The Guy Kawasaki Approach To Marketing -- 'Bottoms Up'

I had the chance to do something rare this week. On Monday, I interviewed Guy Kawasaki on the phone, in preparation for his live presentation as the keynote of the first Inside Sales Virtual Summit today. I wrote about that interview and the summit in more detail here. We don’t know for certain yet, but it may have even set a record or two.

But, for entrepreneurs, I was keenly interested in what Guy would have to say about marketing. I’ll cut to the chase and share the part I liked best:

“As communicators and marketers, people are so accustomed to thinking from the ‘top down.’ Finding the great analyst or the famous journalist who will endorse what you do and tell the rest of the world to go and buy your product.”

Instead, Guy advocates working from the “bottom up”: “You should find the guy who loves your product who lives with his mother, has 15 followers, then 15 more, 15 more, and one day you wake up and discover that lots of people suddenly love what you do. That’s when the great powers that be in journalism will want to write about you and love you.”

“It’s easy to identify a great journalist at the New York Times, but much harder to find ‘LonelyBoy15’,” he says. “But it’s vital.”

What else did Kawasaki say about marketing communications?

Accept people for who they are. Have you ever had the subconscious feeling that someone attempting to market to you doesn’t really accept you for who and what you already are? Have you ever been successfully persuaded by a person who really doesn’t accept you? Probably not. Bear it in mind as you market – any ideas about re-shaping someone you feel has too much jewelry on your face, the wrong gender, the wrong social/economic status or orientation to suit your customer base will most assuredly be a marketing “miss.”

Always default to “yes”. The thought in your mind as you communicate and market should be “What can I do for you? Can I review your book? Connect with you on LinkedIn LNKD -1.89%?” If the basic mindset of a connection is ‘What can they do for me? What am I going to get out of this?’ you will lose. You engender a much better relationship by defaulting to “yes”. “Over the course of my career, I’ve learned that the upside far exceeds the downside risk of being used,” he said. “This will bear fruit in ways you never anticipated.”

Become a “baker,” not an “eater”. For an “eater,” the world is a zero sum game. There is a limited pie with only so many pieces. A “baker,” however, looks at the world in terms of “Wow. I can bake more pies. I can bake bigger pies. I can bake cookies. I can bake cakes.” This philosophy applies not only to communication, of course, but to every aspect of selling as well.

Agree on Something. Find something—anything—no matter how small—that you and your audience or target can agree upon. For example, “I hate opera. Your wife forces you to go too?” Find the common ground, no matter how small, and from there, the communication and the engagement can swell.

Create a product that is “DICEE.” Perfect your product or service (and perfect your communication as well). Great stuff is Deep. It is intelligent. It is Complete, Empowering and Elegant.

Learn to reciprocate. When you think like a baker not an eater, people will naturally say “Thank you”. The right response is not “you’re welcome,” Guy says, it is “I know you would do the same for me.” (I have heard him make this statement before. It’s one of my favorites.) You should give the individual a way to pay you back. You are doing good thing in offering them the ability to reciprocate, and thereby to clear the deck and pave the way to elevate the relationship to another level.

Tell a Story. “We have patent pending, enterprising, scalable products”. No. Instead, tell a story about what you needed to run your company or that your spouse needed to run her store. “We thought computers should be smaller, cheaper and easier to use. So we started Apple AAPL -0.8%.” Or the story behind eBay. Stop using adjectives about curve-bending, paradigm shifting products and enhancements. (I agree!)

And, of course, as anticipated, Guy discussed the three pillars of the Art of Enchantment for sales:

1.    Likeability. Think about the likeability of Richard Branson, and the visual image of him getting even down on his knees to persuade customers to fly on Virgin.

2.    Trustworthiness. Zappos has become an amazing company by trusting women to buy shoes they have not tried on or seen by agreeing to pay for shipping both ways, and trusting their customers to not abuse their generosity in doing so. Likewise, Amazon allows Kindle users to return an ebook within four days of purchase – enough time for an unscrupulous customer to read the book, enjoy it, and hand it back in. The trust has paid off and has helped to earn them a booming business.

3.    Quality. Think about the iPhone. Everything about the product (well, perhaps not the wireless service arrangements, at times) speaks to ease of use, utility and elegance.

These three pillars, in sum, are the art of sales enchantment.

And just for fun, here are several more tidbits from the pre-event telephone interview with Guy, that I got to sit in on with the help of Ken Krogue and the team at Inside Sales in preparation for the Summit event: (Disclosure – Inside Sales is one of our agency’s clients.)

What do you think about the Virtual Summit program?

From a speaker’s standpoint, not having to get on an airplane is everything. And if you think about it, when you go to a large conference, best case, you’re going to see the person’s slides every once in awhile and get a glimpse here and there of the speaker’s face on a screen. So you might as well be online, right? And to offer 61 speakers of this caliber in the space of a day… So you know I love this idea.

How do you anticipate the role social media plays in the preparation for an event such as this?

Well, social media will definitely drive the attendance, but here’s my prediction: for a virtual trade show event, email will be even better than social media. I am betting the registration will be split 70/30 between email and social media.

A question from Ken Krogue: Of the four social media alternatives that are prevalent to an event like this, I’ve seen you make a huge swing to Google GOOG -0.49%+. What are your thoughts on that?

I happen to love Google+: the design, the people, the threading, the plus ones. So much of the infrastructure is done for you. And it helps with your SEO. So I think Google+ is a no-brainer.

So there you have it. The words of an iconic sales and marketing expert. To Guy Kawasaki and to everyone involved in the Virtual Summit event today, nicely done.

Forbes.com