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Category: Management

  • Brand Effectiveness Key to Membership Growth

    Brand Effectiveness Key to Membership Growth

    The visibility, awareness and effectiveness of your organization’s brand directly impact your ability to recruit and retain members. If your organization isn’t the first thing member prospects think of when they turn to industry issues, there’s work to be done.

    But where to start?

    As popular wisdom has it, knowing and admitting you have a problem is half way to solving it. In this case, that means doing a little member research to determine how your members and prospective members view your organization through its brand. This can take one of several forms, including a quick poll on your website, a phone survey, an e-mail or electronic survey, or a paper/mail survey. Regardless of the format, the recipient list should be equal parts members and prospects, to get both perspectives and spot any disconnects between those that know the organization from the inside versus what the brand alone presents to the outside world. The included questions should be formulated so that the responses returned are actionable, and give you some indication of their perceptions of the brand and the organization behind it, based on their actual experience with you, as customers, as members, as industry participants.

    Reading the results in a timely fashion is important, as the cyclic nature of non-profit schedules creates peaks and valleys in the brand perception and awareness level, depending upon what time of the year it is, and how high the level of activity involving members is at the time you launch the survey. For organizations that have even more volatile years, it may be necessary to do two sets of surveys at different times of the year and compare the results to get a good reliable read on the level of awareness you can count on.

    The results of your survey are one source of data, but there are other sources that while less formal or quantifiable, are just as valid in getting a read on your brand awareness and effectiveness. These include interviews with Board members, committee members, volunteers, chapter presidents or directors, vendors, other related professionals, including members of related associations, and members of ASAE.

    Once all this data is collected, it needs to be interpreted accurately so that the actions you take drive your brand efforts in the most effective direction possible. Some items will be readily apparent if the surveys and interviews were constructed correctly. One good tool you can use to read your results is to retrieve the set of brand characteristics from the marketing archives, and see how many of your responses line up with those characteristics. If your responses, including the open-ended comments, use some of the terms and attributes that make up your organization’s brand, then you’ve got a good solid start on reading your data correctly and rating a good score on your brand effectiveness. Conversely, if very few or none of the responses include those attributes on the list, there’s a good chance there’s a disconnect between what you’re trying to convey with your brand, and how it’s being perceived by the various populations it’s designed to serve.

     

    Now that you’ve got a read on how well you’re doing, how do you go about improving? The answer, much as it’s been overused by too many of us in today’s litigious society – it depends. It depends upon what your data tells you, and every case is different. However there are some common scenarios and a few valuable remedies to match them.

    Scenario #1 – Our brand registers very low on the surveys for memorability.

    Typically this means that your customer base doesn’t remember your brand in response to a question designed to illicit a favorable response unprompted. Your organization isn’t top of mind for them as relates to your products or services, and someone else’s brand is. That could mean that your exposure frequency is too low, they don’t see enough from you to keep memorability high enough. It could be that a competitor has captured some key emotional connection to the customer that you have not, despite an inferior product or service – they’re not as good, but customers remember them because they’re “out there” more. This can be remedied with some increase in exposure to key audiences – your top buyers should hear more from you in a positive light to reassure them that you offer the product or services that give the best value. Putting your brand in front of them for positive reasons, like a price discount, a new offer that really saves money, rebate eligibility or other product or service related reason other than to sell them something should go a long way toward remedying this issue. It will boost memorability without seeming like you’re overselling them, a positive cognitive light that will cement the brand in the uppermost memory of the customer.

    Scenario #2 – Our brand rates favorably and has high memory retention among customers, but neither do as well among prospects.

    Usually, this indicates that your product or service has to be “seen to be believed” – it’s value is best seen at delivery or in the transaction, rather than prior to receiving it. This is a sticky problem that has to do as much with promotional direction and relevance as anything else. Your customers know you and have experienced your value, been satisfied with the product or service upon and after delivery and the reputation of the brand was reinforced positively. Prospects, on the other hand, only know you by your “public” face – advertising, packaging, direct marketing, sponsorship associations. The brand unfortunately has little carriage by word of mouth, based on the fact that satisfied customers are not waving your flag and passing on the good word to prospects themselves. Prospects only get a read based on what you tell them. Look to your research and find those key hot buttons of your best customers, and promote those attributes to prospects more heavily. Also, compare your reading on prospects versus customers in other areas of your brand – you may find another disconnect in their perceptions that could cause this effect, and you can remedy both with a shift in your promotional or creative approach to highlight those key elements more heavily. Align your creative with those highest ranking attributes of your best customers, and the prospects should get the best, most relevant perception of your product.

    These are just two of the possible outcomes to this type of analysis. In Part II, we’ll outline some additional outcomes and the directions they indicate you should make adjustments. Suffice to say that if you’re brand is aligned with your message and your audience, you’ve got a strong package for success.

    If you liked what you read here, and would like to read more, subscribe to this blog and watch your inbox for Part II, and be sure and pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Is A Graduate Degree Keeping You From Getting Hired At A Start-up?

    Is A Graduate Degree Keeping You From Getting Hired At A Start-up?

    I came across this article, Why Start-ups Shouldn’t Hire People With Graduate Degrees by Penelope Trunk on bNet, and thought it was particularly appropriate for our Entrepreneurship Practice – having lectured at both undergraduate and graduate level and worked with a variety of students, I feel this rings true. Having worked with start-ups and started seven businesses in the last 30 years, I can relate to the pool of talent that comes out of b-schools over the last three decades – they need more resources, more management time and more seasoning than undergrads with 2 years of work experience ever did. They whined more and produced less than their less educated counterparts, too.

    See if you agree after reading Ms. Trunk’s words of wisdom . . .

    It’s likely that if a person attended graduate school, he will have a hard time translating his strengths into strong workplace performance — especially at start-ups.

    Most people who went to grad school did it to prolong adolescent needs for grade-based approval. (Note: This analysis comes from writers at the Chronicle for Higher Education.) This is because the grad school model is generally outdated for today’s workforce, and high performers see this before they enroll. But people who are scared of trying to hold their own in the workforce see grad school as a way around the inevitable difficulties of finding a job one enjoys.

    Here are three reasons why it’s a decent bet to stay away from candidates with graduate degrees when you need to hire at your start-up:

     

    1. Humanities are for people who are afraid of adult life.

    My experience with graduate school was for English. I tried it when I couldn’t figure out what job I was qualified to do.

    The answer, in fact, was that I was not qualified to do any job before grad school — but I was not qualified to do any job after grad school either. So I left early, without the degree, when I realized graduate school is stupid.

    It’s not just the field of English that is a dead end. One would have had a better chance surviving the Titanic than getting a job as any type of humanities professor. Humanities PhD programs suck up time and energy with little return.

    Most people who go to grad school for humanities defend their decision by saying they love their topic. But look, if you love your topic, you can do it after work. Just open a book and read it on your own.

     

    2. Business school is for people who lack ideas and initiative.

    The big question you should ask when business school graduates tell you they want to work for your start-up is: Why did these people just dump $100,000 into a business degree instead of dumping it into their own company?

    If they really wanted to work at a start-up, why didn’t they launch one? Clearly, money was not the barrier, because they had $100,000 to burn. So it’s something else.

    I think they don’t start companies because they do not have any ideas. Or, in the case where a person actually does have ideas, he doesn’t believe in himself enough to give his own ideas a shot.

    So why should you believe in this person?

    Take a look at how many smart people write about how business school is not a good path to entrepreneurship. The only reason we are even talking about business school in relation to entrepreneurship is that so many people want to be entrepreneurs that business schools had to launch entrepreneurship programs to attract those people.

    During my days as a journalist, I interviewed Saras Sarasvathy, from Dartmouth’s business school. She explained to me the research about the traits of a successful entrepreneur. And believe me, none of those traits requires a degree from business school.

     

    3. Law school is for people who lack creativity and will likely fail in the workplace.

    Yes, this is a generalization. But there is pretty good evidence to back up this generalization.

    For starters, most lawyers hate being lawyers. There are five, big myths about being a lawyer, but the main problem boils down to this: To get in to law school, you have to be great at school (reading and regurgitating back to the professors what they want to hear) and you have to be great at test-taking (the LSAT still rules admissions).

    So law school selects for people who are rule followers and like to be told what to do.

    But to be a successful lawyer, you have to be great at marketing and client relations. Otherwise you won’t make any money because you won’t bring in any business.

    People applying to law school ignore this problem. (And so do law schools, but that’s another story.) The reason law students ignore it is because they are so desperate to have a clear path to money based on the skills they have exhibited in school. The desperate need for a safe route makes people ignore the fact that law school is very, very high risk for an unhappy life.

     

    4. People with multiple degrees will be a pain in the ass.

    Why would anyone get two degrees? It’s like being a triple major. Anyone who is a triple major as an undergrad is likely to be awful to work with. A triple major is myopic in her knowledge, insecure with her own identity, and desperate to impress. There is no good reason to have a triple major in a world where it’s clear that an undergraduate education does not really teach you anything about your major anyway.

    The same can be said about people with multiple graduate degrees. It’s just that as an undergrad, the triple major is trying to find an excuse not to have to socialize. A graduate student is trying to find an excuse not to have to embark on adult life. And that’s not the kind of person who’s going to add a lot of value to your company.

    Which leads me to the best hire you can make: Someone who faces the difficulties of adult life head on and takes personal responsibility for building his own skills. Someone who makes time to develop social skills, test his own ideas, and take risks that are scary but necessary for growth.

    Those people often look messy. Adult life is messy. But it’s better to hire someone who has waded through the mess of growing up than someone who has avoided it at all cost.

    If you find this strikes a nerve, or if you think it’s spot on, and would like more, subscribe to this blog above – and don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” 

     

  • Selling Is Not About Relationships

    Selling Is Not About Relationships

    Reposted courtesy of HBR, copyright 2011
    Matthew Dixon is Managing Director of the Corporate Executive Board’s Sales and Service Practice. Brent Adamson is Senior Director of the Sales Executive Council, a division of the Sales and Service Practice. Their new book, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, is forthcoming November 10, 2011 from Portfolio/Penguin.

    This post, the first of a four-part series, is also part of the HBR Insight Center Growing the Top Line.

    Ask any sales leader how selling has changed in the past decade, and you’ll hear a lot of answers but only one recurring theme: It’s a lot harder. Yet even in these difficult times, every sales organization has a few stellar performers. Who are these people? How can we bottle their magic?

    To understand what sets apart this special group of sales reps, the Sales Executive Council launched a global study of sales rep productivity three years ago involving more than 6,000 reps across nearly 100 companies in multiple industries.

    We now have an answer, which we’ve captured in the following three insights:

     

    1. Every sales professional falls into one of five distinct profiles.

    Quantitatively speaking, just about every B2B sales rep in the world is one of the following types, characterized by a specific set of skills and behaviors that defines the rep’s primary mode of interacting with customers:

    • Relationship Builders focus on developing strong personal and professional relationships and advocates across the customer organization. They are generous with their time, strive to meet customers’ every need, and work hard to resolve tensions in the commercial relationship.
    • Hard Workers show up early, stay late, and always go the extra mile. They’ll make more calls in an hour and conduct more visits in a week than just about anyone else on the team.
    • Lone Wolves are the deeply self-confident, the rule-breaking cowboys of the sales force who do things their way or not at all.
    • Reactive Problem Solvers are, from the customers’ standpoint, highly reliable and detail-oriented. They focus on post-sales follow-up, ensuring that service issues related to implementation and execution are addressed quickly and thoroughly.
    • Challengers use their deep understanding of their customers’ business to push their thinking and take control of the sales conversation. They’re not afraid to share even potentially controversial views and are assertive — with both their customers and bosses.

     

    2. Challengers dramatically outperform the other profiles, particularly Relationship Builders.

    When we look at average reps, we find a fairly even distribution across all five of these profiles. But while there may be five ways to be average, there’s only one way to be a star. We found that Challenger reps dominate the high-performer population, making up close to 40% of star reps in our study.

    What makes the Challenger approach different?

    The data tell us that these reps are defined by three key capabilities:

    • Challengers teach their customers. They focus the sales conversation not on features and benefits but on insight, bringing a unique (and typically provocative) perspective on the customer’s business. They come to the table with new ideas for their customers that can make money or save money — often opportunities the customer hadn’t realized even existed.

     

    • Challengers tailor their sales message to the customer They have a finely tuned sense of individual customer objectives and value drivers and use this knowledge to effectively position their sales pitch to different types of customer stakeholders within the organization.

     

    • Challengers take control of the sale. While not aggressive, they are certainly assertive. They are comfortable with tension and are unlikely to acquiesce to every customer demand. When necessary, they can press customers a bit — not just in terms of their thinking but around things like price.

     

    We’ll discuss each of these capabilities in more depth in our upcoming posts, but just as surprising as it is that Challengers win, it’s almost more eye-opening who loses. In our study, Relationship Builders come in dead last, accounting for only 7% of all high performers.

    Why is this? It’s certainly not because relationships no longer matter in B2B sales–that would be a naïve conclusion. Rather, what the data tell us is that it is the nature of the relationships that matter. Challengers win by pushing customers to think differently, using insight to create constructive tension in the sale. Relationship Builders, on the other hand, focus on relieving tension by giving in to the customer’s every demand. Where Challengers push customers outside their comfort zone, Relationship Builders are focused on being accepted into it. They focus on building strong personal relationships across the customer organization, being likable and generous with their time. The Relationship Builder adopts a service mentality. While the Challenger is focused on customer value, the Relationship Builder is more concerned with convenience. At the end of the day, a conversation with a Relationship Builder is probably professional, even enjoyable, but it isn’t as effective because it doesn’t ultimately help customers make progress against their goals.

    This finding — that Challengers win and Relationship Builders lose — is one that sales leaders often find deeply troubling, because their organizations have placed by far their biggest bet on recruiting, developing, and rewarding Relationship Builders, the profile least likely to win.

    Here’s how one of our members in the hospitality industry put it when he saw these results: “You know, this is really hard to look at. For the past 10 years, it’s been our explicit strategy to hire effective Relationship Builders. After all, we’re in the hospitality business. And, for a while, that approach worked well. But ever since the economy crashed, my Relationship Builders are completely lost. They can’t sell a thing. And as I look at this, now I know why.”

     

    3. Challengers dominate the world of complex “solution-selling”

    Given the first two findings, it might be reasonable to conclude that Challengers are the down-economy reps and that when things return to normal, Relationship Builders will once again prevail. But our data suggest that this is wishful thinking.

    When we cut the data by complexity of sale — that is, separating out transactional, product-selling reps from complex, solution-selling reps — we find that Challengers absolutely dominate as selling gets more complex. Fully 54% of all star reps in a solution-selling environment are Challengers. At the same time, Relationship Builders fall off the map almost entirely, representing only 4% of high-performing reps in complex environments.

    Put differently, Challengers win because they’ve mastered the complex sale, not because they’ve mastered a complex economy. Your very best sales reps — the ones who carried you through the downturn — aren’t just the top performers of today but the top performers of tomorrow, as they are far better able to drive sales and deliver customer value in any kind of economic environment. For any company on a journey from selling products to selling solutions — which is a migration that more than 75% of the companies I work with say they are pursuing — the Challenger selling approach represents a dramatically improved recipe for driving top-line growth.

    If you found this valuable, you can have more like this delivered to your inbox weekly – FREE, just by subscribing to this blog above. And, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Are Accuracy and Grammar Important in The Era of Social Media?

    Are Accuracy and Grammar Important in The Era of Social Media?

    OK, I’ve about had it with poor language skills being forgiven under the pretext that “as long as you can read it, a few mistakes are OK” on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

    If Social Media platforms are ever to achieve true legitimacy as a business communications and marketing tool, we have to learn to respect our audience, respect the medium, and respect the message, just as we would any other channel. Would you leave typos and bad grammar in your direct mail, or in a print ad? Production designers, copy writers, proofreaders spend hours poring over copy to ensure accuracy and eliminate errors, and just because it’s presented electronically, it’s OK to have mistakes published for the public to view? I don’t get it, can someone explain to me why this is so?

    If these errors, omissions and poor usages are a reflection of the use of language in this country, maybe we should cast a critical eye on the elementary education system. If our kids are being taught that this is the way to speak and write English, then some body’s asleep at the switch and should be replaced. If we as a society condone such poor talent, then we are to blame as well – silence is tacit approval, and as such, saying nothing out of some misplaced sense of decorum is doing us all a disservice.

    There are those especially in the previous generation to mine, who value their language, and prize it’s correct usage and accurate representation. When you read a book or magazine or newspaper and come across a mistake or a typo, doesn’t it downgrade your opinion of the whole publication, reducing it’s credibility, and altering your perception of the accuracy of the information being presented? If they missed the basics, how accurate can their statements or research be?

    I wasn’t an English major in college, not even liberal arts (whatever that means), but I’ve had my homework and essays and reports and papers corrected by a professional publication editor according to Chicago style manual since I was eight, and after swimming in red ink for years, finally realized the importance of accuracy and correctness in the use of our common language. After a while, the ink started to recede and become more rare, and now with that training firmly embedded, I could focus on the message and how to craft it effectively, and not on the mechanics of producing the work.

    If everyone had this level of training (and if our teachers were willing and able focus on it, rather than being glorified babysitters and disciplinarians trying to escape each day with their skins intact, we might manage it), then such things as poor word choice (their vs there), bad grammar (where are you at), lousy spelling and other grammatical gaffs wouldn’t be present or tolerated, no matter who the poster is – it’s up to society to set the acceptable standard for word usage and language skills.

    It’s time to raise the stakes, lower the tolerance levels of bad language use, and revive the love of language that is the hallmark of great civilizations throughout history. The US is already working on becoming a second world nation, economically, educationally, in the areas of business and scientific innovation – let’s not add language skills to that list as well.

    If you agree with this rant (or think I’m full of it) comment below or subscribe to this blog for more commentary like this. And, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Promotional Items Should Be Carefully Selected for Maximum Impact

    Promotional Items Should Be Carefully Selected for Maximum Impact

    There are lots of elements to be considered if your marketing plan for the year includes participation in tradeshows, and a number of good reasons to include it in your plan in the first place. One element that has been closely focused on over the years, sometimes to the exhibitors detriment: the tradeshow “giveaway”. The use of promotional items for creating lasting attention and retention of brand image has cycled up and down in popularity over the last 50 years or so. There are some interesting correlations between the state of the economy and the level of quantity and sophistication attached to the promotional items given out at shows. In general, when times get tough, the quantity goes up, and the quality/cost goes down. When times are hard, something in marketers minds says “better to give away lots of cheap stuff just to get the name out there, than to spend the same but only give away half as many nice items that actually connect accurately to the brand”. Why, I have no idea, but it’s bunk.

    In reality, if you choose to distribute promotional items at a tradeshow, that choice should be as well-thought-out as the display construction, the sales training scheme for the event, the selection of size and location of the stand, and the selection of representatives working the show. Often such items are an afterthought, an add-on after everything else has been decided. Sometimes, there are “Standard” items that the company keeps a stock of, or makes available to each location for marketing purposes – they get a better price buying in higher quantity, and they make available or distribute it throughout their “system” for use in ad hoc marketing efforts, including local tradeshows. Ever visited a home improvement show, and the local bank has purchased a table space and brings water bottles and stress balls, and thinks this will make them memorable to the attendees and that they will open an account or apply for a loan? For the impact that really has on the audience, they may as well have taken the money and put it in one of those plexiglass Grab-a-Buck boxes – that at least connects money and banks in people’s minds and might have gotten them some attention!

    If you’ve made the decision to promote your business with a branded item, if that selection is made carefully, it can be of great benefit at that event, and can drive recognition and awareness, not necessarily sales. If really obvious, it can create buzz on the show floor and drive traffic to your display from elsewhere on the floor. And if you’ve really read the audience right, that item will be so specific to a particular population that it will help qualify that traffic and thin and focus the lead selection before they arrive! Now that’s a promotion.

    Some general rules of thumb for a successful promotional item giveaway.

    1) If you can do so, and it’s appropriate, try passing out samples of the product. Smaller, not necessarily fully functional, but a good replica of your product will at least remind the recipient for months to come, who gave them that item and what they make.

    2) If you can’t sample, for whatever reason, select something that links practically to what you do or what you offer. This type of item at least will carry some activation, that coupled with the logo printed on the item, will conjure up a memory of your firm and what it offers.

    3)If you can’t sample, and you can’t link practically with your product, link with the audiences habits or industry specific needs or processes. If you’re marketing to engineers, a measuring device of some type is a good example of this – they can actually use the item at work, where they hopefully make purchasing decisions.

    4) If you can’t do 1, 2, or 3, at least make the item something useful or entertaining and of good quality, including the imprint method. Also, be aware of the audience. If you can, try to select items that are at least non-toxic – sounds strange, but I can’t tell you how many stress balls and foam toys I’ve handed to my young kids only to find out the printing rubbed off when they got drool on it, or put it in their mouths.

    In short, smart, engaging, creative choices that engage the audience’s imagination, trigger a memory of what you do, your products or your brand promise, that are practical and useful within your industry are the best bets for effective giveaways.

    There are lots of other tips and tricks to using promotional items to drive traffic and leads. More later . . .

  • Tradeshows – Make A Commitment, Make It Count

    Tradeshows – Make A Commitment, Make It Count

    We recently attended a tradeshow (Granite Partners principal and staff, not the royal “we”) with a client, in an effort to help them gather competitive information prior to entering a new market for a line of products they were planning to launch in a few months. We got together prior to entering the show floor, and discussed a specific set of goals and tactics to be applied to our activities during the morning, including observing and asking questions anonymously of the competition, researching potential production partners or related ancillary product partners that worked with our product, finding possible new applications for our product beyond the intended use, and observing the marketing tactics used by our potential competitors.

    A tall order, but one that can usually be filled in a couple of hours of strolling the show floor, watching, chatting with vendors, asking questions as if we were in the market to purchase, along with a few covert snapshots of displays and a collection of collateral materials in our show bag.

    After spending an hour on the floor, we had accomplished most of the goals we discussed. Some general take-aways on the state of small tradeshows:

    1) Vendor displays have gotten less expensive – and less professional. If you’re going to spend the time and money to highlight a new product at a tradeshow, don’t have your sister-in-law design the booth and the collateral signs because she won Third at the science fair in 11th grade! Go to the professionals for your exhibit design, and have a professional help you with a marketing plan that will help activate and leverage that display and turn it into viable leads! Just because the structure is less expensive than it used to be, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t spend the savings on good design!

    2) If you’ve gone to the trouble to design and transport a display, at least show up, set up and participate. We saw three or four empty booths, half constructed and missing key elements, with no sales or technical staff in evidence – shame on you, what a waste!

    3) If you are prepared and suited up, working the booth, don’t just shoot out a generic question to passer-by to try and snag their attention – it’s tacky and worse, ineffective. Simply come out from behind the table, out into the aisle, make eye contact with attendees, and maybe ask a legitimate question, maybe something related to the problem your product solves. If you hit on a sore point, you’ve hooked them, if that’s not their problem it’ll be a pretty tough sell to start with and you’ve not annoyed anyone. Being a tradeshow attendee doesn’t mean you’ve signed up to be molested in the aisles!

    4) This is not a re-run of “Boiler-room” – stop trying to close me on a complex, high-dollar, multi-step sale three minutes after I meet you at a show. Ain’t Gonna Happen! This is essentially a meet-and-greet with A/V support. Simply take my information, give me some data and some salient points that can be beneficial or differentiating for your product, and actually do the follow-up work later in the week. Even at consumer-based, residentially-oriented shows, I may not want to sign a contract on a $10,000 piece of infrastructure construction on my house – such things need researched, discussed with family, budgets allocated, etc. It’s a long-term, complex, consultative sale, not a $10 widget that helps wash the car faster.

    5) Do some pre-show marketing. Don’t rely on the show organizer to do it all for you, your results will reflect such an approach. If you plan to sell into the local market, do some homework, craft a decent direct mail piece, do some segmenting, mail a few key zip codes and let some likely consumers know you’re going to be in their neighborhood. You’ll be the busiest guy on the floor.

    No matter how small a show it is, if you’re going to spend the money and time, make it count. Make the commitment, do it 100%, make an effort to be your professional best. If you’re counting on a show like this to make your year, your plan is flawed, and your desperation will be readable from a mile down the aisle. A show should be a small part of a more holistic approach to your overall marketing effort, not a make-or-break event.

    Happy trolling . . .

    If you found this information valuable, and would like more, subscribe to this blog above, and don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” . . .

     

  • You Gotta Have A Plan!

    You Gotta Have A Plan!

    After thirty years of helping commercial companies and non-profit organizations enhance their effectiveness through high-impact marketing efforts, we’ve seen some patterns develop. It appears that there is a correlation between how effective these companies’ marketing efforts are, and wait for it, the specificity and thoroughness of their marketing plan. It’s not budget, it’s not necessarily vision, it’s not brilliance in creative execution – it’s how well they draw up a plan and stick to it.

    Imagine a fighter pilot, maneuvering a $150 million aircraft (small one), randomly, changing course whenever clear skies present themselves, dropping ordnance on whatever targets strike his fancy. He might hit the assigned target, at the right time, in league with others also scheduled to attack that target. But the odds drop precipitously with each misguided maneuver and missed “opportunity” bomb dropped on his way there. That’s how some companies run their marketing operation, wandering from media outlet to outreach platform to new endeavor, without ever consulting the plan, if one even exists. This kind of rudderless marketing is nearly always doomed to failure, and results from a lack of vision, lack of discipline, lack of planning.

    The best way to avoid this is to actually go through the often painful but always beneficial exercise of creating a specific, measurable, organized, well-researched and grounded marketing plan, and disseminating it to EVERYONE, so that all stakeholders are in sync and can be involved in carrying it out in an informed way. Make a plan, stick to it, carry it out aggressively, and measure your results routinely, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised how much more successful your efforts will be.

    There are loads of publications, books, blogs etc out there to help you with this task if you are a young start-up with no experience at planning. Each one is different, each is unique, but each share several key elements, including measurable specific goals, time milestones, assigned responsibilities, and available resources. Fully complete plans include media choices for outreach advertising and PR activities, brand characteristics, audience profile, media schedules for placements, creative cues for progressive campaigns, drop dates for mail, e-mail, and designated resources and personnel for all tasks including social media activity.

    Big job, but one that not only saves time and money over the year by reducing missteps and waste, and one that removes the guesswork and allows everyone to move forward confidently and aggressively toward achieving the goal. How simple is that? Apparently not very, based on a resent study showing that nearly 40% of businesses with over 20 employees have no written marketing plan!

    If you need help, get it. If you can’t find it within, hire it! If you can’t stick to it, post it and have someone else hold you accountable. Ultimately, it’s plan now, or pay later – your choice.

    If you agree with these assertions (or disagree) drop me a line and let me know what you think. If you found it valuable, subscribe to this blog above, and be sure to pick up your copy of  “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” 

     

  • Tell The Corporate Story – Not “Just The Facts, Ma’am”

    Tell The Corporate Story – Not “Just The Facts, Ma’am”

    We’ve been reviewing lots of corporate materials over the last several weeks, as it’s stock Proxy season. Each Spring, public corporations hold their shareholder meetings, and issue proxy voting statements for the shareholders to provide feedback to the Board, elect new board members and settle other issues like compensation, accounting firm choice, and other matters. They are also required to bring shareholders up to date on the financial health of the company. Many of them choose this opportunity to further inform shareholders of their efforts and fill them in on future endeavors planned by the company, by mailing out Annual Reports with lots of artfully crafted text and full-page glossy images – all that’s required by the SEC is a set of edited, audited financials and some bare-bones intent reporting.

    If you read this creatively crafted text carefully, you’ll have a hard time discerning where the company fits in the competitive scheme in their industry (they’re all industry leaders) and how their products are perceived, sometimes even what they do or are used for! Some are so nebulous, so vague, so “artful” and flowery, they become nearly useless.

    Holy missed opportunity, Batman! What a tremendous chance to reach out and tell your corporate story in a way that really provides not only usable information that might prove relevant to increasing future investment, but to do double duty in a number of other forums where a corporate story might be useful. Love the images, too, but do they reflect the daily reality at that firm? Not likely. Do they tell the story? Better than the text, but is it the right story? Maybe not.

    I think they can do better. Printed Annual Reports may be going the way of the dinosaur, with online websites allowing technology to improve communication’s timeliness, and relevance. The use of multiple imagery, video, and the tantalizing prospect of nearly endless real estate in which to put more flowery copy, not to mention the reduced cost of reproduction and distribution, make online Annual Reports very tempting. Not sure of the SEC’s feelings on this, but we now have online proxy voting, so the annual reporting requirements can’t be far behind.

    For now, let’s hope corporate marketing departments take transparency to heart, and while they don’t have to back track all the way to the days of Dragnet scripts, a little direct, honest language may go a long way toward convincing shareholders to maintain and even increase their investment. It might also allow employees and other constituencies to become company evangelists – surely the current copy can’t be repeated verbally by company representatives – at least, not with a straight face . . .

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  • Leaving Gold On The Table

    Leaving Gold On The Table

    For those companies out there who include industry tradeshows in their marketing mix, either on purpose as part of a strategy, or “because all our competitors are there”, you are probably leaving a pile of gold behind when you pack up your boxes to go home.

    Recent studies by independent national organizations show that very few companies do any pre-show marketing to prospects or clients, and that the number of leads actually followed up after the show is in the single digits!

    This type of behavior makes no sense to me, and is creating a case of diminishing returns for the tradeshow industry as a whole and for those who participate in them. If you were to spend millions of dollars on a Superbowl ad for your company, and then disconnected your phones for the month after the ad ran, you’d consider such behavior ludicrous, wasteful to the nth degree. Yet, that’s exactly what you’re doing when you fail to broadcast your presence at an event, when you pay dearly to participate; spend thousands on a complex display and related collateral material; spend endless time in meetings reviewing a hundred different types of tchochkeys and giveaways; take a week’s worth of time from your key sales people, technical people and administrative staff; when you don’t get full benefit from T&E, including travel, meals, hotels, cabs and entertainment; and then don’t follow up some of the most qualified sales leads and partnership opportunities you’ll ever encounter. Absurd, you say? Commonplace, at best, if we’re to believe the data. And that’s just for one major show – scale that up to include 6-10 shows a year, and you’re watching a pot of gold in lost opportunity fly out the window!

    So how to you capitalize on all that opportunity? Five quick fixes that will cut waste, provide more value and prevent lost opportunity:

    5) Train and select your on-site staff with care. Even for a major show, you don’t have to send the whole team. While a big group of people all dressed alike trolling the floor and inhabiting the exhibit does have some value, especially in reinforcing your brand, it’s a costly and inefficient way to do that, and the job can be better handled by fewer better selected candidates. A mixed bag of junior and senior sales staff, one technical person to act as advisor and closer on the BIG sales, and a couple of engaging administrative folks to help clean up the loose ends, steer traffic to the sales group and provide coverage. That’s it. Train them all to be effective in as many different roles as are appropriate, so there is good overlap, but make sure everyone knows how important this show is to the prosperity of the company, and that all leads, no matter how small or remote, could be important, and are to be treated as such.

    4) Set up a lead management system, and use it. That’s not the same thing as renting the capture machine from the show management’s vendor. This is a system within the company for qualifying, funneling and following up on leads gathered at the show. Your existing prospect database is a good start, but it’s probably not built to handle a big influx of leads in a short time, and likely doesn’t have a good qualifying system within it. It should be designed to work quickly, have all the follow-up materials created in advance and be able to customize them to a certain extent for each lead. Nothing is more impressive than having a quick, well-crafted, specific follow-up note waiting for you when you get back to your room for the evening from a vendor you spoke with that afternoon!

    3) Craft an effective pre-show marketing strategy. If you really want to stand out of the crowd, marketing your presence at the show a couple of weeks beforehand is one of the best ways to do it. You can prompt booth visits, make appointments with big clients or promising prospects who are planning to attend, build attendance in your hospitality suite event, pre-qualify leads, and much more with this simple step. Get access to the registration list from the prior year if it’s available and use it repeatedly and effectively. You’ll be amazed at the resulting traffic.

    2) Set goals for the show that make sense, and hold EVERYONE accountable for meeting them. Especially if this is one of many shows you participate in each year, goal-setting will give you some idea of how worthwhile your tradeshow investment is likely to be. It gives you an ROI variable to push back against when making decisions for next year. Make them just barely reachable, and make them finite and quantifiable – “we will contact and follow-up with 25 new prospects not in our current database at this show.” Now, it’s everybody’s responsibility to be familiar with what’s in that prospect database, know who the big fish are, and engage everyone in a productive, helpful way to make that number attainable. It forces a teamwork approach, and keeps down the finger-pointing later if you don’t hit the number.

    1) See the show as a triple opportunity and treat it as such! How many times do you get to be in a room with a huge universe of prospects and customers, prepared, armed and in a selling environment, all in one week, with your best troops in attendance? Not very often, I’ll wager. So make that opportunity count. Follow-up religiously, engage every reasonable visitor, invest in some staff training, make the display work for you, make sure it carries the brand well and is easy to read and understand, make sure your staff understands the goals and the importance of the results to the success of all concerned. Make sure that lead management system is working for you, not just making you more work.

    You’ve invested a significant chunk of budget to participate in these marketing opportunities – its up to you to make the investment pay back. Enjoy.

  • Leadership Behaviors Gain You a Seat at the C-Table

    Leadership Behaviors Gain You a Seat at the C-Table

    I’ve long been an advocate of soliciting the help of marketing experts when developing, launching and branding new products, services or businesses. We’ve seen in our practice that the earlier you get the marketing folks involved in the process, the more likely you are to be successful. This is backed by study after study, both anecdotal and empirical, over the last 20 years. How many articles and references have you seen, including obituaries, that say something like “. . . successful business man was a marketing and promotions genius and applied his skills to creating and growing the company . . .” ?

    Clearly, the knowledge of the practice and theory of marketing is a valuable, nee critical skill to have in your bag of management tricks. And indeed, it seems the more input from the marketing folks you get, the faster and bigger the success is! Ramp up times are shorter, development and product lifecycles reduce, launches are more dramatic, and alternate applications and uses surface faster and are more often taken advantage of, when the marketers get heavily involved in the upper echelon decision making.

    So why has it taken so long, and required so much effort for marketers to seek and achieve a true place at the C-level of management structures in the U.S.? The newly-invented Chief Marketing Officer title was a hard fought battle, typically one that is won on an individual basis, and in only a small percentage of companies, often larger and older firms, where upper management is often tinged with risk spreading behaviors rather than overt leadership. Often this battle is won by only the most vocal, dynamic, personable, innovative and connected of marketers. One might say these are inherent traits in every good marketer, but you’d be surprised at some we’ve worked with who are impossibly poor at blowing their own horn while excelling at promoting the business they serve.

    I’m convinced, after working directly with over 100 marketers in the last thirty years, that those who market themselves as well as they do their firms are those destined to go the farthest. In some cases, it’s a matter of the squeaky wheel getting the grease, but that only really works on an internal basis on the way up the ladder in a contained environment. But in this case, they have to not only talk the talk, they have to walk the walk, too. You have to back up the swagger with bottom-line success time after time to truly gain legend status. Just plain visibility alone won’t do it.

    Business executives rise to prominence in their own small world through long-term, solid achievement, aided by public recognition of those achievements and a desire to be associated with those achievements. Which makes it even more amazing that marketers have had such a hard time gaining celebrity status in the business world, as marketers have an endless series of “wins” to point to on a given day.

    Some of the difficulty is that marketers tend to be collaborative, work in teams, even if the team leader works in a supervisory capacity – there’s just too much for one person to really do without spreading the load, and thus the credit. CEO’s get credit for the good decisions, and spread the blame for the bad ones among their top management team. Marketers tend to take it on the chin for the failures, while others take credit for the successes. That shadow tends to keep them in the background, slaving away as good corporate brand stewards, until there’s a regime change.

    The challenge before us as marketers is to loudly and often show the value we contribute to corporate success. We needn’t be shy about putting our names and faces behind the successes we create, because in reality, there is no success in business without something being bought or sold, and we’re the closest to the end of the sales chain and have the best understanding of what customers want and need. That makes our expertise not only critical but invaluable. Don’t be afraid to step up and take credit for the successes, spread the credit as far as you need to, to your team and beyond, but accept the success for what it’s worth without demurring or deferring. On the other side of the coin, never shirk responsibility for the inevitable misses, take them head on, learn from them and apply that education to the next situation. You’ll be applauded and respected for the integrity, so you win anyway.

    Stay the course, be visible, be effective, have an impact, and don’t be afraid of public exposure – you’ve earned every last bit of it. Be the corporate leaders we know you are, but do it in a visible way. Everyone’s a winner in the end when you do.