Your marketing tools should show gold in their cracks

Choosing the right software as a solution to your marketing team or agency’s needs is critical. But what if it starts to show cracks?

Have you ever seen a piece of pottery enhanced through the Japanese practice kintsugi? Where the piece has been broken and cracks formed, it is skillfully put back together using a powdered gold to enhance the appearance of the breaks.

kintsugi_grey — Work through your pain points together to create a valuable long lasting software solution

Kintsugi. Turning cracks to gold. — Work through your pain points together to create a valuable long lasting software solution

Each repair takes careful artistic skill, is unique, and results in a beautiful work of art. The kintsugi technique shows that breakages and weaknesses can become valuable – if you treat with care and a positive approach.

Let’s bring this back to the realm of MarTech software

So you’ve carefully chosen software to enhance the capability of your team and now it is beginning to show some cracks. What should you do?

Speak up. Don’t stay silent and throw out the broken piece of pottery that you invested time to seek and select. Give feedback about these cracks as you use it – let the support team behind the tool know what’s being finicky, not quite working in your workflow, what’s missing that you expected should be there.

The best technology teams have processes in place for listening to feedback, prioritizing it and slotting it in to be actioned by engineering and design teams quickly and efficiently. More often than not, each ‘repair’ to the software will enhance it far greater than what you were expecting, thus adding streaks of gold.

Soon these cracks that have been repaired based on the feedback loop between your team and theirs, will over time give you a tool that’s more golden and valuable to your team than you ever thought it would be.

Time for everyone to shine

Now that your team is reaping the benefits of what the solution has promised to deliver and more, take the time to work together with the vendor to create valuable co-marketing pieces such as a case study, quote or verbal reference to potential users. Helping each other will continue to ensure success for both your organization and theirs, and you might find mutual customers or relationships develop as well.

Voices are powerful, and even more so when everyone is listening and working together. These feedback loops should really be termed golden circles: everlasting relationships based on conversations, trust, and action.