Porcupines Part II:How Can I Ignore You When You Keep Going Away?

I’ve been thinking a lot about Porcupines lately, which is either testimony to Richard Gallagher’s brilliant insight or a sad commentary on my social life. My thesis in the last post was that porcupines, defined in this context as people who are angry, demanding and rude, are not born, but made. So the question for marketers is how do we make them or, more importantly, how do we avoid making them?

I think the key is in the trinity of angry, rude and demanding. Of the three elements, anger is the only emotion; the others are the behaviour of angry people. So it’s anger that turns Bambi, Thumper and the gang into mean old Mr. Porcupine.

How do I anger thee?

I figure there are three primary ways marketers can piss off someone to the point where they metaphorically change species:

1. Ignore them
2. Corner them
3. Betray them

Today let’s open door number one and see the three ways we manage to institutionalize ignoring people.

 Not being set up to not ignore Porcupines

I have ranted at length about this one  but the point bears repeating. Too many times companies are operationally unable to execute what marketing is promising.  Here’s a fine example: A few years ago I set up a generic email address as the CTA (call-to-action) on a campaign. We had a few responses but after a week or so nothing. So I took my lumps from sales and moved on. Months later, I discovered that someone in the Productivity Prevention Department (that’s IT to people who don’t deal with them) had decided to change an alias setting which meant that inquiries were piling up in an unmonitored mail box. Turns out we had hundreds of inquiries from bunnies and hedgehogs who were now looking a lot more like Porcupines.

How many times have you practically begged a company to take your money only to be told they can’t process a transaction without a credit card? Or they don’t take the credit card you need to use? Or they can’t ship it to your location? Or the guy who knows how it works is away today? How many times has your inquiry simply not received a response at all?

Marketing’s lead is sales’ coaster

One of the chief reasons we don’t manage to respond to inquiries in a reasonable time frame is the long-standing difference between what marketing thinks is a great lead and what sales is willing to follow-up. Let’s face it, most marketers consider anyone who can fog a mirror to be a hot lead. Many sales people won’t call anyone back until a credit and criminal background check has been produced.  So all those web leads, fishbowls full of business cards and BRC (business reply card) bingo thingies are often going nowhere because sales, not unreasonably, thinks they’re crappy leads. Marketers need to do a much better job of lead qualification and ranking before they can pin the blame on sales for creating Porcupines.

Automating the fun out of it all

At the far end of the scrap heap of potential revenue is the sanitized world of automated lead response and nurturing systems. Now I think these are fine things and long overdue. They certainly solve the problem of timely responses and can be a great way of ensuring content gets into the right hands at the right point in the sales cycle. Some CRM systems are also wonderful tools for the sales guys to mine for customers and prospects who might need to be pulled back from the brink of Porcupineness (Porcupinity?).

The downside of these things, of course, is that they suck all the smart out of the room. They turn sales people into order takers or call centre drones, and they turn the art and science of selling into a game of Frogger.  Here’s a recent example: got an email from a supplier who got my name out of some industry directory and made a reasonable, but erroneous assumption about my potential interest in his product. So I sent a reasonable reply suggesting he try someone else in my company.  My response, obviously unread, directed the lead to a phone guy who wasted my time for about ten minutes before I finally interrupted and pointed out that he was not talking to the right person. His priceless Porcupine-making response: “Oh, sorry. Marketing just sends me these names…” The kicker is that three days later I got another email from the original guy. And so it goes.

So while this company wasn’t ignoring me entirely, they were ignoring what I was saying. They were ignoring a human interaction in favour of a process. The job was to move my little icon down the sales funnel or out of the sales funnel. Problem was, the right thing to do was neither and their system couldn’t accommodate.

BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
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