Should Marketers Say “Business Outcomes”?

Sometimes. But make sure it’s not out of laziness or ignorance.

Increasingly, you’ll hear the term “business outcomes” popping up in software marketing.  While I initially loathed the phrase for its vagueness, over time I’ve come to believe that, much like the frequently-abused word “solutions,” there is a right and a wrong way to use “business outcomes.” 

Let’s start with two examples.

Example 1: 

Our skills-based HR solution helps you inventory your talent so you can better leverage the people you have and achieve the business outcomes you desire.

Example 2:

Our metadata platform helps you deliver clean data to business analysts so they can build better models, make better decisions using them, and deliver superior business outcomes.

These are ostensibly similar claims.  Both are in feature/advantage/benefit form (i.e., our feature X gives you advantage Y that delivers benefit Z). However, I strongly dislike the first one, while I’m almost-OK with the second.  Why?

Example 1 deals with a specific application where it’s possible to enumerate concrete benefits such as:

• Save money by making more productive use of your existing talent
• Save more money by eliminating new hires from the plan
• Increase employee satisfaction by providing more stimulating work (that leverages their skills)
• Reduce attrition and backfill costs as a result of increased employee satisfaction

Saying “business outcomes” instead of enumerating these advantages strikes me as either lazy (if you can’t be troubled to enumerate them) or ignorant (if you don’t know them). It leaves too much to the mind of the reader. The reader has to figure out the advantages of the feature. They have to answer the question “so what?” on their own.

Leaving too much to the mind of the reader by omitting advantages and benefits is — not to put too fine a point on it — the cardinal sin of marketing. Don’t make people figure it out. Tell them.

If laundry detergents can take you from the green spot (feature) which is an emulsifier to remove stains (function) to whiter towels (advantage) to happier spouse (first-order so-what = advantage) to kiss from your spouse (ultimate benefit), then we in technology can certainly take you from skills inventories (feature) to happier employees (advantage) to saving money (advantage) to getting promoted (ultimate benefit).

When you have something to work with, when you have an advantages stack to climb, failing to do so is a dereliction of marketing duty. You should be called before the Marketing High Tribunal, convicted, and sentenced to 10 years of writing technical documentation.

(I’d argue this is often caused by a subtle form of templatitis, an endemic disease in marketing, where you fill in the template with the name of the template field. In this case, business outcomes.)

Example 2 suffers from the same problem, but with one big difference. Because we’re marketing a low-level data platform that can be used for almost anything, it’s basically impossible to enumerate benefits without knowing more about what the customer wants to do with it.  If I were writing a solutions piece on customer relationship management, I could talk about how cleaner data means better churn prediction means less churn means higher NRR. If I were writing a fintech piece, I could write about how cleaner data means better fraud detection means less fraud means reduced fraud costs means higher profits.

So the question becomes:  are there benefits that you can reasonably enumerate? At some point you have to know what someone wants in order to climb the advantages stack. But even here, I think I could do better:

Our metadata platform helps you build a superior data infrastructure to drive your organization’s data culture, help analysts build better models, make better decisions, and deliver superior business outcomes across areas like finance, marketing, and operations.

It’s not great. Look, this is a tricky marketing problem. We’re trying to climb a generic advantages stack in a way that results in more compelling messages than save money by working smarter. Here’s what I did to try and improve it:

• Knowing that CDOs buy data platforms, I tuned the message toward CDO priorities (which I can learn through market research)
• I know that CDOs see their job as building enterprise data infrastructure, so I tell them directly that we help with that. Our product can makes yours better.
• Many CDOs have a strategic mission to build a data culture, so I make that explicit. If you buy our platform it will help advance you on your strategic mission.
• I remind them that better data means better models means better decisions means better business outcomes. Since I have no idea what outcomes they’re seeking, it’s hard to do better — other than being generic (e.g., “more profit”) which isn’t compelling or taking shots in the dark (e.g., “increase inventory turns”) that will either hit or miss.
• But since I know that most of our customers are delivering data to finance, marketing, and operations, I throw that out to be a bit more specific. Think: ask me about how we help finance teams.

As with many challenging games, sometimes the only wining move is not to play. Or to change the rules. How can we do that? Write a different piece.

Sure, every product needs its web page and product overview. And that’s the land of generic feature/advantage/benefit marketing. Climb the benefits stack as high as you can. But since it’s hard to get strong business benefits when playing the generic game, maybe you should invest less energy in product marketing and more in solution marketing. Write about use-cases instead. Write a solutions piece about how your metadata system can help customers build their customer data platform (CDP) and get the many marketing benefits of a CDP. Write a case study about how BigBank uses your metadata platform to help with fraud detection and save $60M/year as a result.

But either way, don’t get lazy and say “business outcomes” because you don’t want to enumerate them or, worse yet, because you don’t know them. Check yourself each time you write the words. Ask yourself: Can I climb the stack higher? Can I enumerate actual benefits? Am I truly in a situation where “business outcomes” is the best I can do?

If yes, say it. And then start thinking about the next piece you need to write so you can change the rules.