July 14, 2019

About Neural Impact’s Packaging and Pricing Strategy Workshop

The demand for cloud services and offerings is disrupting the market. Yet, not many companies are changing their selling approach to meet the needs of Buyer 3.0. Neural Impact’s two-day workshop will allow you to take advantage of this new gap. 

You can immediately develop new pricing strategies that will boost your revenue margins! You will also learn how to connect with consumers on an internal, emotional level. This is regardless of your target industry. 

Just as importantly, you will review your current offerings, implement proven strategies, and, consequently, increase your sales. These methods will differentiate you from your competitors and allow you to tap into new revenue opportunities, such as AppSource. 

The workshop is hosted by Sharka Chobot, the creator of the CRM product category and the Chief Transformation Officer at Neural Impact. Sharka also works with Microsoft partners across the world. She helps them optimize their strategies and quickly acquire new customers. 

Capture the Heart & Mind of Buyer 3.0 

Initially, the workshop highlights recent changes in consumer behavior. There are many ways for businesses to remain emotionally relevant. Investing in cloud technology, in itself, will not suffice. This is because today’s cloud buyer is very different than traditional ones. 

In the past, IT professionals used to make most of the purchases in the tech market. They made decisions based on technical product descriptions. Today, on the other hand, business executives dominate the tech consumer market. 

Joanne Charley, Chief Marketing Officer at Neural Impact, pointed out that “[business buyers] don’t speak a technical language”. Instead, the big question on their mind is “how is [the product] going to help me in my job?”, Sharka added during the podcast interview with Joanne. 

“The IT folks are still there, they’re still trusted advisers” Joanne said. However, she also added that the new cloud buyer is looking for “outcomes that are aligned with providing business value to […] their strategic discipline”. 

The upcoming workshop goes over several related key shifts. Marketers and business organizations need to change the way they sell their products and how they communicate with consumers. Doing so will allow them to emotionally and psychology connect with Buyer 3.0. 

Define Your Value Proposition 

The second part of the workshop is about developing your message and defining your core value proposition. Similarly, you will learn how to accurately measure your ROI and the effectiveness of your new marketing strategy. 

In order to do so, Sharka is going to illustrate the role of buying triggers. Once they are identified, you can map out your product offerings and value proposition around these said triggers. 

The process is relatively simple. First, you have to understand what the concerns of your industry are. Next, you prioritize the key components of your marketing message and value proposition. Lastly, this will allow you to fill the gaps in the market. The whole process revolves around the buying triggers of your customer.

What are the pains of your industry’s consumers? Which problems keep the cloud buyer up at night? What are their main worries when it comes to their business? These buying triggers incentivize customers to take action. Your products and cloud services should provide solutions to these problems.

Packaging, Pricing, and AppSource 

The second day of the workshop is about your packaging and pricing model. Participants will identify three potential offerings for their target market. These packages will accelerate sales, create recurring revenues, and minimize churn. Similarly, Sharka also uncovers new ways for your business to make money, including AppSource.

AppSource is a great way for your business to drive additional revenue! Moreover, Sharka teaches participants how to create engaging and effective landing pages. This strategy is especially important because of the new way that the cloud buyer makes purchases.

According to the latest studies, consumers go through 60-85% of the decision-making process before contacting a company’s sales representative. This is a major shift from the traditional, face-to-face selling process. In the online world, your landing page will play the role of the effective and personable sales rep.

Are You Ready for the Next Level? 

Business leaders, product managers, salespeople, marketers, and cloud services professionals will all find great value in our workshop.

Are you ready?

Click Here to get started!

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July 14, 2019

In today’s online landscape, neuromarketing and neuroscience can largely boost your return on investment. Any firm or business must also take into consideration how the new buyer behaves and pays for products. Furthermore, the background of tech consumers is largely changing. Marketing efforts should adjust accordingly. 

Previously, before the spread of digitalization, customers used to purchase products in one lump-sum payment. While marketing campaigns took longer to prepare, a single sale covered most of the associated expenses. Moreover, a customer sales rep that knew how to utilize a sales script and deploy selling psychology proved to be a valuable asset. 

Having said that, this strategy is almost ineffective in the online marketplace. The neuroscience behind digitalized sales is completely different. Not only do buyers prefer to remain anonymous, but the absence of physical interaction makes it more difficult to retain their attention online. 

How You Sell 

By the time that a digital buyer contacts a firm’s customer sales representative, they already went though 60-85% of the decision-making process. This makes engaging and attention grabbing content incredibly valuable. Neuroscience and neuromarketing techniques are a central part of making this process successful. 

Digital consumers rely more on self-education than those who walk into a store. This means that they research products online and consult with their network before contacting the seller. Consequently, any business that motivates consumers to engage with their content is more likely to increase their sales. Even more when their product descriptions are easy to understand. 

One way of being digitally effective is through video content. Unlike static pages, videos do a much better job at highlighting a product’s features while retaining users’ attention and keeping them engaged. A short, descriptive video makes it very easy to connect with customers and helps them make a buying decision more quickly than an article does. 

Why You Sell 

In the tech industry, IT professionals and chief information officers (CIOs) dominated the traditional marketplace. Today, however, business executives make the majority of software product purchases. It is important for marketers to understand the different psychologies of these two sets of consumers. 

IT professionals are mostly interested in technical product descriptions. Business executives, on the other hand, have one thing in mind: How does this software help my business? Neuroscience requires marketers to focus on practical and direct details. 

For example, instead of advertising a payment processing software as “WordPress friendly”, sellers should highlight how the product can lower transaction fees or accept all major credit cards. Similar features to focus on are how quickly the funds will be available for withdrawal or that they can be connected to a Paypal account. 

When You Sell 

In a physical store, consumers buy products in one lump sum payment. This immediately covers all related marketing expenses. Online buyers, on the other hand, prefer to pay through increments and monthly installments. 

While this diminishes immediate returns, neuroscience and neuromarketing will boost your overall number of sales. In turn, this increases both short and long-term returns. The key to success in the online marketplace is creating engaging content that showcases the right product features. 

Want to learn more?

Click Here to learn the factors of effective emotional selling!

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July 14, 2019

The online landscape is changing the marketing world in three key ways. Consequently, a business that applies neuromarketing and neurology strategies witness better results. Just as importantly, firms can set themselves up for long-term success by understanding the new online consumer. 

Practical vs. Technical 

First of all, research shows that most online buyers are business executives. Their purchase and decision-making process is much different than chief information officers (CIOs) and IT professionals. Neuromarketing requires advertisers to adapt to this change.

Instead of focusing on the technical features of a product, sellers must focus on its usefulness to the buyer. This is because business executives are mostly concerned about how a software or product can help their firms succeed. In contrast, traditional IT buyers are more interested in technical product descriptions and features.

Anonymous Customers 

When neurology is applied, marketing campaigns can be very efficient at catering to the new type of buyer. Even more when advertisers consider how the online selling cycle is different than the traditional, face-to-face one. Studies show that consumers go through 60-85% of the decision making process before they make initial contact with the seller. 

In large part, this is because buyers prefer to remain anonymous, educate themselves, and conduct online research before purchasing a product or software. Rather than making sales scripts a priority, sellers should focus on creating user-friendly websites that visitors can easily navigate through.

Meanwhile, engaging product pages and attention-grabbing visuals can go a long way. Including video content, rather than static pages, is a great way to retain visitors’ attention and showcase products. This gets them to spend more time on your website and increases the likelihood that they will share product pages with their colleagues. 

A Shorter Campaign Cycle 

Lastly, the new marketing paradigm became much faster and more immediate. This is especially true in the tech industry. Traditionally, it used to take advertisers several weeks or months to prepare a marketing campaign. Likewise, tracking its results and effectiveness took a long time. 

Today, creating and launching an online ad is very quick and easy. Similarly, marketers can measure its performance immediately and have more tools at their disposal to do so. They can reach their audience through emails, social media promotions, search engine campaigns, and so forth. Advertisers can also monitor the number of people who visit their website, the average video view time, where users hover their mouse, and more.

Most noteworthy, online campaigns are cheaper than traditional ones. Yet, the costs aren’t as immediate. In a face-to-face selling environment, consumers paid for products in one sum. A single sale was enough to cover all marketing costs. On the internet, however, users prefer to pay monthly increments. Firms and businesses that account for and understand this are a step ahead of their competitors.

All in all, advertisers can prepare for the future by adapting to the new buyer, selling cycles, and marketing timelines. Applying neurology and neuromarketing boosts engagements and returns. 

Want to learn more? Click Here to see how we can help you!

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July 14, 2019

If you run a marketing team or business, you probably focus on three key metrics: revenue, profit, and cost.  No doubt, your goal is to minimize cost and maximize revenues. You may be considering working with a finance leader to help you set long-term growth goals for your organization.  

This mainly covers tasks that involve pricing service and products to add value to your business and make profits. But how can you do that effectively? What are the strategies you can use to price your product to increase sales and profits with little effort? 

One way is to master the skill of pricing your product. And to do that, you need to not only understand psychological pricing but also leverage the right strategies.

Below we discuss some key strategies deduced from the theory that certain prices have a huge psychological impact than others. Whether you’re a customer service manager, business leader, or professional service leader, the strategies are helpful for all. 

Psychological Pricing Strategies 

1. Charm Pricing

A research study conducted on psychological pricing found that consumers perceive prices lower as compared to prices that are one cent higher when you change the left-most digit to a lower level.  

The strategy is also referred to as charm pricing as it involves prices that end on “9” or “99”.  In this strategy, businesses reduce one digit in price by rounding off one cent.  For instance, the human brain processes $4.00 and $3.99 as two different values: to your brain $3.99 is $ 3.00 and is cheaper than $4.00.    

2. Prestige Pricing 

This strategy is an opposite of charm pricing. It makes values into rounded values, like $19.99, can be converted into $20.00. It happens because rounded numbers, like $20.00, are more appealing to consumers than non-rounded numbers (e.g., $19.99). That means rounded figures “feel right” to consumers. 

3. BOGOF– Buy one get one free

This is one of the most popular pricing strategies where customers pay the full price for a service or product to get another one free. Many entrepreneurs make some changes, like: 

• Buy one get four free
• Buy one get 25% off on the next purchase
• Buy one and get two bonuses valued at $70, for free

4. Visually Highlight Prices

According to Keith Coulter and Robin Coulter research, this strategy triggers an immense fluency effect.  The consumers interpret any visual difference to a big numeral distinction. That means, if you change the color, font, and size of the signage for the existing price and place it away from the previous price, it will likely increase the number of purchases.  

The customer sees the new price as a better deal than the last placed price. 

Final Thoughts 

Overall, the given psychological pricing strategies are effective for various types of businesses, but it is important to test different strategies on different products to determine if they suit your business.  

Sources 

• https://production.wordpress.uconn.edu/businessmarketing/wp-content/uploads/sites/724/2014/08/size-does-matter.pdf 

• https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/678484?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents 
• https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2005-05742-007 
• https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/279464 

Want to learn more?

Click Here to learn how to craft your perfect pricing, and click here to learn how we can help!

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“In a time when business models are changing and industry boundaries are being redrawn, I am passionate about helping companies to rethink ways to generate demand and drive business growth.” — JOANNE CHARLEY

In case you missed meeting Joanne at Microsoft Inspire 2017 in Washington DC, we’d like to introduce you to her officially. 

As Chief Marketing Officer for Neural Impact, Joanne Charley is excited to bring her more than 30 years of sales and marketing expertise to Neural Impact clients during their cloud transformation journey.

Originally from Sydney, Australia, she has extensive international experience, with decades of expertise directing major financial services and information technology industries across the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific.  As marketing VP, she’s worked to create and execute both regional and global scale marketing plans, focusing on customer retention and transformational readiness.

Joanne brings an abundance of customer acquisition, channel and branding intel to Neural Impact, having held senior positions with financial services and technology industries. Joanne has helped the following leading organizations accelerate and transition their go-to market strategies: Hambros Bank, National Mutual Royal Bank and Howard Smith Ltd., Crystal Decisions, SAP Canada, Borland Corporation, Class Software, Fincentric Corporation, and ACL Services. As a senior strategist for a leading Australian marketing agency, Joanne provided counsel for Tier One Banking, St. George Banks, AMP Life Insurance, and Westfield Properties. Joanne is known to lead with an analyzing eye, assessing and securing new profitability and growth opportunities.

In addition, Joanne is a University Professor of marketing and strategic management. She’s taught international, digital and behavioral marketing courses for the University of British Columbia in their MBA and undergraduate programs, making her contributions to Neural Impact vital and significant.

joanne@neuralimpact.ca

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We are all aware of the power of language; good jokes make us laugh, sad stories make us tear up, and curse words make us cringe. But that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The stories you hear, articles you read, and conversations you have day-to-day hold the power to inspire, repulse, or galvanize you, your community— even the society you live in.

Despite the immense amount of power language holds, companies still manage to continually miss the mark when entering into a conversation with their prospective clients. Dry, banal vocabulary riddles websites across industries, describing products and services in a manner akin to your standard operating manual: “here’s what we do and here’s how we do it”. The end.

Taboo Triggers

Luckily, large amounts of psychological research exist to describe the emotional weight of specific words and phrases. For instance, many studies have effectively demonstrated the physiological arousal experienced by subjects who hear or read curses and taboo phrases (Harris, Gleason & Ayçiçegi, 2005). In this specific study, subjects showed higher galvanic skin response (or electrical conductivity of the skin) when presented with a taboo word or phrase. Put simply: telling someone to “shut up”, for example, has the ability to increase heart rate, raise blood pressure, and heighten respiration rate. From there the science is quite simple; when you are in a state of physiological arousal you’re alert. You’re focused.

The Unexpected Power in Negativity

But we ask that you please not curse at your clients! The point of this data is merely to demonstrate the affective power of emotional language and its ability to push a prospect from a passive state to an active one. This leads us to the next point: in a similar study, it was found that people spend longer processing and paying attention to emotionally negative and taboo words than neutral —or even positive— ones (Eilola & Havelka, 2010). In this study, subjects were asked to identify the font colour of words presented to them on a screen. Neutral words had a reaction time of 698.2 ms (with 3.4% errors), whereby subjects took 764.8 ms (with 4% errors) to recognize the colour of the taboo words. So what does this mean for you, someone who’s looking to increase margins on your product or service? When messaging is framed from a perspective of loss, prospects will statistically spend more time engaging with it. For instance, a message to the client outlining a product or service’s ability to save shrinking margins or fix a convoluted sales cycle will be more effective than a message simply outlining how robust or effective a product is.

Who, Me?

Finally, language appeals most to the emotional buyer’s brain when it uses “terms derived from interpersonal communication”, like the words “we”, “you”, or “us” (Sela, Wheeler, & Sarial-Abi, 2012). Language that refers to the customer from a detached, third-person point of view is much easier to forget or ignore according to psychological research, whereas language that is interpersonal is reported by subjects to be more satisfying and interesting to consume. Therefore, it’s much wiser to include language on your website or in your promotional material that says something like “We work hard to provide you with an effective solutions package”, as opposed to “we work hard to provide our customers with effective solutions packages”. Language like this immediately activates the emotional centres in our brain, as we begin to make unconscious associations between the personal pronouns in marketing material and the personal pronouns we hear in day-to-day conversations.

To recap: we’ve seen data indicating that negative words physiologically arouse us and capture our attention, and interpersonal language is people commonly considered to be relevant and important to them. And these are only a few examples of the potential power language can have over prospects; more studies exist that outline the importance of poetic devices, trust-based language, and bilingualism in written material. This type of research is virtually endless, but one thing we can be certain of in the midst of it all: to not utilize the simple power of language in your PR, marketing, and relevant sales strategies would be an awful waste of words.

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