Selling the Hole and Not the Drill: A Q&A with Matt Heinz
We’re all in the hardware business and we think we sell drills. But the client doesn’t want drills. They want what the drill does. They want holes.
As a long-time marketer, Matt Heinz knows a little bit about the buyer journey. So when he says he’s selling holes not drills, it means he’s selling a solution not a tool. That little piece of insight is why Matt and his Seattle-based marketing firm Heinz Marketing has been so successful with clients ranging from with large companies with hundreds of inside sales reps like Microsoft and smaller, start-up companies.
We recently caught up with Matt Heinz and asked him about content marketing, the buyer journey and his reputation as a tastemaker for marketing tools and influencers. We did not ask him about his chickens.
What is the most common pain point you see amongst your clients?
The biggest pain point we see amongst our client base is usually a company missing their number and not knowing why. Most companies have a marketing plan for the month or year but after a while, they get into reactive mode. This means sending out emails or running short-term campaigns.
The challenge for many of these companies is that they don’t have a strong understanding of their buyer personas. As a result, they can’t build repeatable, scalable processes for growth.
What are some tactical mistakes companies make around buyer personas?
How well you understand what a qualified prospect is directly related to how well you understand your buyer. Most companies have a misunderstanding of their buyer. What does the buyer care about? What in and around the service attracts the buyer? These are all parts of the buyer journey.
Buyers tend to think about solutions at the end of their buying journey. A typical journey starts with the pain and problem. This leads the buyer to think about what success and a positive outcome looks like. Only then, will they start thinking about solutions.
Studies have shown that 60% of the buying process is already completed by the time the buyer is engaged with the vendor. This means marketing now owns about two-thirds of the buying process. That’s why marketers have to create content that understands where the buyer is coming from.
How did Matt and Heinz Marketing become a Tastemaker for Tools and Influencers?
Two of our most popular features on our blog are Matt’s App of the Week and the How I Work series. With the App of the Week, it started with us at Heinz Marketing looking to find better tools for ourselves. When we started getting more proficient with certain tools, we started recommending them to clients. After a while, it made sense for us to blog about it. The most amazing thing about this is that we now have PR people pitching me on getting included into Matt’s App of the Week series. We aren’t TechCrunch in terms of traffic but it’s a nice validation of medium-sized and loyal following.
The How I Work series got started in the same way. I liked the idea from a couple of different places I get content and I decided to do one on myself. That worked well with our readers so I asked some of my friends whose work I admired and it snowballed from there. The best part of the series is that each interviewee is asked at the end whom they’d like to see covered in a future post. Sometimes, you get a great suggestion. For example, Ardath Albee recently suggested Doug Kessler to do the series and we got him soon after.
Some Parting Thoughts
There are a lot of things we cover at Heinz Marketing because we cover our audience, not a topic. This means we identify a lot of ways to improve demand generation, from content strategy to sales management. It can get overwhelming so just pick one or two things you and your company should focus on and make that happen. Be intentional on where you are going to make an impact.
Aligning Sales and Marketing into a Single, Cohesive Sales-Acceleration Machine from Heinz Marketing Inc
