I saw some investment research recently that shockingly noted how many current Android users were planning on buying an iPhone when they next purchased a smart-phone. Well over 50% would move away from the Android whereas somewhere around 90% of current iPhone users will buy another iPhone. That’s devastating for Google and I think the Motorola acquisition may reflect an acknowledgment that they need to deliver, first and foremost, a great user experience to the consumer and that the Android just doesn’t cut it.
I have an Android, a Samsung Replenish from Sprint (a green phone, whatever the heck that is). It replaced a Palm Pre. I’ve had smart phones since the early BlackBerry devices in the late 90s and also worked in the mobile technology field for a while, so I’m a sophisticated user – and I hate the Android. The software is so clumsy, often losing the context of workflow or task I’m trying to complete such as when starting up the Google GPS app with the GPS chip turned off, which is a prominent and wise option to toggle on and off from the home screen to save battery life. It gives a message to turn on GPS, but when you click, it brings you to a multiple settings page with lots of other stuff that is irrelevant to GPS. When you do figure out how to turn on the GPS, it then exits the GPS app clumsily, not returning to where I was. I often have to restart the GPS app a couple of times to deal with it. Fyi, this often happens when I’m driving and trying to figure out exactly where I am, so it’s overall a very bad experience at an important “moment of truth” for my priorities.
There have been other things like the inconsistent and clumsy threading of SMS messages, something I fixed by finding a free Android app, but only after several instances of losing the threads of text messages due to them being presented out of order. It also emits strange beeps at times for no reason I can fathom, and simple things like being able to ‘flick’ an email into the trash – something I expect with a touch screen – aren’t there. The overall feeling is that the Google is focused on form over substance. It seems to be a product that was designed via the use of a checklist of desirable features, versus one that focuses on the how and what the user experiences.
I think some sales people find themselves taking this approach to sales. With the relentless focus on “strategy” and “methodology” and “process” today in B2B sales, we can sometimes put too little emphasis on the people we are dealing with. I think that being a good observer of people is crucial to sales, as is the ability to connect with people. If you can tune into a prospect’s world, forgetting all about your attempts to manipulate the situation, and try and really get what’s important to them and how they feel, then really powerful things can start to happen. The personal aspect of selling in B2B environments is a huge part of the “customer experience” and it’s where we can distinguish ourselves personally with the people we are selling too. Once you really tune in to what’s driving your prospective clients, you’ll find that each of them has unique views and perspectives and that the standard messaging handed to you by your company may not exactly reflect the customers priorities and views. The job of the sales executive is to then adapt the sales campaign to really focus on in the precise message that resonates best with a client, as well as what puts the competition on defense. I call this “A Market of One” and wrote a post about it here http://b2bsalestalk.com/major-opportunity-strategy-make-it-a-market-of-one/
So, are you an Android sales executive, mostly concerned about having the correct form or are you and iPhone sales person, mostly concerned about thrilling your clients with the experience of dealing with you?
It brings to my mind the old saying – you can fool some of the people, some of the time.
Many large companies are involved in what Dilbert’s creator calls a confusopoly, where they make pricing and features so complex that people cannot easily choose the right product for them. Thus they can hide a cartel, make more profit than a simpler pricing model and/or hide the fact that they aren’t the best.
Checkbox marketing is becoming far too prevalent. In supposedly cutting edge fields like marketing automation, for example they hide the fact that these are really all about email marketing with a host of checkboxes for social media. But the useability isn’t there. For example one item which takes two clicks in one program has a sixteen page manual just to implement it (in primitive form) on another. But both can claim the functionality.
I can see the discussion in the NPD dept – “it will take us 18 months to get this to work”. Response – “Can’t you just do something temporary so marketing can head off the lead the other guys are getting?” Unfortunately as soon as the temporary answer has been implemented, some other crisis comes up and the full version never happens. So much of our software actually is made of a host of sticking plaster solutions.
By the way, I hate my iPhone. Apple insists on upgrading it even though the new features are for the iPad. Result is that it crashes regularly, a lot of paid apps have become unusable as they don’t work with the upgrade and the GPS is so slow it is not worth trying. That’s on a phone only 2 years old.
Rumour has it that the reason Google bought Motorola is because they have a new operating system ready to go which avoids the patent issues Android is facing. We’ll see.
“Checkbox marketing” is exactly what I was referring to. The research I referred to in the article came from Piper-Jaffray. While iPhone has many problems, Android phones are much worse, at least according to this research.
A product is much more than a pile of features – it works in a specific context that if not well understood and considered will fail to meet a users need. Your comments about marketing automation are spot-on – particularly when it comes to the things that sales executives do. Does lead management mean a query form that helps me look up leads? Or is it an entire ecosystem for marketing AND SALES to interact with leads and groups of leads? If you think for just a few minutes about what might be helpful for folks trying to use such functions, you quickly realize that most products which claim to “automate” sales and/or marketing do little of the sort, but are rather mostly database driven, information stores. Thanks for the comment!!
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