This is the first in a series of point/counterpoint articles by Bill Babcock and Bill Rozier. Babcock is CEO of a direct and relationship marketing agency. Rozier is a no-nonsense senior director of global marketing, dealing with the realities of marketing in a large technology corporation.

Babcock: How long does it take to know you're going to like someone? How long to know someone is not telling the truth? For that matter, how long for you to know this article might have something important for you?

A second, maybe two. That's obviously not long enough to read it or even skim it. But you have an unconscious, intuitive ability to judge value.

And neither you nor I know how it works. We just know it does.

You don't agree? You think things are much more orderly and logical than that? You don't have to take my word for this. Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, wrote a book called Blink about how we make very complex assessments unconsciously. The book is certainly good reading, but for this brief article it's sufficient to accept that we DO have a highly effective, very automatic bullshit detector.

Why is this so important to marketing? Because your prospects will give your marketing messages about two seconds to resonate. They will be assessing importance, value, truth and, most important, personal relevance. And as they say about sincerity: If you can fake that, you've got it made.

Rozier: So how do we do that? I'll grant you that message relevance is critical for us. Focused marketing outperforms "clever" every time. The ROI on generalized customer messaging is so low it's almost irresponsible.

Our customers want communications from us in their vernacular. They reward a dialog delivered in their voice in almost perfect proportion to our ability to be relevant in their discovery process. But that's not easy to do, and it's not cheap to do. Are you saying there is a shortcut?

Babcock: Some very nifty shortcuts. Or at least ways to sidestep that instant judgment. I'll try not to stretch the metaphor too far, but it's like the delicate dance of meeting an attractive stranger. You can't start off with a relevant conversation—because you don't know enough about them. You start off with lightweight emotional cues that pique interest. Like the words at the beginning of this article—nothing heavy, just interesting and with a hint of truth and value. You can bypass the relevance issue if you have enough emotional interest. That won't last, but it gives you those two seconds to engage, and once you've done that you can start being relevant.

Part of establishing rapport is finding out what you should talk about. Having a series of conversations is critical to attracting and then converting a prospect to a customer. Each conversation must deliver value—which means it has to be important to the prospect. And if each conversation occurs in an interactive environment, it can set the stage for value and relevance in the next.

You can't jump from an introductory conversation to the purchase conversation. The funnel has steps, and the prospect decides when to take them. They make such decisions to move forward based on many things, and one if them is having enough information. You need to maintain engagement and deliver that information while they make those decisions.

Rozier: OK, I agree that's true, but it feels a little narrow. Our product portfolio is very expensive, with an average selling time of 18 months. Our customers never make a "single" buying decision. Rather, they make a series of buying decisions that cascade from discovery to demo.

More important, their discovery process is not limited to a single marketing touch. Our Web analytics prove that customers average almost four visits to our site before they "ping" us to have a salesperson contact them. In those visits, they quite methodically follow predictable page streams and will react to unique offers if we can anticipate vernacular and then craft intelligent, personalized offers.

We haven't projected it yet, but we've identified the guide pegs for success. Single touch, single message, single offer lead-generation strategies simply don't work for us.

Babcock: They rarely do for complicated products, but if you're going to drive demand you need to be able to initiate conversations and maintain them. How are you going to do that when each person has unique needs, and each is making a snap decision about the value of your communication?

You need some tricks to force the engagement. These aren't big theoretical concepts; in fact, they're really tactical, but they're part of that larger strategy. They don't work on their own—just as our emotional direct mail messages don't work unless there is a strong back end and a good strategy behind them. But these are tricks we've found that initiate conversations.

The first one we call Verbal Judo. It goes like this: Interest comes from conflict. Acceptance comes from forgiveness. That's why no good marketing ever came from a committee. When I use a word like "bullshit" in the fourth paragraph, it jolts you. You don't really like it, but if I'm reasonably charming and the information is good, you forgive me and move on.

And from that forgiveness comes acceptance and little closer relationship. I call things like this conflict keys, because they initiate interest that simply wouldn't exist if the marketing were pabulum—the conflict keys the interest.

Conflict keys confuse or delay the snap decision. It can be copy, design or even writing techniques like paragraphs that consist of one or two sentences, and sentences that consist of one or two words. Concepts that pull and push. Bold statements followed by humility. Look at the third paragraph of this article—"we don't know why this works." Verbal judo.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bill Babcock is CEO of Babcock & Jenkins, a direct and relationship marketing agency; he can be reached at williambabcock@bnj.com.
Bill Rozier is senior director of global marketing at Ciena.