending on our organizations, we might not even have roles or titles that fit that classic paradigm. Perhaps we’re growth hackers. Or maybe we’re customer champions. And I’m sure there are other novel roles I’m omitting. But even those of us with tried-and-true labels like “product manager” and “product marketer” recognize that our goals, day-to-day work and teams have evolved in some dramatic ways.

Things change. Like most social constructs, businesses and management theory are susceptible to fashion and novelty.

But I’m not here to mock business school jargon or the eccentricities of a tech bubble. In fact, far from it. Something fundamental is going on with this shift in how marketers and product professionals work to create value for our customers.

X marks the spot

If you’ve marketed software or web apps over the past decade, you’ve likely encountered (and incorporated) a steady progression of conceptual approaches to understanding and shaping how customers interact with your product. User experience. Customer experience. Digital experience.

So ingrained are these terms that the catchy initialisms used to name them—UX, CX, DX—have become shorthand for an entire style of product strategy and design thinking. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m soon reading about the discipline of “XX” on thought-leader blogs.

The similarity in these terms makes clear that the underlying ideas are interconnected. But their euphony also makes it easy to conflate the concepts. Don’t make that mistake—they’re not the same thing! Here’s one way to think about these interrelated concepts:

• The discipline of user experience (UX) design in software is focused on usability, affective and emotional aspects of a product, making certain desired user activities intuitive and so on. It’s about designing for how a software product is used.
• Customer experience (CX) is concerned with the overall interaction between a business and a customer over the span of their relationship. It is a high-level, strategic view of the quality of a customer’s encounters with all touch points: products, services and brand.
• Finally, digital experience (DX) could be said to represent the intersection of UX and CX. Its focus is understanding, measuring and optimizing how customers interact with a company on the web, in apps and in communications channels like email and text messaging.

A quick search on Google for any of these terms will show a booming cottage industry of articles, conferences and experts all dedicated to helping marketers put the X in their go-to-market strategies and marketing programs—not to mention martech platforms that enable CX execution.

In the cloud, we’re selling the experience of being a customer

It’s easy to see how the customer experience at a retailer like Target or a coffee shop like Starbucks is shaped by very tangible factors in their store environment, merchandising, ubiquitous branding and so on.

These particular companies also have deservedly good reputations for bridging their online and offline experiences with strong mobile app offerings and cross-channel integration. You can be sure these companies consider CX to be a core aspect of their mission.

But what about businesses that exist entirely online? How does CX play out when there’s no real-world analogue to carry into the digital realm?

For users of a cloud service, the digital experience is the customer experience. That’s why marketers at cloud service providers need to remember our businesses are not just delivering a functional value—whether it’s music streaming, CRM, or in the case of my company, email delivery.

What service providers are in fact selling is the experience of being a customer. That understanding, as much as any technical or functional advantage, is what differentiates cloud leaders from also-rans.

Good marketing is part of a great customer experience

Because the online experience is so malleable, digital marketers can have an outsized impact on our customers’ experience.

Think of your own interactions with web apps and cloud services. While I hope the majority are delightful, I’m sure you also can recall too many that are marred by intrusive ad technology or other poorly conceived marketing efforts that compromise your experience as a customer for the sake of the marketers’ convenience or short-term needs.

So, what should we do as marketers to help our companies deliver a great customer experience? I’d like to leave you with three ideas to consider.

First, because customers don’t draw a bright line between their pre- and post-signup experiences, neither should we. In other words, marketing itself is part of the customer experience we sell. In fact, when done right, marketing is the epitome of making the customer journey feel effortless—an experience so good the customer wants to invest time and money.

Second, marketing can’t stop at the sign-up form. Dumping a customer off at the front door leaves a jarring disconnect between the promise and the fulfillment. Truthfully, that doesn’t work for any business, but it’s especially problematic for one that’s selling an experience.

Marketing must cross the marketing/product divide attitudinally and functionally to support and optimize things like onboarding and customer engagement that used to be considered “a product problem.”

Finally, generating leads “at any cost” hurts the customer experience. Sometimes, we’ll have to give more and get less—to get more in the long run. We have more ways of targeting customers and measuring the impact of our efforts than ever before.

That insight and accountability is a good thing. But don’t be fooled that martech by itself will drive results; exclusively focusing on the technology and data can make it easy to chase the needle and to privilege short-term gains over long-term value.

Martech tools and the data they generate are fundamental to today’s digital world. Like any tool, martech is only as good as the way it’s applied. It’s key to making a great customer experience a reality—as long as we don’t lose sight of what the “X” in CX signifies. With a nod and an apology to James Carville’s ebullient misanthropy, “it’s the experience, stupid.”

As digital marketers, let’s make sure our true north is our customer experience.

This article originally was published at Marketing Land/MarTech Today.

I want to be up-front about something: I’m a CMO who hates marketing.

Sure, I’m exaggerating. But only to a point: as the marketing lead of a company that sells primarily to developers and other technical practitioners, I’ve learned to be really and truly skeptical of some of the “conventional wisdom” about B2B marketing.

Some of that wisdom still holds in my situation. But a lot of it doesn’t; not because it was never valid, but because conditions have shifted profoundly when it comes to marketing to developers.

Don’t get me wrong: when companies like mine are selling enterprise solutions, we’ll certainly leverage aspects of the B2B model that get results. But there’s no denying that something’s changed in the business of selling technology over the past decade. And it has everything to do with developers—and how they discover, evaluate and deploy solutions to their technical and business challenges.

Not coincidentally, that change has coincided with the rise of the cloud and APIs (that’s “application programming interfaces,” though we hardly need to spell it out anymore) as the primary means companies, big and small alike, utilize software and technology.

An explosion of API options

Several years ago, Internet development pioneer Marc Andreessen claimed “software is eating the world.” The cloud gave every kind of enterprise the ability to employ a lot of the same platform solutions as the biggest competitors. The access to and scalability of cloud-based systems has caused a real sea change, in just a few years, in how businesses leverage software. As business pundit Steve Denning has pointed out, it’s caused every company to act like a software company nowadays: how they adopt, adapt and manage software is central to their ability to compete.

But if the cloud is a conceptual architecture, then APIs are the tools developers are able to use to bring software-as-a-service (SaaS) capabilities down to concrete reality. APIs are nothing new; they’ve always been a fundamental part of developing for a specific platform, like Microsoft Windows or POSIX.

And latter-day APIs offered by pioneering cloud providers, from Salesforce to Google, extended that concept by leveraging the ubiquity of the Internet itself as the common integration platform. It made all manner of business processes accessible to developers without requiring a heavy-weight, on-premises implementation. And, for this next generation of platform providers, Internet-accessible APIs were a great way of creating developer reliance on those platforms.

But developers have been through this sort of platform dependency before and understandably chafe at the notion of being boxed into one provider’s approach. So it’s no surprise how they’ve driven the explosive recent growth of third-party APIs. They’ve embraced the latitude to shop from among thousands of specialized APIs enabling everything from site search (Algolia) to home automation and monitoring (Z-Wave) to email delivery (why my company does business).

Here’s a growth profile to keep in mind: In 2010, there were slightly over 2,000 APIs publicly available in the cloud. Today, some analysts estimate that number has skyrocketed at an amazing rate; API development platform Apiary says it alone has over 130,000 APIs registered.

Imagine what that landscape will look like as wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT) really take hold.

So, if you’re trying to market your product to developers, what’s the current lay of the land? Developers refuse to be limited to single platform solutions, understand the inefficiencies of home-grown development and know there are third-party APIs galore to choose from to meet their needs. That’s a pretty good picture of a buyer’s market.

How do you survive the shift?

From the standpoint of somebody selling technology, developer empowerment presents both key opportunities and serious challenges, thanks to all these very rapid changes. Developers spread throughout an entire enterprise often have the leeway to be choosy about the solutions they need to get their work done, and they might do so on a practically individual or unit-by-unit basis.

That’s in stark contrast to older models of technology sales, where IT sales were typically top-down endeavors with clear gatekeepers, and developers often were given very little choice about which technology they could use.

What does this power shift mean from a practical perspective? It obviously represents more competition for the marketer, and it changes the dynamic of whom you’re addressing and how you’re engaging with them.

If you’re marketing to developers in this new context, what are the keys to surviving or, better yet, thriving? In my experience, there are several strategies for success to keep in mind:

• Your API is your key marketing tool. It goes without saying that your API has to perform and deliver compelling functional value. But it also must be easy to understand, easy to use and appealing in its own right: well-formed, or even beautiful. Remember to make sure its documentation provides just as much clarity and convenience, too. No matter how amazing your overall solution, if the API is just an afterthought, you’re not going to get past square one with developers.
• Don’t fake it. Developers say they hate “marketing,” but what they really mean is that they’re not interested in marketing that shows how a marketer doesn’t understand them and their needs. Some of those sins? Clumsy messaging that shows an ignorance of how to apply the technology you’re selling, especially in their particular situation, that puts them through hoops that waste their time and drag on their productivity, or that shows a disconnect with reality by relying on hackneyed stereotypes of developers and developer mindsets. Any of these missteps just go to prove, in their eyes, that you don’t understand what they want.
• Don’t stereotype developers. This works in tandem with the point above: never assume that developers’ negative reactions to your marketing mean they’re automatons who don’t “get” marketing. They’re just having the same absolutely natural reaction to bad marketing that you would if you were in their shoes. In other words, if your marketing is falling flat, it’s not them—it’s you.
• Help developers help themselves. Developers are inherent tinkerers and experts in making things work. Help them get to success faster by providing them with great documentation, blogs, how-tos, code samples and more, and make it easy for them to find the resources they need via Google as well. Create tools that help their development work flow better (Slack is a great example of finding success by making developers’ work life better). And don’t just cling to selling your core product. The more resources you can supply to solve “adjacent” problems, the more important and authoritative a collaborator you become, in their eyes, as they grapple with different or bigger challenges.
• Nurture a collaborative community with developers. Whether that takes the form of peer-to-peer advice and testimonials, walkthroughs and how-tos, conversations on Twitter, developer-specific sites like Stack Overflow or collaboration platforms like Slack, successful developer marketers scale one-off conversations into a collective sense that “all of us are part of making this thing work.”
• Listen. There’s nothing more valuable than the specific feedback developers can offer up about how your product works, what they wish it would do, and where your product assumptions don’t match their pragmatic reality. Be sure to listen on Twitter and other channels. Better yet, don’t simply wait for that input, but solicit their ideas on “how can we make this better?” You’ll get an earful, I’m sure, but a great thing about selling to developers is that they often proactively want to tell you what works and what doesn’t. Product managers in other industries would kill for the precise, actionable feedback developers are often more than willing to share. Developer feedback is gold and a key part of the collaborative process that wins buy-in.

This article originally was published at Marketing Land/MarTech Today.

Jay Henderson, general manager of IBM’s Marketing Cloud business, was a featured speaker at SparkPost’s annual Insight user conference. In his talk, he delivered a great overview of how marketing is adapting to new technology and business models.

I’ve embedded Jay’s presentation below, but here are few key ideas:

• Noisy marketing chatter is cheap. And ineffective. The number of campaigns and emails and messages we encounter has soared. The right content is critical to breaking though the clutter.
• Mobile technology is ubiquitous. Mobile marketing isn’t a niche—in fact, it’s the most mainstream medium possible. Email and other marketing tools need to be mobile-first, not mobile-maybe.
• Cross-channel experiences are not optional. See above—customers use mobile all the time. But then, they walk into a store. Or switch to a web site at their desk. Does the experience you offer follow effortlessly, or at all?
• Marketers must manage their portfolio of marketing technologies—the martech stack—strategically. In a period of innovation, it’s easy to wind up with a jumble of technologies that barely hold together. The balance between streamlining technology investments while still pursuing competitive advantage and differentiation is a perennial challenge for all of us.
• Successful marketers cultivate a culture that bridges technology and creativity. Better-performing marketing teams collaborate with their technology providers and have the operational resources to make the most of martech. But marketing isn’t just numbers—if it were, we’s just turn on the computer and walk away. Customers aren’t clickstreams. The emotional talents that marketers apply like creativity, empathy, and intuition all remain utterly essential to our craft. Don’t let the data or an algorithm blind you to the human being you’re striving to reach.

Jay’s presentation stuck with me in the subsequent weeks, and I kept thinking about the implications of these changes for my profession. What does it mean to be a marketer today?

In most regards, there’s never been a better time to be a marketer. The technology’s awesome and has made all kinds of things possible that we couldn’t do before. The business models of growing businesses, be they cloud-based services or real-world retail, are increasingly dependent upon marketing expertise to understand customer behavior and engagement. The portion of marketing budgets that are considered strategic rather than discretionary is increasing. The amount of “marketing” that we all experience is going up, up, and up.

Yep. Good times.

But why, then, do I sometimes sense some unspoken anxiety from my peers at professional conferences and meetups? Why does it seem that a lot of us are “faking it ‘til we make it?” Hey, no shame. I have those feelings from time to time, too. I think a lot of it is just human nature in the midst of change. Some of us welcome it, and some of us fear it, but there’s no denying that the marketing worldview has changed in lots of meaningful ways.

Maybe you’ve heard the comment author William Gibson made at the dawn of the modern Internet era: “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” And perhaps, at first, the different facets of digital and data-driven marketing seemed like specialized skills. But this change has been underway for a long time, and it’s now become so obvious that it’s impossible to miss.

Over the two-plus decades since Gibson made his quip about the future and the web ushered in commercial use of the Internet, several technology stacks have arisen (and sometimes fallen) to enable an ever more intimate (read: data-driven) customer marketing relationship.

So, for marketers, the future indeed already is here. It’s all about the long-term shift in how businesses think about connecting with customers. Conceptually, one of the biggest changes has been an explicit reorientation away from a relatively static notion of marketing—for example, that a customer’s decision to buy is based on a lightning strike of the right combination of the four P’s of product, price, promotion, and place. Instead, most of us today understand that a customer’s experience with a brand or a company really occurs in many steps over time. That experience over time is the “customer journey” that we strive to perfectly fulfill.

But one thing that sometimes gets lost in this acknowledgement of the primacy of the customer journey is that we marketers have been on a journey of our own. Sometimes that journey requires a fresh perspective on our craft. Other times, it means becoming facile with new technologies. And throughout, it depends upon bringing more “science” and empirical decision-making to our creative “art” of communication. But above all, it means not standing still.

(This post originally was published on the SparkPost blog.)