When Bad Assumptions Happen to Smart Marketers

Years ago, when companies still paid to caffeinate their workers, I had the desk closest to the coffee station on my floor. Mostly this meant I could smell a fresh pot before anyone else, and occasionally had to rescue one that was boiling dry on the old Bunn-o-matic.

The downside was that at least once a week, some under-stimulated co-worker would stick their whiny face into my cubicle and let me know we had run out of cream/sugar/sweetener/napkins.  I developed a particularly good bovine stare in response, since I honestly had no idea where such things came from; they just appeared.

The point of this is that we make assumptions.  

In marketing, we spend a lot of time making and documenting assumptions like conversion rates, impressions, currency exchanges, competitive product releases, data accuracy and other stuff.  Which brings me to the broader assumptions we make about things and the ways in which they come back to bite us. Or at least ought to.

Here’s one: When I was first working on technology products for small businesses, we made the assumption that small business owners were terribly intolerant of technical issues. Not just intolerant of the downtime, but also of the fact of a technical problem. Medium and large businesses, we knew, understood how complex our hardware was and accepted that sometimes it just plain wouldn’t work.

But small business owners were different, we thought. We spent months sourcing products that, while they weren’t as feature-rich as might be needed, were much more stable and technically less complex. Imagine our post-expensive-bloody-launch surprise when we surveyed our target market and discovered that they hated the dumbed-down product and had a higher tolerance for technical glitches than their corporate brethren.

Turns out small business owners totally understand complexity and time-to-repair and operate on the assumption that downtime is inevitable. All they ask is that we prioritize the repair ahead of the consumer segment. The lesson I didn’t quite learn here was to survey the market before your product tanks.

Another assumption: this I heard from a colleague in consumer marketing just the other week: “Well, you don’t really have to market to businesses since they can just buy what they want and write off the expense.” Wow!  Had I known that I wouldn’t have wasted the last 20 years trying to sell them stuff. I would have just issued the best looking receipt in town and offered to do their taxes.

Here are some other assumptions I think B2B marketers need to reconsider:

• Business customers don’t see our consumer pricing
• Small business owners are unsophisticated
• Small business owners only care about price
• Our segmentation data are accurate
• Our competitors are stupid
• Growth is certain
• Our top sales people will never leave
• Our worst sales people will always leave
• We will never hit our numbers
• Business customers don’t make emotional decisions
• Our customers will never leave
• Our customers don’t talk to one another
• Our customer is involved in only one business
• Business people don’t use Facebook for business
• Twitter isn’t for business
• Our ad agency cares less about awards than about doing good work
• Steve Jobs was right
• Steve Jobs was wrong
• Interactions with customers as consumers don’t influence their decisions in business
• Sales and marketing are motivated by the same things
• Small business owners want to act like consumers
• Sales always follows up on all the leads we send their way
• Sales never follows up on any of the leads we send their way
• Existing customers don’t see the much richer offers we throw in front of new customers
• The guy who sits near the copier knows where the toner is kept

I think it’s time we stopped assuming anything beyond what the Hand Wringers insist we do to get a budget approved and go with the facts. Which is a roundabout way of realizing Jack Welch was right about viewing the world as it is, not as it was or we wish it were.  I hate it when he’s right.

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