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Author: David Poulos

  • How Marketers Can Use Customer Advisory Boards to Engage Customers, Engender Brand Loyalty, and Much More

    How Marketers Can Use Customer Advisory Boards to Engage Customers, Engender Brand Loyalty, and Much More

    Guest Blogger Rob Jensen provides some great insights about how you can get reliable customer insights to improve your engagement and profitability.

    Marketers are giving a lot of attention of late to the topic of customer experience. Indeed, ensuring that companies optimize interactions with their top clients, obtain the highest level of value and maximize ROI from their precious customers seems to be a universal desire the significance of which is of little debate. The more challenging aspect of achieving these outcomes seems to be HOW marketers are supposed to do so. It is our experience that customer advisory boards (CABs) are the most effective and impactful way to engage with key customer executives and achieving these desired results.

    For those who are unaware, customer advisory boards (also known as a customer advisory councils) are forums to review industry trends, address mutual challenges or opportunities, and offer unvarnished insights and guidance. For vendors, these councils are ideal for validating corporate strategies, gathering input on product development, and deepening relationships with key customers. In turn, there is just as much to be gained by the participating customers.
    Indeed, while engaging customers, gathering their feedback and input to your strategic plans and product roadmap helps engender brand loyalty, the benefits of CABs go much deeper than that. Here then are the top 5 benefits your company can get from a well-run customer advisory board program.

    1. Insight into Business Strategy: Your customers—the consumers of your products or services – are the best (and surprisingly most often overlooked) resource to provide input to your company’s overall direction and business strategies. Such customers should be able to advise you on the products and services they desire, what they would pay for them and how they want them delivered. After all, everything you do is designed to appeal to their needs, so there really is no one more qualified to counsel you on how to best target, approach and serve your client base. Your council can provide invaluable direction regarding which markets to pursue, how to capitalize on market trends, what customer pain points to address, which companies to partner with or acquire, how to best exploit competitors’ weak points, and how to position your company for optimal advantage.

    2. Feedback to the Product Roadmap: A customer advisory board is ideal for providing feedback and desired direction on the host company’s offerings. Your advisory council can offer an insider’s view of what your target buyer needs and wants from your products and/or services. A council also serves as a great platform for securing beta testers of your new offerings, helping you introduce your solutions and providing immediate validation before you go to market.

    3. Increased Revenue: The often unspoken (yet highly desired) benefit from your council is the positive impact you will see in incremental sales revenue. Your members’ organizations will likely increase their overall spend with your business over time. This is due in large part to the fact that they are privy to your growth strategy, are early testers of your solutions and feel closer and more faithful and dedicated to you and your offerings. In fact, Ignite’s experience shows that B2B companies that have active and successful customer advisory boards enjoy a 9% increase in new business among advisory members starting after year one of advisory programs above non-advisory council customers.

    4. Customer Approval and Brand Champions: An additional benefit to running an advisory council is that you are building a close-knit group of company advisors and brand champions. By bringing members into your company’s “inner circle” as trusted advisors, you are also transforming them into even bigger raving fans of your company. In our experience, this almost always happens with council members. As they take on the responsibility of helping to guide your business, they inherently become professionally and emotionally invested in your success, and their enthusiasm and passion tends to permeate their immediate team and sometimes beyond. The result is a group of highly loyal customers who have a vested interest in your success – and not defecting to your competition. Furthermore, your members will likely refer other prospects to you as they talk about you with peers at conferences, events, and throughout their day-to-day operations.

    5. Marketing Campaigns and Messaging: Another often less-recognized area of value a client advisory council delivers is feedback to how your company markets itself. You will gain the rich insight necessary to understand how to position (or re-position) the company against the competition. Your advisory board will advise you as to what makes your business unique and what differentiators you should highlight. Just as important, the council can guide you on which mediums are the most viable in terms of reaching your desired audience. Members can also serve as wonderful client references for testimonials and case studies. Likewise they may also be willing to develop and publish joint articles or white papers with you. This lends industry validation and credibility to your advisory board program, your own organization, and serves as a means of promoting the member and bolstering his/her own company and career.

    While engaging with customers and engendering brand loyalty may be all the rage with marketers these days, in our experience, customer advisory boards are the best method to deliver this – and much more. A well-run customer advisory council will undoubtedly provide your organization with significant input that will put your company on a better, more targeted and profitable course for years to come.

    Rob Jensen is VP of Marketing for Ignite Advisory Group (www.igniteag.com), a consultancy that helps B2B companies manage their customer and partner advisory board programs.  http://www.igniteag.com

     

    If you found this valuable or enlightening, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Google This: What It Means When A Brand Becomes A Verb

    Google This: What It Means When A Brand Becomes A Verb

    I thought readers would appreciate this – I’m as guilty as anyone of using these verbisms, especially being close to the inside at Xerox and a couple of the other larger brands in a couple of industries. Its interesting to see the differences in which one gets picked for this “honor” – we text and call people, and we phone people, we don’t iPhone them, no matter that they are the market leader. But when the telephone was not the only device that performed this function in the early days of communication technology, the telephone won the market and, became the generic term. Kleenex also experienced this as the dominant player in the disposable tissue market, but we still blow our noses or wipe up, we don’t “kleenex” our noses. No verbism, but still the market leader becomes the default term for the category.

    Good article, enjoy the read . . .

    By Mike Hoban

    TiVo. FedEx. Taser. Velcro. Superglue. Sometimes consumers latch onto a brand and make it a verb–the question is whether it helps or hurts a brand.

    We FaceTime and Skype but we generally don’t Facebook or YouTube. We Google but we don’t Bing (at least not yet). We Rollerblade but we don’t Slinky. In past years, we would Xerox but would never Polaroid. Why are some popular brands or products used as verbs in our everyday conversation and others not?

    It’s an interesting question and there are opposing sides in the business world about whether “verbifying” (which is a verbified word in itself) a brand or product is a good thing or not. On the one hand, the marketers tend to believe it’s the ultimate compliment and demonstrates a personal connection between consumer and brand. The intellectual property attorneys, on the other hand, usually contend that using a product or brand name this way risks what is termed “genericide,” (as Dave Barry used to say, “I’m not making this up…”) meaning losing the legal power of a trademark. Xerox, for example, for several years apparently ran a campaign with publishers asking them to not use the name “Xerox” as a verb when the generic term “photo copy” was the intended meaning. A much referenced 2009 New York Times article describes the opposing views.

    TiVo. FedEx. Taser. Velcro. Superglue. Sometimes we consumers just latch onto a dominant brand and verbify it with no mind or care about whether the company wants us to or not. But it’s not clear why this happens to some products but not to others, even if they have similar product characteristics. Why do many people use the verb “Photoshop” (a product by Adobe) to mean any type of digital image manipulation but we don’t use “Word” (a product by Microsoft) as a verb to mean any type of word processing?

    Technically, the etymologists refer to the practice of verbing as “anthimeria,” which means a functional shift or conversion of word use, and it’s not a new phenomenon. Shakespeare was a serial verber, for instance. It can be creative and clever but in the business world it is abused and can become buzzword-speak. We ballpark, we partner, we value-add, eyeball, fast track, leverage, and we green-light. And in meetings we flip chart. But the line must be drawn somewhere. People using “dialogue” as a verb, for instance, should be formally reprimanded and the use of “architect” as a verb should be grounds for termination.

    Oh, sorry about the little rant. We were talking about brands being verbified and perhaps the first brand to do that consciously as part of its marketing strategy is Simoniz, the car wax. Back in the 1920s or ’30s the company’s tagline was “Motorist wise, Simoniz” and posters and ads from that period would exhort car owners to “Simoniz Now!” Similarly, having grown up in Michigan in the 1960s and 1970s, we would routinely use the brand Ziebart as both a noun and a verb (“Did you Ziebart your new car yet?”) to refer to any car rustproofing process (there’s that genericide bugaboo again).

    Sometimes companies’ efforts to “verb up” their brands fail or fizzle. Back in the 1970s I recall a campaign by the grocery chain Kroger which featured a jingle that sang out “Let’s go Krogering, Krogering, Krogering…” Let’s just say that ad was soon retired. And Yahoo several years ago asked people “Do you Yahoo?” Yahoo no longer asks that question and seems to be content to remain a noun.

    Brand verbification. What do you think will be the next one to enter our everyday lexicon–and does it help or hurt a brand?

    –Mike Hoban is a management consultant in his day job and can be contacted at business-at-large@sbcglobal.net.

    For more insights like these, be sure to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

    [Image: Flickr user Isolino Ferreira]
  • Research Data Drives Effective Creative Strategy

    Research Data Drives Effective Creative Strategy

    It’s that time again . . . time to get the ball rolling on your new membership recruitment campaign, or your seasonal ad campaign, or your annual meeting promotion. You need an idea, a direction, an inspiration to guide your creative mind to a result that will be executable, will reach and resonate with the intended audience, and come in within budget. Where do you turn? Hopefully, you turn to the potential customer, in the form of primary research.

    The more you know about the audience for any marketing effort, the more effective that effort will likely be. You know the challenges they face, you know the mindset they use on a daily basis, you know what they need, and can make your concepts, copy and offers sing to the audience in a way that creates action, but only if you have the information you need. The way to get that information, in a reliable way that you can use to make decisions, is to be in regular contact with the audience. One of the most effective ways to do that is with periodic in-depth phone research.

    Get a Reality Check

    In-depth phone research, when combined with some written survey work on a periodic basis, can help you get an accurate feel for your members or target audience on an ongoing basis, unfiltered by the “pick the middle choice” phenomenon of printed surveys. Done in a truly blind fashion, where the audience has no idea your organization is behind the questions, customers feel secure enough to answer honestly and directly. Even so, most respondents in a small, highly specific prospect pool, especially in a member-based organization, figure out that the word will filter back to your organization eventually, so they feel that this may be an opportunity to air their gripes and get something done on their behalf without complaining directly to you. You can also gather information on the positive side as well, as compliments are far more rare then complaints from customers or members of the organization.

    Customer service benefits aside, true primary research generates not only anecdotal information on your current customers or members, but if you include ex-customers or former members in your scheme, there is quantitative data generated that can be projected accurately over the entire audience or prospect pool. And in that data is where the creative inspiration hides.

    Draw Comparisons

    Inspirational data often comes from the most unexpected numerical comparisons. Most marketing data mirrors the expectations that were built into the questions in the phone survey. In the face of that effect, there is often one set of data that stands out as an unexpected result, either very positive, or extremely negative compared to your own “feel” for that issue.

    The other comparison that lends itself to driving a creative “hook” is the comparison between the data from your current constituents and your former constituents. Not only will this comparison show you what facets of your organization are working well and retaining customers, but it will also show some of the reasons why the ex-customers left. Those are the things you can address in your creative strategy to shore up those perceptions that could be discouraging potential customers from doing business with you.

     

    [pullquote align=”left or right”]The more you know about the audience for any marketing effort, the more effective that effort will likely be.[/pullquote]

     

     

    Often an issue you feel is of little consequence turns out to mean an awful lot to the constituent audience. If you find that unexpected “key to their heart”, that should inspire a creative approach that will yield considerable success. Both in the concept and in the copy, hitting that high note repeatedly based on solid research is usually a home run. Careful reading and interpretation of that collected data is key to going in the correct direction. Sometimes some additional follow-up research with a small but representative audience to drill down on that unexpected issue can generate some additional, more leading data. That clarification can mean the difference between a home run and a wiff.

    Occasionally, the opposite scenario plays out, and something you’ve been promoting as a benefit all along turns out to have little importance to the audience. That lack of “resonance” is a disconnect that you now know you can avoid in your copy. That frees up some room to play up the positive aspects you’ve verified with the research data.

    Use The Data You Gather

    Without the underpinnings of that research, there is little basis for decision-making in the creative process. The data can give you a more sturdy brand profile, it let’s you make a persuasive case to senior management, and gives you something to backstop your creative direction. The temptation is often to take the data and twist it to meet the “gut feel” that exists in the collective mind of the organization. Ignore the data at your own peril. If the study is conducted by professional researchers, and there are no clear flaws in the list of respondents and its reflection of the audience is accurate, then let the data drive your decisions.

    The data doesn’t lie. It’s very easy to discount research data when you compare it to your own perceptions, or the preferred perception of the organization, and it doesn’t match. It’s tougher to stick to your guns, believe the data and act upon it. Once you see it work predictably and successfully, you learn to trust the numbers.

    Prioritize the Issues

    Once you have the data collected, and the analysis done, how do you make the leap to a creative direction? The secret is in the numbers. The basic strategy is that you determine the type of approach based on the read of the top 5 factors in the survey in order of importance. If the top three involve emotional issues, rather than the rational, or intellectual, then the creative approach leans toward a more emotional appeal.

    For example, if the survey indicates that your organization is not producing results for customers in a particular area, maybe customer service or responsiveness – those are largely emotional issues, as no one likes to feel ignored or not served adequately, but they are not functional issues or operational issues within the organization’s functional mission. The creative approach in that case might involve imagery and copy that plays upon the warm, service-oriented nature of the organization, a one to one approach that is more welcoming and almost apologetic. Of course, you can also pass the info on to the customer service department and improve there operationally as well.

    If you uncover among your top five factors that numerically your satisfaction level among customers is 3 times higher than your ex-customer dissatisfaction ratio, there’s a set of numbers to crow about, and you can take a more rational, numerical approach to the concept and the copy – show you’re keeping customers happy and keeping them longer than ever before. The data still drives the point home, and works to provide you with a creative direction, a springboard toward a winning concept that resonates with the audience.

    Use A Metaphor

    One of the simplest ways to make the leap from data to concept is to use a metaphor that explains what the data reveals. If you’re trying to illustrate that your company grew its customer base by 200% in the last quarter, or that your customer satisfaction rating improved by 3x over the last year based on some changes you’ve put in place, showing images of outrageous growth – beanstalks, elephants, Cyclops giants, etc.; or show images of size disparity – big bones with little dogs, big sandwiches with little kids, an Oreo cookie so large it won’t go in the glass of milk. The metaphor gives you a way to explain the concept that the data revealed in a way the audience can relate to easily.

    Now, on to those meeting ads, or those membership recruitment ads. Let the data be your guide in these cases as well. If your data shows that 80% of your members don’t go to your annual meeting because it’s too expensive, takes too much time away from the office and the same people go every year and it’s turned into a good ole’ boys club, its time to break out the big guns. They are not finding the value in your meetings. Time to fight the perceptions with your own reality and show the members in your ad or brochure that there are benefits to spending the money, taking time away and meeting those good ole’ boys face to face. Imagery in this case should be very rational, practical, businesslike, and copy should be extremely benefit-laden, addressing those concerns head on in a way the audience can relate to. In many cases, if you get one good lead, one good tip, meet one solid useful connection at a meeting, you’ve made the trip a worthwhile endeavor. Now multiply that by the “possibilities” of the number of typical attendees (some latitude allowed here, no accountants in the wings), and show how the value multiplies with the number of participants – sort of a “you have to show up to win type of approach”.

     

    [pullquote align=”left or right”] It’s tougher to stick to your guns, believe the data and act upon it.[/pullquote]

     

    Destination “X”

    Ads focused on the destination are destined to fail for at least a portion of the audience, yet they persist and even proliferate in the member organization landscape. Everyone knows it’s great to go to a meeting in “X” city, if you like that city, and if it has something inherently beneficial or relevant to the meeting’s purpose. If not, you’ll lose the folks who are farthest away and those that are the most cost conscious, almost automatically. No matter what city you pick, those two audiences are lost if the content isn’t up to snuff. You can’t have a meeting good enough to get them to go there. For those who are having trouble finding value in the content, the city is irrelevant. If the content is good and the results beneficial, you can have the meeting in a train station and people will attend.

    Use Testimonials

    For those organizations hunting for new members, there are many approaches where the data can give you some insights to follow. Testimonial approaches are a very strong framework from which to build value for prospective members. They humanize the organization, provide benefits the audience can relate to easily, and put a face to the issue of keeping members involved and active. Your research data sets showing the biggest challenges members or customers face are the key to crafting solid testimonials that answer these challenges. You can use the top 3-5 problem areas the data reveals and create a series of ads or brochure pages featuring members explaining how their involvement in the organization helped them solve the problem or meet the challenge. They would be highly credible, they would show the organization at work, and they would outline very relevant benefits that would resonate with the audience to a high degree – all driven by a few questions in your phone research survey.

    Use Everything Available

    There are many creative approaches buried within your primary research, and there are many sources of data that can be used to augment, support and reinforce your primary data and the subsequent analysis. Member application data, tradeshow or annual meeting attendee data, industry atlases or SIC code studies published by the U.S. Department of Labor, can all shed light on your target population. There are other kinds of research as well that will generate data, including focus groups, written or e-mail surveys, web surveys, live interviews at meetings or tradeshows, and live long-form personal interviews at a research facility equipped with one way mirrors and camera equipment. All these are viable forms of information gathering, and each has their place in providing you data you can use to form a creative approach to your outreach marketing.

    The key is to believe the numbers and use them in conjunction with your internal organizational knowledge to drive an effective creative strategy.

    If you found this valuable, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

  • Don’t Assume You Know Your Customers

    Don’t Assume You Know Your Customers

    Adam Richardson provides exquisite validation to Granite Partners’ research based marketing approach, in this well thought out blog post from Harvard Business Review. I couldn’t have said it better, so I bring it to you in it’s original form. Enjoy!

    Don’t Assume You Know Your Customers

    by Adam Richardson  |

    If the recent U.S. election taught us anything, it’s that you have to be careful assuming that others see the world the way you do. It’s very easy for any organization — political, commercial, not-for-profit — to get caught up in its own echo chamber of like-minded believers. After certain blogs, social media outlets, pundits, and talk shows whipped themselves into a self-reinforcing frenzy, many people were stunned by the election outcome. How could so many “experts” have gotten it so wrong?

    Shared enthusiasm and beliefs are valuable assets when pushing for a goal. In a business context, it’s vital that your employees are emotionally invested in your company’s vision. But there need to be checks and balances to make sure that the vision matches external reality, or you could be enthusiastically charging toward a similar shock. As the science fiction author Philip K. Dick once remarked, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

    Getting an objective view of who you, as an organization, are trying to serve is critical, but it’s easier said than done.

    Most companies are the centers of their own universes. It’s a natural enough impression; after all, the products and services they offer are on their minds 24/7. The trap is in those companies deluding themselves into thinking that they are as important to their customers as they are to themselves. This is almost never the case. This delusion interferes with understanding customers and their needs, and frequently leads companies to talk to customers in ways that seem foreign or confusing.

    Financial services, the area that I work in now, is an example. It is rampant with confusing jargon and terminology, such as compound interest, ETFs, or the now infamous CDO, or collateralized debt obligation. A 2008 AARP study found that 79% of Americans think prescription drug instructions are easier to understand than materials from financial firms.

    But the financial services industry is not alone. Health care, wireless communications, real estate, information technology, and airlines are all major industries that consistently confuse and turn off their customers, leading to mistrust and disloyalty.

    Jargon in communication is just the surface of the problem. People who work in these industries day-to-day become infused with insider knowledge, techniques, and perspectives. After a while they forget their former lack of expertise and start to assume that everyone must also possess their knowledge — customers included.

    Employees are like hostages suffering from Stockholm syndrome — they take on the worldview of their employer and industry, and forget what it’s like to be a “regular” person without this specialized knowledge. Over time, employees start to talk mostly about tangible product features and become distanced from customer needs and benefits. Value propositions become more abstract and lose the naïve freshness of seeing of who customers really are and how they think, behave, and feel. It becomes increasingly difficult to see your company and industry as nonexpert outsiders do.

    How do we fix this? There are many research methods for better understanding customers, and you may be using them already: ethnographic research, focus groups, surveys, in-store intercepts, and so on. It’s also important to encourage employees to use competitors’ products, so they don’t develop tunnel vision. These are good and necessary, but you can have lots of data and still not see what it’s saying.

    There are two things that can stand in the way getting real insight:

    1. Admitting you may be wrong. If the organization isn’t willing to recognize that it’s not connecting with customers, dismisses indications that customers are confused or uninterested as “irrelevant outliers,” or avoids the message by shooting the messenger, then all the research in the world won’t help. Yes, there are times when an organization needs to be visionary and do things that at first most customers don’t get. Salesforce.com’s pioneering role in the nascent area of cloud computing services is an example of a company that was willing to lose some customers early on in pursuit of the bigger market later. But you have to be very confident in the size of the potential opportunity — and have the organizational fortitude — to pull of that big of a bet. Silicon Valley is littered with companies that made similar bets and failed because ultimately their proposed view of reality never came to align with that of their target customers’.

    2. Garbage in, garbage out. If you’re talking to too narrow of a sample (as was the case with many of the conservative pollsters) or framing research questions in ways that subtly pre-bias the answers, you could be inadvertently creating ever-better products for a shrinking audience. Don’t just meet with your best and current customers; get outside the echo chamber by meeting with ex-customers or people who have never been your customers but love your competitors and the upstart disruptors. (Yes, this often stresses out the sales team.) Years ago, when I was at Sun Microsystems, many at the company initially dismissed the cheap servers then being introduced by Dell and Compaq. Our loyal customers at large companies with massive IT budgets weren’t interested in these low quality machines. Not then, anyway. Sun couldn’t bring itself to lower its standards, and as a result, it ceded a huge part of the market to competitors moving up from the PC space.

    Don’t wait for a catastrophe to show you when you’ve become too caught up in your own hype. Make sure you are continuously seeking a more thorough and objective understanding of your customers, harness the fresh perspectives of new employees, and have the humility to recognize that your customers may have needs and lives beyond your company.

    For more on research and customerinsights, pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Guide”

  • Vertical Marketing Strategy – Are you Barking (Up the wrong tree) ?

    Vertical Marketing Strategy – Are you Barking (Up the wrong tree) ?

    Owen Ashby hit it on the head with this, we’ve seen this happen in bigger companies who are finding they need to spur new growth to keep up with the curve. Too perfect, no need for me to paraphrase, so here’s the original post in it’s entirety . . . enjoy!

    November 30 owenashby

    There was a time when all B2B marketing was horizontal and I don’t mean at the Christmas party (!).  Companies designed their value propositions to address needs they had identified in organisations of a certain size in a certain geography. There it stopped.

    Then someone sold the product or service to a Bank (for example). Everyone was delighted but not surprised because that particular bank had the exact needs the company had identified its product or service could address.

    Then some bright spark suggested that actually if they had one bank as a customer, surely other banks would “peer reference” (follow one another) and so the company should now try to sell to all banks.  To do that they would need a “Bank’s” sales force (and P&L) and probably a “Bank’s” proposition too. Of course with that would go a “Bank’s” sales target and the hope and dreams of the shareholders as  the company would surely be “the number 1 provider to Banks” before the year was out.

    Only it didn’t work out like that, by year two they had still only had one bank. The sales team had, had to focus elsewhere and the marketing team were at a loss. Which was annoying because the company had built its entire organisation like this. Now as well as a “bank” sales team it had a “retail” team (because they’d previously won a high street travel agent) and a “transport” team because they’d won a haulage company.

    Over the course of a period of three years they’d “gone vertical”. It sounded great  and each quarter they’d meet and discuss which new customers and prospects would sit in which of the new vertical teams they’d created. It was always a bit of a bun fight because they didn’t win any more banks or any more travel agents or any more hauliers. So they either created new vertical teams to accommodate each new win, or they stretched their definition of a vertical so wide ( to accommodate each new account) that the vertical became a horizontal again.

    Mmmm….

    Sounds implausible doesn’t it…?

    It is happening right now and if it’s not happening in your organization then you can bet your bottom Dollar it’s happening in the company across the street and the one next to them too. In the rush pull all the focus into a vertical market, companies are losing sight of the value of their proposition.

    One bank does not a banking vertical make.

    So what’s the point?

    Start by understanding the business issue your product or service addresses, then look for the kind of operational model that generates that kind of issue, then look for the organisations that fit that profile. You may find that large numbers of these organisations all sit in small number of market sectors in which case going vertical will be appropriate. However, there’s a really good chance they won’t and “going vertical” will make you irrelevant to the vast majority of the companies in that sector.

    If you’re not careful, you end up stretching your offering and value proposition to fit the vertical market strategy you’ve imposed…that way lies oblivion…margin and market erosion and a slow and painful death. Ironic really, when you consider you went “vertical” to allow you to focus in on a niche.

    For more on segmentation and niche marketing, pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Guide”

  • How to Assess and Enhance Membership Value

    How to Assess and Enhance Membership Value

    There are many areas of common interest among member-based organizations, especially now, but the largest and longest running area of concern is certainly finding and keeping members for the long term. Its the bread and butter, the engine of any organization, forming the reason for being, driving strategic direction, drawing stable revenue, and creating the nucleus of the organization that gives it its ideological center. But how do you present that value proposition to both new and existing members in a way that keeps them engaged and involved, year after year?

    It is a question that is raised constantly in roundtable discussions among non-profit executives, and one we see in our practice perennially, as new budgets are set, statistics from the prior year are examined and goals are derived. Unfortunately, there is no single easy answer, as each organization has its own unique value proposition, its own character based on the membership in aggregate, and each should be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Fortunately, there are some common areas that can be reviewed and measured, and some relatively easy fixes that can be put in place at minimal cost that will yield results both short and long term.

    The most obvious area in which to start your retention effort is an investigation into what you really know about your members. Almost to a man, if you interview senior executives at a non-profit, they will tell you know they “know” their members well, know what they want and what they need, what will attract them to the organization. Yet if you delve a little deeper, ask when they last surveyed their members about the organization itself, about how their individual lives and businesses have changed, how their needs have shifted, how they’d like to receive information, you’ll almost invariably find that the executives view and the reality do not connect completely. There’s general agreement, surely, for any good Executive Director knows the basics of their members and their respective businesses. However, the speed with which things change, not only in the members’ lives and business circumstances, but in the media and communications arena, regarding content delivery and outreach methods, make it necessary to accelerate your rate of member surveys and research by nearly double the typical rate, in order to stay current. Flexibility and adaptation are the keys to survival, and to make the right moves, you have to have good recent data.

    [pullquote align=”left or right”]…each organization has its own unique value proposition, its own character based on the membership in aggregate, and each should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.[/pullquote]

    Once you’ve decided to craft an updated survey, creating the most revealing questions, limiting them in number and complexity to reduce abandonment and boost response, and deciding the most reasonable and appropriate delivery method are some issues that must be dealt with. There is a balance that must be struck between gathering a comprehensive data set, and gathering enough responses to make the resulting data statistically significant. Too few questions and too little data and its a wasted effort. Too long a survey to get the most data yields too few responses and the reliability of the data suffers.

    Most surveys on a single issue or two are kept to ten questions to boost response. More in-depth total member surveys can be double or triple that, but at that length, delivery methods must be considered, as does the question of incentives. A short survey can be delivered in an e-mail, posted on a website, or set up via an independent web-based services, like Zoomerang. Longer, multi-page surveys don’t pull as well using online methods, and the incentives typically delivered through online surveys, including coupons and links to other sites etc, are typically not powerful enough to drive the response levels you’ll need to make good decisions. The abandonment rate is too high on a long online survey, and you might burn a bridge to your members or customers if you insist on delivering such a document in this manner. More lengthy surveys are often best delivered by old-fashioned snail mail, and include a more valuable incentive to spur response.

    Your list of recipients is also important. It may seem obvious that you include all current members on such a survey, to get a sizable enough number of responses, but there are other constituents that should also receive a survey, and in some cases the questions should be tailored to their status. Expired members who didn’t renew, those in arrears, a sampling of prospects, those with no participation in a committee, project or who haven’t  purchased anything from the organization in over two years, each should have a slightly different coded survey, one that collects information about the value to the organization, their current business situation, and their needs and preferences.

    [pullquote align=”left or right”]There is a balance that must be struck between gathering a comprehensive data set, and gathering enough responses to make the resulting data statistically significant.[/pullquote]

    Once these issues are worked out, the survey delivered and the data collected, the results should be analyzed in a number of different ways. With no baseline data to work from if this is the first comprehensive survey in more than two years, this data constitutes the best information you have, but won’t be useful in spotting trends or sensing shifts in perception or preferences. It can still be used to craft strategy and policy, and to present enticing value to current and future members.

    One of the more important questions is one regarding communications preferences. If you are trying to communicate value to your members, you have to have a good idea how they’d like to receive that information. This question will also give you a secondary reading on the technology adoption curve location of your members. If a majority of members would prefer e-mail or other web-based vehicles, your members are moving toward the center of the electronic media adoption curve, and is a good indication that they will continue to develop at a pace commensurate with the national average. This metric may correlate well to the average age of your member. Older members are typically behind the curve, both due to lack comfort and educational opportunity, and to the expense associated with high-speed internet access.

    Any way you conduct the research, the best policy is to BELIEVE THE DATA. If you’ve gone to the trouble and expense of polling your members and associated constituents as to their needs and preferences, you should at least have faith in the data. If the data goes against your “gut” feeling about members, or trends away from the direction you suspected through anecdotal evidence, it may have been too long since these impressions were formed.

    If you found this article valuable and informative, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes“

  • Consultants Offer Flexibility, Hands-Off Productivity

    Consultants Offer Flexibility, Hands-Off Productivity

    With staff sizes and budgets restricted or diminishing, and top executives up and down the ladder under pressure to do more with less each year, many savvy executives are seeking help among the seeming army of consultants of every stripe to get their companies on the profitability track. Are they finding success down that road?

    The idea of the consultant is ancient – Egyptian kings and pharaohs had “consultants” with specialized magical talents to advise them and point them in the right direction when governing the masses. King Tutankhamun had one of the greatest PR consultants ever seen, who told him that to the Egyptian people, big buildings mean big power, big statues mean big power – and Tut and other Pharaohs took this to heart and built the pyramids of Giza and other wonders of the ancient world.

    Consultants can be used for a variety of purposes, from adding moral support in difficult or uncomfortable political situations, to adding credibility to pet projects in communicating them to Boards or subordinates. The image of the unfamiliar man with the briefcase and the air of confidence in the boss’s office was born out of some particularly sticky board meetings in the 1960s by top executives at a large conglomerate who’s ideas were not being communicated effectively or credibly, and a CEO who’s head was on the block. Once the Board members heard the same message in a different way coming from the consultant, an expert in such matters, they approved the plan and the CEO was spared. The consultant in that case didn’t come up with the idea, he simply communicated it effectively and lent his credibility to the idea. This practice continues today with great success in companies and organizations across America. Communication by proxy can be used as an effective strategy if a number of conditions are met. One is that the idea or issue must have real merit on its own. A bad idea is a bad idea, no matter who presents it. Another condition is that the consultant be at least as credible as the staffer to the selected audience. He should be a known, or at least vetted, quantity, with the credentials to back it up. Once those two elements are in place, communication by proxy can be effective in getting new ideas implemented.

    Short Term Expertise

    Consultants have many other functions as well, and most departments within the organization can find a number of consultants that specialize in their particular areas of functionality to assist them. Sometimes consultants can simply be used as additional manpower, fill-ins for key employees on personal leave, plug-ins providing necessary functionality on short notice for the short term. These are not temps you can call in for a day or two while someone is out with the flu. They are highly-trained, experienced executives who have been in many different corporate situations and reached a level of comfort with the commonalities in procedures in their area between companies to be effective quickly. They are typically not used in situations where the term is shorter than a month, as the cost of lost opportunity for a stint that short drives the hourly rate beyond the return value. Expectations in this situation are relatively high, as the consultant is being asked to step into any number of situations already in place and under way, and gather sufficient information from internal sources to keep these projects moving forward effectively, in a very short period of time, but without injecting much of their own influence or changing the direction of the project. This is a tough gig, and successful consultants are to be highly prized and respected for this set of skills that make such performance not only possible but routine. When projects are critical, and the schedule is inflexible for any number of reasons, this may be a good option for mid-size to large organizations.

    “Special” Projects

    Some organizations use consultants as outboard manpower to plan and implement special projects outside the normal scope of the department or organization, or for projects that are of vital concern to the organization’s success but only come up rarely. Changing membership databases for a non-profit organization is a prime example of this type of consultant use. An IT or Association Consultant who has been through many such changeovers and data conversions can be an invaluable resource for such a critical undertaking that most organizations only face every few years. Hiring a consultant under such circumstances will expand and extend the organization’s scope of expertise for a short period, and take advantage of specialized knowledge that isn’t needed on a regular basis. The expense of the consultant is far outweighed by the savings gained by avoiding a misstep in the process and crippling your organization, however temporarily, while the problem is investigated and fixed. The consultant can prevent you from making a poor purchasing decision, and mitigates buyer’s remorse by making the correct match between user and product.

    [pullquote align=”left or right”]King Tutankhamun had one of the greatest PR consultants ever seen, who told him that to the Egyptian people, big buildings mean big power, big statues mean big power – and Tut and other Pharaohs took this to heart and built the pyramids of Giza and other wonders of the ancient world.[/pullquote]

    Sometimes that special project requires some specialized expertise in order to allow a “pet” project to be executed properly, and that expertise doesn’t exist in house. If time is a factor, and there’s no time for internal staff to develop that type or level of expertise, a consultant can be an excellent solution. The can work directly with your internal staff, provide the expertise necessary to move the project forward effectively, by-pass the internal chain of command and the inherent internal politics, and propel the project to a successful conclusion quickly and effectively.

    Guidelines

    There are some guidelines to keep in mind when using a consultant for this purpose.

    • When planning to include a consultant in the mix, be sure to make “room” for them both in the budget and in the schedule. There will be some initial ramp up, no matter how short, as they learn to work with the particular in-house players, and assess their individual capabilities. Leave a reasonable time for them to get acclimated and figure out who’s who in your organization.
    • Depending on the type of project, the consultant has been hired to provide expertise, advice and specialized services. This often requires change from the status quo, introduction of new ideas, and some assessment of the internal strengths and weaknesses on the team. Take the advice and ideas you’re given and make the most of it. Putting up roadblocks, creating obstacles, withholding information, and rejecting ideas out of hand are all a waste of time and money. You’ve hired him or her as an expert, treat them as such, and listen to them.
    • When planning to use a consultant, build into your plan sufficient staff time to manage the consultant, and the money in the budget to implement the ideas they introduce. You’ve hired an expert, but if you don’t leave room in the budget to put into practice the concepts they introduce, you’ve only done half the job. Even if you don’t keep the consultant in the picture during the implementation, you still need to fund the project sufficiently to be successful.

     

    Most good consultants in most fields have learned to work with a bare minimum of supervision or management. If you carefully outline the goals for the project, introduce them effectively to the internal staff, and provide the resources and the communication pathway for them to get accurate, unvarnished answers to questions quickly, they will take the ball and run with it. In order to keep them from veering too far from what you envision a success to be, some check-ins or milestones for approval should be built into the project schedule. That way you can adjust the course at critical junctures before they go too far off the map. Too many of these can erode the effectiveness of the consultant and doom the project, so avoid the temptation to micro manage. You had the foresight to hire them, now let them do their thing. Too few milestones can lead to some surprises, when the end of the project approaches and the final product is not what you envisioned and you don’t know why. A happy medium and a light touch usually lead to a successful outcome.

    [pullquote align=”left or right”]When planning to use a consultant, build into your plan sufficient staff time to manage the consultant, and the money in the budget to implement the ideas they introduce.[/pullquote]

     

     

    Finances

    The financial arrangements for consultants vary to some degree, depending upon the industry, the scope and duration of the project, and the nature of the organization. Many work on an hourly rate, which are standardized to some degree based on what the market will bear for the size of the projects, the area of expertise, the reputation of the consultant, and the geographic area. A Human Resources Consultant will likely charge a small company in Tennessee less per hour for a candidate search than a large company in New York City, and the company’s expectations and needs will likely differ as well. The rate can be negotiated up front, before the project starts, and the terms are often outlined in a binding legal contract. Most Boards insist on such a document in one form or another, to help provide the company some recourse and some protection for both parties should outcome turn out to be less than expected.

    Some consultants in certain industries work on a fixed project fee. This is negotiated up front as well, once the scope and extent of their involvement and the size of the project has been agreed upon. A contract is often required for this arrangement as well, with some contracts including an incentive bonus for successful or early completion or for staying under established budget guidelines. On rare occasion, a consultant will work on a contingency, similar to a tort or personal injury attorney. Especially in forensic financial work, collections, auditing, or tax work, these arrangements exist where the consultant’s fee or payment is tied either directly or indirectly to the money they are able to recover or save the company.

    No matter what the arrangement, no matter what the industry, selecting which consultant to work with is a critical step to a successful outcome. A recommendation from a colleague who has used someone for a similar project is a great start. Other sources include your local Chamber of Commerce, and industry-specific trade publication editors. The local College or University department most closely aligned with your industry is also a good source of “experts” in your selected field. Once you’ve gathered a few names, a brief phone interview is always a good idea. That alone can whittle the field down to two or three suitable candidates. Their availability, and responsiveness will give you an idea as to what they will be like to work with on your project, and you can prepare some industry specific questions to ask, to see how close to your industry and your project they are currently. Once these are complete, a personal interview is in order. This will give you an even better idea as to the character of your candidates and their capabilities. Each candidate should furnish a list of client references, and they should be rigorously checked before making a decision.

    Once a decision is made, financial arrangements can be made, and your project can begin.

    Consultants can be a vital part of your organization, expanding your capabilities, allowing you flexibility in staffing to meet short term needs, and let you take advantage of expertise beyond the level you are able to train in house. Used wisely and strategically, consultants can help you meet goals, complete new projects, grow your organization and function more efficiently and profitably.

    If you found this helpful or insightful and would like to read more, subscribe tot his blog today! Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • What Is The Worst Marketing Campaign Ever?

    What Is The Worst Marketing Campaign Ever?

    5/11/2012 | blur Group, Expertsourcing, Featured | Dorothy | No Comments

    We’re all guilty of the occasional bout of marketing Schadenfreude – but we’ve also probably had the odd campaign or two of our own when things didn’t go quite to plan. blur Experts talk about those well-known marketing moments when things don’t quite go to plan.

    David Poulos

    The worst marketing effort I can recall is a legendary story from quite a while ago, and was really a lack of research and local cultural awareness. When General Motors’ Chevrolet division launched a new mid-sized model called the Nova, after a superfast shooting star, hoping it would resonate with consumers seeking something fast and futuristic. The formulated print ads, mailers, TV commercials and worst of all, bill boards. The car sold very well in the US, but when they wanted to penetrate the Latin American market, no one in the marketing department did their homework. A quick rebadging would have saved the company many heartaches and a boatload of cash. They went ahead and launched the car as the Nova in Spanish speaking countries throughout Latin America, and after six weeks recognized that there might be a problem reflected in their dismal sales reports. It didn’t dawn on anyone at the company that NoVa in Spanish means “doesn’t go!”

    Huge billboards lining the roads in Mexico, Panama, Honduras, Costa Rica and El Salvador promoting a car that doesn’t run! Finally someone pointed out their error, and they pulled the car and killed the campaign locally. It pays to do your homework.

    We had one fairly significant snafu, but it wasn’t a strategy error, it was a relatively simple technical glitch that cost an awful lot of money. We were launching a new financial publication, aimed at investors, and using a series of direct mail pieces, multi-piece packages mailed in the millions. As you might imagine, a large chunk of the addresses on the target list were linked to the financial industry, centered in Manhattan, NY. One of the largest buildings in New York City at the time was the World Trade Center, which leased office space to hundreds of financial firms, and was so large that there had to be an additional line of address added for a mail stop number, so that the building’s mailroom could deliver efficiently. Someone in the data processing department was tasked with printing off a set of labels for this list, which numbered over a million records. The technician had a tough time fitting the addresses using our standard font, labels and software due to the extra address line – so he took it upon himself to eliminate the third address line – the mail stop. In five days our lobby was filled with commercial laundry carts full of undelivered mail, nearly 50% undeliverable! The entire World Trade Center had denied the mailing as ‘inadequately addressed’ without the mail stop line, and the post office, having a standing order on the account to return ‘undeliverables’ for address correction, returned all the mail to us!  We made the technician open all 500,000 packages, salvage the guts, and re-run all the letters and new labels.

    The devil is in the details when executing marketing tactics, and it doesn’t take much to reduce your plans to rubble. The best marketers are detail people that stay on top of the small stuff to make the big stuff flourish!

    For hundreds of tips on how NOT to make marketing mistakes, pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Guide”

     

  • Is Your Branding Team Thinking Strategically?

    Is Your Branding Team Thinking Strategically?

    Graham Robertson provides us with this week’s opus – brilliantly done, a really good grasp on strategic brand thinking. Gotta love Graham. If so, spread the love . . . graham.robertson@beloved-brands.com
     

     

    Slide1

     

    In our marketing careers, we start off in a doing-role and get completely swamped in execution.   We think “if only I had a higher level job, I’d actually have time to think, rather than just do”.   The problem for many of us, is not only do we get good at the doing, we get so good that we can’t get past it and we never end getting to the real strategic thinking.  We just become a do-er at a higher level and drive everyone crazy beneath us.

    When I talk to many of the senior Brand Leaders, at the VP and Director level, I hear 3 common things:

    1. “I am too busy and I have no time for strategic thinking”
    2. “My team lacks the experience so I have to jump in resolve issues myself”
    3. “If I didn’t jump in, it just wouldn’t get done right”
    Are you really Strategic?

    Everyone out there claims to be a strategic thinker, but I would guess that really only half of us really are strategic.

    • Strategic Thinkers see “what if” questions before they see solutions.  They map out a range of decision trees that intersect and connect by imagining how events will play out.  They reflect and plan before they act.   They are thinkers and planning who can see connections.   This is PLANNING!
    • Non Strategic Thinkers see answers before questions.   They get to answers quickly, and will get frustrated in the delays of thinking.   They think doing something is better  then doing nothing.   They opt for action over thinking.    They are impulsive and doers who see tasks.  They are frustrated by strategic thinkers.  This is EXECUTING!

    As a senior Brand Leader, it is easy to get so wrapped up in the details of the execution that you’re making the non-strategic decisions on behalf of the team.   You have just really become the “senior” Senior Brand Manager that really annoys your team.   Instead of providing the team with a vision, challenging on strategy or teaching the team, you’re telling them to make the flash bigger and change the sell sheet to purple.

    If you speak in a telling voice, you leave your team with one answer:  YES.   If you speak in an asking voice you leave your team with 3 answers:  YES, NO or let me dig in a bit more and find out.  

    Instead of telling people what to do, why not challenge yourself to sit back slightly and ask the really tough challenging questions.  You’ll know you’ve asked a really tough question when you don’t even know the answer.   There’s nothing wrong with stumping the team, because you’re even stumping yourself in the process.

    So What are the Tough Questions to Ask?  

    As your team might be at the beginning stage of digging in on analysis, here’s are 10 great questions to ask your team:

    1. How do we make money?                                                                                                                                                                                                               This focuses them on figuring out the pathway from the activities on the brand to the results in the market and the profitability on the balance sheets.   The most beloved brands use the consumer connection to create a source of power that they can use on various areas of the market and then use that power to drive the brand’s profitability.   Your team should be able to map this out and use it as a roadmap for the brand’s future.   If you’re not focused on power and profit, then you’re not strategic.  
    2. What is it that makes us different?  USP 2.0                                                                                           The best of brands are either better, different or cheaper.   Or not around for very long.   If you can’t answer this question, then how do you expect your consumer to be able to answer.   You’re likely just a me-too brand and once that’s discovered, you’ll be on a downward spiral.   
    3. Why are we here?  How did we get here?  Where could we be?                                     It’s great for getting to the vision, without writing the word “vision” up on the board and saying to everyone “ok go”.  That gets you no-where.   Pick a magical date of 5-10 years from now and say “if you got everything you wanted, what would the brand look like in 5 years?”  Push them hard on the where to, because that’s when the brand starts to transform itself.  
    4. What’s holding us back from being where we want to be?                                            Once you get the team focused on the vision of 5 to 10 years from now.  This allows you to start attacking your brand, to find the inhibitors that you can try to unleash or course correct.  
    5. Which would be easier:   getting our most loyal users to use more, moving up those who have already bought into the brand to start using regularly or getting a new user?                                                                                                                                                                          This is pushing them towards a strategic choice, whether to focus on base users or new users–penetration or usage frequency.  It also should start to force you to look at your brand funnel to see where you have strength and where you have gaps.   Every brand should be utilizing a brand funnel.   It’s almost negligent to not use one.   Slide1 
    6. That’s like working out at the gym and not knowing your blood pressure or cholesterol scores.  When you layer in What would make us more Money, you might start to see the ROI impact of the same decision.  
    7. What would our consumer say about our brand?                                                            This shifts the focus of the discussion from a myopic brand focus into thinking about the consumer first.   Everything you do should be start and end with the consumer in mind.  After all, if you figure out how to win over the consumer, you become more powerfully connected and can drive greater growth and profits through that power.
    8. For Strategy, what choices are on the table that helps you gain a foothold into the market but also helps to drive the long-term win?                                                                 A test for any great strategy is whether it has all 4 key elements.   FOCUS:  all your energy to a particular strategic point or purpose.  Match up your brand assets to pressure points you can break through, maximizing your limited resources—either financial resources or effort.   Pick a tight target market of those who can love you, and pick a unique position that you can stand behind and win.   You want that EARLY WIN, to kick-start of some momentum. Early Wins are about slicing off parts of the business or population where you can build further. Find that connection with your consumer—moving them along the love curve.  LEVERAGE everything to gain positional advantage or power that helps exert even greater pressure and gains the tipping point of the business that helps lead to something bigger.  Your brand finds a way to turn the consumer connectivity into a source of power the brand can leverage.Seeing beyond the early win, there has to be a GATEWAY point, which is the entrance or a means of access to something even bigger.   It could be getting to the masses, changing opinions or behaviours.  Return on Investment or Effort, where you can translate all the power you’ve earned into profits and brand value.
    9. For any choice related to brand positioning and go-to-market, whether it’s target market, main message, media choices or activities, force their hand by asking a few questions to ask:  1) which one gets us on our way to vision faster?    2) which one helps us grow faster  3) which one makes us more money?                                                                                                                                       Always push your team to focus by making them use the word “or” instead of “and”. If you think you are a strategic decision maker, then whenever you choose both, you’ve failed.   When you go into a casino, and put one chip on each of the 38 choices on the roulette wheel, it might be fun, but you’ll never win.    By targeting everyone then you’re not making the choice, you’re just depleting your resources.   And you run the risk that no consumer ever says “wow, that brand is really speaking to me.”
    10. When seeing new creative execution of anything, ask “DO YOU LOVE IT?” and then watch their eyes.  Do you think our costumer will love it?                                                                                                                                                                                                         Is this connected to personal pride or are they just passing the buck filling in forms.  not okGetting something to market, big or small takes a herculean effort to overcome obstacles.   I want to know on day 1, will they fight for it?   A great idea that falls on the vine is worth less than an OK idea executed with passion.  If we don’t love the work we do, then how do we expect the consumer to love the brand?    OK is the enemy of greatness.  
    11. Why do you want to spend this money?                                                                                                                                             If you are about to spend millions of dollars, I want to hear the reason why you think it’s crucial, why it will pay back even greater than the resources we put forward.   Understanding and aligning to one key objective allows everyone to focus on the outcome.   

    And finally, the most important question of all:   

    What do your instincts think we should do?    

    And then listen.  You might be surprised by the good thinking on your team and you might be surprised that their answer is better than the one that is in your head.  

    This might be most obvious of questions, but how many times per week do you ask this?   Imagine the responses you might get from that.  Imagine how motivated your team would be.  As a leader, I want you to start exhibiting more patience.  You have to learn the art of questioning that sets up the listening.  If you learn this skill you’ll start to realize that you can still control the direction of the brand through questions, even more than through direction.  On the plus side, you’ll have a fully engaged, motivated team that’s ready to deliver.

    As a Brand Leader at the executive level, you should walk into every meeting telling yourself “I know less about this than anyone in the room” and that puts you in the most powerful position to ask the right strategic questions and listen for the right strategic answers.

     About Graham Robertson: I’m a marketer at heart, who loves everything about brands.  My background includes 20 years of CPG marketing at companies such as Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer Consumer, General Mills and Coke. The reason why I started Beloved Brands Inc. is to help brands realize their full potential value by generating more love for the brand.   I only do two things:  1) Make Brands Better or 2) Make Brand Leaders Better.

    If you found this valuable, there’s more information like this available in one neat volume of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” – pick up your copy today!

  • How Do You Know It’s Time To Get Some Expert Help?

    How Do You Know It’s Time To Get Some Expert Help?

    Adding a senior employee can bring short-term costs but long-term gains. Here’s how to tell if the time is right for your business.

    When you’re the owner of a small business, knowing when to hire a senior employee isn’t always easy — but it is important. By freeing you to focus on high-value activities where you have true expertise, it can help you take your company to the next stage of growth or, in some cases, simply ensure its continued viability.

    “Entrepreneurs are accustomed to hiring ancillary employees and pawning off smaller tasks on them,” observes Dave Poulos, chief consultant at Granite Partners LLC in Sparks, Maryland. “But at some point, they discover that they’re working their tails off and still can’t be everywhere they need to be or do everything they need to do. That’s when they need to make a high-level hire.”

    While cost can be an issue, Poulos says companies should consider how much they might be able to boost revenues with a new player on the management team. Ideally, it will more than cover the additional salary.

    Chuck Cohn, CEO of Varsity Tutors, a Washington, D.C.-based tutoring service, says that over the past several years he’s “fired” himself from various duties and brought in expert replacements to handle, among other things, bookkeeping, sales and advertising. “Each time it’s had a dramatic impact on how effectively that role is done, my happiness, and our ability to grow — because my time became available for higher-level projects,” he says.

    Wondering whether your company is a candidate for a high-level hire? Here are five signs it may be time to expand the executive suite:

    1. You’re working long hours but missing operational goals or revenue targets. Julie Sue Auslander, president and chief cultural officer at cSubs, a New Jersey-based provider of outsourced subscription services, says a bell tolled for her when she realized that she was doing “a lot of work” but never seemed to have any money.

    “I hired cheap, tried to do it all myself, hired multiple part-timers, and, as a result, missed out on growth opportunities,” she says. Taking a new tack, she outsourced payroll and brought in a bookkeeper who discovered that some invoices were being paid twice or in the wrong amount while some of her own clients weren’t being billed at all. “The revenue I realized from her correct work covered her salary,” she says. “In addition, offloading those activities freed me to do work that nobody else could, and in turn helped my company reach the Inc. 5000 list.”

    Auslander has since hired a part-time controller, which has helped her secure additional funding for her business, enter comfortably into strategic partnerships, and even plan an exit strategy for herself.

    2. Critical parts of your business are proving error-prone or inefficient, and you don’t know how to fix them. Eric Thomasian, head of business development and strategy for Blayze Inc., an online video company, says his firm knew it was time to hire a chief technology officer after its technology systems, which had been outsourced to a third-party developer, turned out to be bug-ridden and not true to their original design.

    “As soon as we made the hire, our CTO hired more coders to create an internal technical team,” Thomasian says. The results were impressive. Turnaround time on system changes rose by 800 percent, funding became more easily attainable because investors felt safer when they could actually meet the company’s technical team face-to-face, and customer satisfaction increased by 90 percent.

    3. Essential tasks are going unfinished. Brianna Sylver, president of Sylver Consulting, a business consultancy with offices in Chicago and Brazil, says she knew it was time to bring in high-level help when “we got into a situation where I needed to be able to duplicate myself in order to get everything done.” After documenting her specific pain points, she brought in a director of global insights and innovation in May 2011. “The results have been fantastic,” Sylver says. “She’s a great addition to the team in multiple ways and has helped us grow as a company.”

    4. Business initiatives yield poor results because you’re not an expert in that facet of your business. Brock Blake, co-founder and CEO of Lendio, an online service that helps small businesses find bank loans, says he decided to hire a vice president of marketing about a year ago after realizing that his own marketing initiatives weren’t helping the company meet its goals. “I wasn’t cut out for that job,” Blake concedes. “We were just going in circles.” After a three-month search, Blake found the right person to take the job, and the results, he says, have been phenomenal. “We’ve doubled in size, both in revenue and in our number of employees.”

    5. You’re continually telling customers you can’t meet their needs. “If your customers are constantly asking, ‘Do you have this?’ or ‘Can you do that?’ and the answer is always ‘No, because we don’t have time,’ you’re making a mistake,” Poulos says. One of the advantages of being a small business, he argues, is the ability to act quickly and nimbly to meet customer demand. “The answer to ‘Can we do?’ and ‘Do we make?’” he says, “should almost always be ‘yes.’”

    Making a high-level hire can be intimidating, especially if you’re accustomed to doing everything yourself. But it can also make you happier and more productive, and your business more profitable.

    For more like this to maximize your business growth curve, pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”