Don’t forget to include a way for prospects to sample the offering without necessarily committing to the whole thing: The “honey pot” offering.

The job of a good honey pot is to help prospects experience the service and see for themselves how the promised results might be delivered. You’ll want to draw them in with insights into the challenges they face and that your full offering addresses. Provide useful information, share frameworks for solving the problem, and, yes, make them ask themselves: “Can we really handle this on our own?”

Honey pots come in all shapes and sizes. Everything from a free breakfast seminar with guest speaker, to an audit, to cost-benefit analysis. But you have to walk a fine line between setting up a future sale and delivering useful information, analysis or results.

For a honey pot service to be successful, think of it as a slice of the larger offering rather than a business development activity. Name the slice, market it and perhaps even brand it. Map it into your service portfolio to make it clear to customers that it is part of your offering, and clear to those in your firm how it can be used as a tool to entice buyers to the full offering.

“No one has built out an infrastructure like ours.”

“We’ve invested over half a million dollars this year alone to build a proprietary trading platform….”

We hear things like this every time we talk to senior management at b2b services companies. Then we take a look at the marketing and see … little or no evidence of anything distinctive. File that under “Missed Opportunity.”

Sure, infrastructure is not the whole story — you have to position  your services in the minds of  your target customers — but it is a key piece of evidence that you can deliver the benefits you promise. Put another way: Infrastructure can help you explain what you bring to the table that competitors do not.

Clearly defining the tech platform, what makes it different, how it works in a larger ecosystem, and strategically “surfacing” it in your offering can help to build your brand. How should you think about marketing and branding your platform?

For our purposes, let’s define a platform as any technology-enabled system for the creation and/or delivery of a service. Financial services firms have trading platforms (e.g. Goldman Sachs’ GSET). Logistics/trucking companies have supply chain management systems. Architecture/engineering firms have integrated planning and design toolsets. Business intelligence/news firms may offer media platforms (e.g. the old “Bloomberg box”). And so on.

Some are sold or offered directly to customers, others work behind the scenes to support the delivery of a service, and some do both. Branding strategy will change depending on whether these platforms are proprietary  (developed internally), customized off the shelf (perhaps using Open Source systems), or built with/offered through partners.

For example, a “proprietary”platfrom can, depending on the customer, mean “uh oh, we’re gonna have interoperability and future support issues” or “great! technology adapted and customized for my particular purpose.” Off the shelf begs the question: What have you done to adapt it to my needs? And offering with or through partners means you also have to consider the equity in the partner’s brand.

In the next post, we’ll start looking at how to define your platform under each of these three scenarios and some of the implications for marketing and even naming.

The place: 39,000ft over the Pacific in business class of an international carrier.

The service: Lunch. A choice of stir-fried chicken or a steak.

Intended experience: Relaxation and delight.

Complication: Turbulence and …

… cooking a steak to perfection is enough of an art in a land-based kitchen — one that has a proper gas burner say and doesn’t happen to be bumping around when it hits air turbulence. While the idea of a steak is appealing, here’s a case where the chef/meal planner could have made life easier for the stewardesses and stewards. Around us, nearly everyone who ordered steak sent it back because it wasn’t “done enough.” The result, aside from impatient diners, was a back-up of meal service and increasingly harried stewardesses. This made for a decidedly less than prestige-level experience.

What seems like a good idea before it gets off the ground may not work so well in the actual delivery. A lesson worth remembering when designing a service experience. Always consider how the operational elements will impact the experience from start through preparation and delivery. Think what could go wrong and the Ripple Effect of small upstream issues on downstream experience.

Fish anyone?

That world is obviously here now.

B2B services companies are doing all they can to become more flexible, autonomous and responsive. They want to be more like networks.

As a result, marketing ideas proven in local markets now can be plucked from relative obscurity and adapted for global use faster and more effectively than ever before. As we work with one such global network, a few lessons from the front line:

Be clear about brand behavior: Have a clear brand proposition that suggests expected behavior: Imagination, Fun, Efficiency are good examples. Quality, Service, Trusted Advisor are not because they are too broadly generic: Quality how? Trust me why?

Appeal to profits: Dispersed operations all have one thing in common: The desire and drive to make money. Marketing is not Sales, of course, but in trying to get a network to adopt a particular initiative it is helpful to be clear how the strategy or tactic will help those in the field to improve their chance to close a sale. Then internally broadcast successes.

Boldness as a beacon: As in a corporate environment, great ideas often start small and build momentum. The key in a network is to activate those with the skills and drive to take an idea and champion it. You’ll be appealing to their self-interest and entrepreneurial zeal. So, make bold challenges: “We’re going to create a global training program with one of the top 3 international business schools and put 20% of our staff through it in the first year and do it without a budget.” (On a recent project, 3 partners from around the world immediately volunteered).

Provide a forum: Always look for excuses to bring people together. We used this technique during a recent positioning engagement to help build consensus for a final brand decision. Their input was invaluable but perhaps even more so the creation of an infrastructure of partner-champions who were a critical to guide the implementation that followed.

Guideline: Ideas may work well in one locality or region but not another. If there is value to the concept , boil it down to its most critical elements. Provide a template or guideline (instructions) on how to create those elements and allow other local markets to adapt to their markets.

The “world of networks?” It is all based on clear communications.

What can you do to mitigate the negatives of your potential Error 37?

Plan for it: Understand pre-launch what could go wrong and decide how you will deal with it. Communicate early and often.

Apologize: Don’t take customer loyalty for granted. An apology or explanation will help calm the storm but is not the end-game.

Think long-term: But not in the sense of “we’ll fix these things and in 6 months no one will remember.” While much of that may be true, in today’s socially networked economy it does not pay to leave a trail of anger (among the least of which are poor reviews)

Give customers something: Is there an opportunity to give customers something for the pain they’ve experienced? Think creatively. What freebie might entice customers to use your service more in future? Be careful not to make the freebie seem too self-serving.

Invite involvement: Don’t just read the bad reviews, look for opportunities to engage customers and develop solutions.

What should you be thinking about as you create service-products or product-services?

Customer Goal: What does your customer really want to get done? Consider not only the end result but the process of getting there and how you can enhance the product or service with services or products that make the experience easier, more satisfying, more profitable, etc.

Artifacts: These are the tangible expressions of product or service (e.g. a McKinsey deck, Salesforce.com dashboard, AECOM architectural/engineering drawings). Use them to help express your firm’s unique capabilities and the promise of your brand. Try to create artifacts that customers will seek out and competitors will find hard/costly to match.

Complements: What other products or services can you partner with/purchase to expand the value of your offering? Jet Blue partnered with GroundLink to offer limo service to and from airports. Look for opportunities to create ecosystems of products and services, especially ones that can be offered on an exclusive or near-exclusive basis (e.g. OnStar originally only available on Cadillac).

Community: For B2B services firms, a community of customers/clients can be formed around thought leadership (e.g. Gartner’s Peer Connect). The products are most commonly books/research reports or other stand-alone media. What other physical things could you put in your customers’ hands to build stronger communities around your service?

Simplicity: Rather than ask what can be added, you might consider what can be taken away to make life easier for your customers. For example, the process of renting a car for half a day. Zip Car makes it easy: “join, reserve, unlock, drive.” And its Zipcard is a good example of an artifact.

These are (emotional) end-benefits to the consumer and your competitors know them just as well as you do. That’s why you can find a number of competitors in say, the automotive parts supply industry, touting their innovation. Or in healthcare supply chain — companies such as Cardinal Health or Allscripts — touting better outcomes.

But what gets you the better results, outcomes and solutions? We talked about the real business at the heart of yours in a previous post on Xerox. The answer has to be some unique asset or system. And every company has one, delivering some unique benefit, or it would not be in business (or it will not be for long.)

Effective brands combine the promise of an outcome with a powerful story about how that outcome is delivered. A classic example is Avis and its “We try harder” campaign. In this case, the general promise of “better service” is supported with an expression of what Avis would have us believe is their organizational culture: relentless in pursuit of being the best. We believe the promise because we can tie it to something real, all those red uniformed employees trying harder than anyone else in the rental car business.

The challenge with b2b marketing is that it is all to easy to say “our products are our evidence.” Evidence of innovation, creativity or whatever else is being promised. So ask yourself: What created the great product or service?

Great. Try to go in with a framework to help guide the discussion.

Today, for example, we used “Focus, Value Proposition, and Experience” to help explain how a professional services firm should start to think about its branding (and ultimately its business model — the two are and must be connected).

The CEO of this mid-market professional services firm was struggling with how to position the firm vs competitive and substitute offerings. There was a bit of research on client impressions. The research contained just enough to enable us to tee up our 3 part framework. The framework made it easier for our friend to see what she needed to think about next and what questions she and her team need to answer as they seek to define their brand.

Focus: Clients said: “Your competitors are either becoming generalists (offering a wide variety of services) or specialists. We do not see you going in either direction. What do you want to become?” This is a question of focus: What are you going to do best? To help you decide, examine your client base to see who is buying, what they are buying and why. What do they need that they may not even know they need? You’ll see these kinds of questions and many more in just about any marketing text you happen to look at. And for the question of focus, I often reread CK Prahalad, and Gary Hamel’s paper on Core Competencies just to get in a good frame of mind.

Value Proposition: Once you know your focus, including your target customer and what you will offer them, it’s time to think about your value proposition. If your focus is on speed say, your value proposition needs to bring this to life in a measurable way. What are the benefits of “fastest to market” for your clients/customers? And importantly, how do you measure speed? FedEx, when it “invented” reliable overnight express package delivery, promised: “by 10:30am the next morning.” A great value proposition and one FedEx knew its competitors could not match.

Experience: Every branding agency knows to talk about customer touch points and how the experience of the brand should be consistent across all of them. The practice of making this so, especially for firms with more limited marketing budgets and/or with seller-doer business models, is the challenge. So, start simply. We’d counsel our friend to identify 1 to 3 key areas where she and her people could make a demonstrable difference in alignment with their focus and value prop. Thought leadership is one such area. But even with focus and value prop, you have to orchestrate it well. Much more on that in a later post.

The point with the above is not so much to say: Approach branding professional services in exactly this way. Rather, it is a gentle reminder that providing a framework is a good way to get folks to remember what it is they need to think about when tackling their marketing challenge.

Reviving the E.F. Hutton brand is not a bad idea, especially if E.F. Hutton’s new marketers resist the temptation to change the brand’s “when E. F. Hutton talks, people listen” emotional storyline.

Any historical tarnish on the brand name can be overcome with a bit of clever and consistent marketing and, above all, living up to the promise of authoritative information and analysis/market movers.

The real game will be trying to prove that the new E. F. Hutton’s way of doing things is better than those of competitors. To that end, the firm has a unique opportunity to build an operations structure that truly can deliver on its promise.

One tactic to get the operations conversation started: Consider the marketing campaigns of others broadly in your space to identify what you need to do differently and better. (Working under the premise that smart competitors will understand the market mindset , albeit through their particular lens). Two examples:

Trust
The folks at E.F. Hutton might prompt themselves with a page from Kroll’s ratings agency “Our name is on the line” campaign (you can trust us because we weren’t around to make the mistakes when the others did) to ask: What can we do to help clients experience this in new ways?

Approach
Black Rock’s “Investing for a new world” (it’s all different now) might prompt you to ask: What’s really different about the market today? What would we need to do to be seen as the firm with the authoritative voice?

Let’s imagine the more likely scenario that you find yourself in just such an organization with the mandate to sell across offerings. What can you do to at least start the conversation with your colleagues in other groups?

Start with a picture. On one page, draw your portfolio of offerings as your target customer will see it/experience it. This will help you make the case, from the customer’s perspective, that a unified approach to cross-selling is needed. This is an important first step to taking an abstract discussion about process and relationship and making it more concrete. As I wrote way back in 2003, you may want to start by thinking which organizing principle fits your offerings best.