Why Excel beats everything
Is it easier to push for investment in marketing automation or not to cause trouble for your boss?
The choice here isn’t between better or worse marketing. It’s between a better or worse position at your job.
As marketers, we often forget that everyone isn’t constantly daydreaming about efficiency, productivity, or whatever else our products do.
Our goals, like our problems, come in hierarchies.
And sometimes it’s easier to do the more convenient thing.
That’s why brilliant and intuitive apps don’t get killed by better apps.
They get killed by Excel.
You can get all judgy about the flaws of short-term thinking, lack of vision, or a failure of culture.
But the answer is much simpler — we’re people.
And sometimes it’s easier to file a difficult decision under ‘it can’t be done’ or ‘it can’t be done by us’ and get on with life.
Ignore the situation or learn to live with it.
That’s what I do. That’s what you do. And so does everyone else.
We may not notice it because of modularity — where we adjust our long-term or short-term goals to fit our current Life Projects.
Making a decision is essentially building a story where what we choose comes out on top of all other available alternatives.
Obviously, what information we use to decide can make all the difference.
And that’s a big deal if you’re in the business of convincing people to buy something from you.
Take the effort out of decision making.
You know this yourself: It takes more mental effort to pick between two or more options where the benefits are too similar or ambiguous.
No, please don’t make another list of features.
Instead, talk about the cost of not making a choice.
And the only way to do that is by addressing the anxieties and habits of your customers.
This is where You come in.
Remember this:
A choice is arriving at a clearly superior option of all the alternatives available.
And our decisions are often based on how easy it is to process the information available to us.
So, of all the effort you spend on marketing, is there anything more important than making it easier for people to pick you over everyone else?
No, there isn’t.
The right information describes how your product helps the user do more, achieve more and meet greater expectations.
Take time to obsess over:
- Simplifying the decision-making process for your customers.
- Discovering their conflicting goals and delivering information that helps them adjust their relative importance.
- Or by highlighting new benefits that make your product clearly a better choice.
