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Category: Management

  • Are You Prepared for a Communications Crisis?

    Are You Prepared for a Communications Crisis?

    In the general hierarchy of life’s priority, when you think of crisis, the marketing department is probably not the place to call. But if you’re a business that’s facing a natural disaster, a tampering case involving your products, an on-the-job accident or other damaging event, that call to the marketing department is one of the first and most important. But if they aren’t prepared to handle a communications crisis, it may not help.

    Is your company prepared for a scramble drill in communicating effectively to convey the proper information, using the right tone and messaging to quell customer fears, or creditor agitation or anxiety, and deal with intrusive media inquiries? If not, now might be a good time to craft a plan, get it reviewed and vetted by all other departments for accuracy and feasibility and get it put in place – before the crisis occurs.

    This plan should include the following:

    1) List of personnel involved: Who is the designated spokesman for your company, who comes next if that person is not available? Create the hierarchy so that the job tumbles downhill logically. The person needs to be credible, well-spoken, and to understand the goals and ideals of the company thoroughly so that any statement made to the local or national media is believable and makes sense.

    2) Who internally should be contacted: List of people will vary depending upon the nature of the crisis, but at bare minimum, the CEO, CFO, VP Operations, General Manager, VP Marketing, and in-house Counsel should be included on the list. Your plant security company should be informed immediately, and if the crisis involves injury or death of staff or contractors on the site, the local police department, local first responder services if needed, and local utilities that service the site, including Hazmat services if required.

    3) What is your position on the incident? Is it an accident, was it intentional sabotage, is your company responsible in any way, what is your plan going forward? From a public relations standpoint, clarity and direct honesty is always the best policy. The media is tremendously resourceful, and they will find out their version of the truth. Better to give them yours and it turns into a non-story, than to stonewall and let them start digging on their own.

    4) Provide only the facts you’re sure of. If you don’t know for certain, simply tell the media that you’re investigating and will keep them informed as things develop in that investigation. Make sure in-house counsel or your of-counsel attorney reviews any written statements for accuracy, or anything that legally obligate your company to do anything in future.

    5) Position Your Company As Compassionate, Caring, Concerned. No matter how simple or harmless the situation appears, in today’s environment anyone can potentially be construed as a victim of something. Make sure your company is seen as one that cares about all it’s employees and contractors, or an civilians who may have inadvertently been involved in the incident. Spread the net of concern wide, but make no direct promises, express your concern for the well-being of all, and stress that no matter the cause or level of responsibility your company ultimately takes in the final analysis, they will take great pains to assist and care for anyone affected by the incident.

    The real trick is to have a speedy, comprehensive and clear position, and to release it to the media as early as possible. If media representatives sense that you’re holding back or hiding something in any way, they will see it as their duty to get to “the truth” as they see it. Fast response heads this reaction off at the pass, returns control to your hands, and makes it appear that you know the drill and are being cooperative.

    Each crisis is different, and each calls for a custom-tailored response. But if you have a plan of action, centralized contact information, a chain of command and a prepared spokesman, you can contain most incidents and concentrate on damage control to preserve your company’s reputation and good name.

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  • The Illusion of Control

    The Illusion of Control

    I think we can agree that most top marketing professionals are what used to be called a “Type A” personality – high speed, high motivation, attention to detail, internally driven, goal oriented, strong need for control. Sound about right? If so, you’re likely in the right role if you’re a marketer, but are all of these traits actually helping you succeed? Sometimes less is more, and I think as a race, most of us labor under the misconception that we can control much more than we can in reality.

    That control issue can lead to problems. We can plan for just about any scenario, we can be prepared for the worst outcome, we can remove or stabilize as many variables as possible, but there is always a large element of the unknown involved in our work. That’s not to say that we can give up responsibility for the outcome of any of it, but there is only so much we can control about the results of our efforts. We can’t go to people’s homes and force them to buy what we have to offer at gunpoint. We can only use history, research, or self-proclamation to divine the likelihood of each one buying a product, lump them all together, and put forth our best pitch based on common characteristics among the group.

    We can test, but we can’t control. Test results, be it focus group, direct response test, concept survey, or other method, can only give us a snapshot of the most obvious feelings and actions of the given group at that moment. If you got the same group together again the following month, you might get different results to the same test, based on circumstances beyond our, and their, control. All you can really do is play to the odds, decrease your chances of missing as much as you’re able, and hope to catch potential buyers under favorable circumstances. That’s not control.

    On a larger scale, our lives contain the illusion of control as well. Anyone who’s planned an outdoor wedding knows, you can’t control everything. You can have the best vendors, the most elegant choices, the best caterer and decorator and a force-of-nature coordinator, and none of that makes up for the fact that it could rain buckets that day. You can increase your odds by considering timing, location, and site protection, but those are not control, just contingency planning – it’s still raining, you just made it tolerable for the guests by ordering a tent.

    That’s not to say that such events don’t have a cause somewhere that can be eliminated, deferred or altered – the Butterfly Effect is a theoretical conceptual diagram designed to show the rippling and far-reaching impact of actions in a closed system that highlights this – but at the end of the chain it is simply a set of unalterable circumstances.

    Lack of control can cause us to make errors – lack of recognition of loss of control can lead to disaster. Take a direct marketing test grid. We can’t control those buyers, but we can test that group of uncontrollable people’s preferences as a group, and control for wide differences within the group. When we read the test results, there may be a set of data that appears inconsistent with what we know in history, with what we feel, with what we “think” we know. That data may be discounted as an anomaly, an aberration, some irrelevant variable that isn’t affecting the overall program. But what if that piece of data, when expanded upon and tested further by itself, is critical to a strong response – that the audience needs that portion of the mailing needs to be there as a catalyst to response, and by ignoring it, we negatively affect response to a great degree going forward? Our own sense of control has effectively overwhelmed the data in front of us and reduced our effectiveness and our impact on profits with that mailing mistake.

    We can’t control everything, but we can control how we react to things. If your first reaction when faced with an uncontrolled situation is to hide or ignore it, or worse, try to control the uncontrollable, failure is a likely outcome. As marketers we would be better served by our flexibility, our ability to “roll with it” in our reaction to the situation, to make the best of what might be a less than desirable outcome. Plan for the worst, hope for the best, be ready for anything.

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  • Event Marketing – The Key To Reaching New Customers May Be Through Their Stomachs

    Event Marketing – The Key To Reaching New Customers May Be Through Their Stomachs

    If you own or operate a service or manufacturing business, one great way to show your leadership of your industry and in the local business community is to host an event. There are many benefits, little downside, and if successful it can be scaled up or down or repeated again and again.

    There are some basic requirements for a successful event:

    1) Guests! Getting enough participation by the right participants is key. Market the event extensively, but create exclusivity by sending actual paper invitations – not just an e-mail announcement of an open house. The invitation requests and begs an RSVP, so that you can get an accurate head count for food and beverage, space planning etc. You want the room to look full but not crowded, and you’d like current customers to mix and mingle with prospects, so they spread the word about the work you do for them.

    2) Refreshments – This is a tough part for many people to get right. Gauging the amount, level and type of food and drink to serve a very diverse guest list can be difficult, but there are some guidelines to follow to make it easier.

    a) Let the time of day for the event guide your choices. For afternoon events, light appetizers and soft drinks may be appropriate. For a after-hours cocktail event, more substantial appetizers and passed hors d’oeuvres and beer and wine selections might be more appropriate.

    b) For a dinner event or awards presentation, a buffet style will facilitate networking, but a sit-down dinner will allow guests to be more comfortable for a longer period of time, and form fewer but closer relationships with table-mates. Get the highest quality food and most sophisticated beverage choices you can afford – these are your guests and customers, doubly important to let them know you care enough to serve the best.

    c) Drinks – for open bars, plan on 2-3 drinks per person, average, and keep key brands of each spirit on hand, along with plenty of mixers. For gatherings of over 20 people, hire a professional bar tender, you don’t want your guests being over-served because your staff feels generous when pouring for their favorite customer. Keep plenty of ice on hand, about 2 lbs per person is a good rule of thumb.

    3) Venue – if you are a manufacturing business, you have hard assets to show off – an open house type should include a “plant tour” of your production areas and equipment. Clean up extensively beforehand, remove trash, scrap and waste, remove any unused or non-functional equipment, sweep and mop floors, remove signage or decoration of questionable taste from walls, re-install any safety equipment, cover or hide proprietary customer work in progress. If you’re a service business, there may not be much of interest to show visitors, cubicles look the same pretty much everywhere. Consider having the event in your building lobby if it is impressive, or at a nearby hotel.

    4) Entertainment – unless this is strictly an open house to greet customers, there should be some additional component to the event to warrant attendance by the guests. If you seek to be a thought leader in your industry or local business community, consider a brief presentation by your top management, including slides or video. Show off your new service or new capabilities, show your point of view and strengthen the reasons for your guests to work with you rather than your competitor. Another avenue to consider is to hold educational seminars, which would highlight how your firm provides solutions to well-known or recognized problems in your industry.

    5) Amenities – make sure the guests feel welcome and thank them for their participation. The little things make a difference when creating an impression. A small parting gift, even if its a branded item (your brand, of course)is fine, but make it a high quality piece. Make sure there is a place to put coats if it’s in the winter, offer umbrella escorts from the parking lot if it’s raining, valet parking if you have a city location, and other niceties will make a big difference in the overall impression.

    6) Follow Up – all the entertaining in the world won’t make your business grow (unless you’re a caterer) unless you connect with those prospects both at the event and afterward, when they are back in their own environment and in decision-making mode. A nice Thank You note to all attendees with a personal note in each will do the trick, along with a follow-up e-mail later that week, highlighting some of the advantages and benefits you presented them with at the event should help cement your company in the correct place in their mind for future.

    Using events to promote your business and generate new customers is a time-honored tactic that works when you pay attention to the little details and you make it look easy. If you’re not comfortable with all this, maybe have a dry run for your staff a week before to work out the bugs before getting in front of customers. In general, quality will show you off to best advantage, so work with the best caterer, best beverage supplier, produce a high quality presentation with some production value and take advantage of the opportunity and follow up, and your business will grow before your eyes.

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  • Show Up, Suit Up, Follow-Up – Don’t Forget That Last One!

    Show Up, Suit Up, Follow-Up – Don’t Forget That Last One!

    Usually I focus on marketing strategy, tactics and practices in this forum, but I wanted to touch on a more sales and management-oriented topic that has been rearing its ugly head recently – Poor sales personnel practices.

    If you’re in sales as a profession, there’s a few simple adages that pave the road to success.

    1) Know your market, know your customer, solve their problems, don’t create them

    2) Under-promise and Over-Deliver

    3) It’s more effective and less expensive to keep your existing customers than to find new ones

    4) Always make that last call of the day, no matter how tired or late you are

    5) Show Up, Suit Up, Follow-up

    If you can keep those things in mind as you go about your daily interaction with customers and prospects, you probably won’t go too far wrong.

    Where most less-experienced folks tend to drop the ball is on numbers 2 and 5. Most new folks are so eager to make the sale, they will tell prospects virtually anything to close them, and then when it comes time for the order to arrive or be fulfilled, the customer is left disappointed or worse, feels cheated. At extreme levels this amounts to bait-and-switch, which is a prosecutable offense. You may get a few orders this way, but there won’t be any referrals or recommendations, and the gravy train will grind to a halt fairly quickly, especially in the age of Internet postings, blogs and rating sites for every business imaginable. Word will get out even more quickly and nobody will touch you after that – bad idea.

    Number 5 is sometimes a function of time management, sometimes of lack of training, sometimes lack of personal responsibility. The Show up and Suit up portions, most have down, although I’ve spoken with many business leaders in the last few months who say they can’t hire staff that can manage to do even that on a consistent basis. It’s the follow-up that eludes most people, and the one’s that discover this little secret are going to move to the top of the heap rather quicker than his or her competitors. Just because someone was not in a position to buy when you left them last, (some more hardcore folks would say you failed to effectively close them the first time) doesn’t mean that they never will have a need for what you’re offering. Your odds of them calling you when the time comes has much more to do with top of mind awareness and initial impressions than of product quality or benefits.

    Effective follow-up must be gauged carefully and is different for each prospect. The tone, medium, frequency and content of your follow-up is critical to maintaining that tenuous connection and reinforcing that initial, hopefully good, impression. The more personal and more specific you can make that follow-up, regardless of the medium, whether by phone, card, letter, e-mail, or visit. General, automated, non-specific stuff will not have the impact or make the connection you need to encourage that prospect to pick up the phone when the time comes. Sometimes there’s no substitute for a hand-written note – it takes about 5 minutes of your time and you’d be amazed that impact it has on the recipient. sometimes a mix of media is appropriate, depending on the volume you need it to cover every week or the type of sale. The only constant you can count on is that if you don’t do it, your sale with go to the guy who does. Sometimes it’s trial and error, but you have to use common sense, especially having to do with timing and frequency. You really don’t want to overdo it – an e-mail every other day is likely overkill . . .

    Consistency, reliability and accountability are the keys to good sales practice, and the follow-up should be part of that – if the customer feels you’ll be there before the sale, think how much they’ll appreciate you being there after the sale.

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  • Negotiation – the Spirit of Give and Take

    Negotiation – the Spirit of Give and Take

    Everyone negotiates, almost every day, on some level, even with themselves in some cases. The idea is to weigh two opposing ideas against each other and give up something one side needs to get something they want from them – simple, right?

    Lawsuits are negotiations, divorce settlements, business contracts, even social gatherings (ever try to decide on a restaurant with a group of six people?). Everyday situations require at least some skill at negotiation, and really that’s a good thing. It forces you to define your position on a given situation, to clarify your personal dividing line between “need” and “want”, and forces you to devise rationale to defend your choices. Is it any wonder that decisive people are often the best negotiators?

    One helpful hint in successful negotiation is to remove any emotion from the equation. This is difficult to completely accomplish, but the better you are at it, the more likely you are to get what you want. Emotion tends to cloud judgment, makes us do things for reasons other than logic or material gain, and to give in out of pity or caring for the others’ well-being, even at risk to our own.

    That doesn’t mean that you can’t be nice about it – nice isn’t an emotion, it’s a social convention. You can be civil and still not back off of your position and get what you want without emotionally wounding the other party. No need to be mean, just be firm and accommodating and civil, but stand your ground.

    Above all, to be a negotiation, there has to be a spirit of give and take on both sides, some accommodation to the other side’s position, some give in order to get. Without that willingness to cooperate, to lead the proceedings down a path to mutual agreement, then it’s not a negotiation, it’s an ultimatum. A this-is-it, take-it-or-leave-it approach will not produce the results either side wants. It engenders ill will between the parties and creates a very adversarial atmosphere that is counter productive.

    Sometimes, the situation just isn’t conducive to negotiation. When one side holds all the power, all the cards, leaving the other side no real room to get and has little to give, negotiations will be strained and of limited value. Job interviews or evaluations for a pay increase are like this – the employee has little leverage in most cases, unless they are absolutely irreplaceable. The best they can hope for is to make a good case, show their value in a persuasive way, and hope the boss is feeling generous or sees potential in keeping the employee happy and productive. The one time where the employee has the whip hand in this relationship is during the initial salary negotiation after the offer is made. Market forces create variance in how much power the employer has, but the odds are always in their favor.

    Successful negotiation requires knowledge – knowledge of self, knowledge of the opposition’s position and wants, needs and desires. The better you know your own position, the more strongly you can negotiate it, because you have the surety of knowing where you draw the line, you have a picture of what you can live with, and anything above that is a bonus.If the other side’s line is somewhere near yours, everybody wins at the end. A smart man once said “If both sides feel like they lost a little bit, it’s a good deal” remarking to the spirit of willingness to give up something to get something else.

    As you go through your week, take special note of situations that require you to negotiate – you might be surprised how many of them there are – and try to gauge how you might have used knowledge to improve your own position and get a better outcome . . .

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  • Self Promotion Is Not a Crime

    Self Promotion Is Not a Crime

    A lot of business start-up executives I encounter in my practice have an odd feeling about marketing. They seem to think that promoting themselves is somehow unseemly or impolite, simply not done. I can only thank my stars that this isn’t the case, or I’d be out of a job! Self-promotion of your business is vital to it’s growth and continued viability. So where did the guilt come from?

    I think it comes from the image of a blowhard, always talking about themselves and exaggerating their prowess and bragging about how they are the biggest, best, whatever they do. We’ve seen them, we know of them, and we try to avoid them. But there is a distinct difference between promoting your business endeavor and bragging about it’s success. Done properly, self-promotion allows you to get the word out often enough, and generate enough business that your satisfied clients will do the bragging for you, so you don’t have to.

    Small or especially start-up businesses need to promote their existence rather heavily, and it comes more naturally to some entrepreneurs than others. Most we’ve met are extremely passionate about their business and very proud of their accomplishments, and rightly so. For those to whom this is a natural occurrence, they not only make it look easy, but have come to a point where it can be very subtle and low key and still be effective. That’s the mark of a master, and admittedly, few reach that level. Fortunately, some come to the realization early that this is not their forte, and they hire someone to do it for them – they’re called clients at that point, and bless them all!

    To be a small business owner, one thing it’s difficult to be and still be successful is shy. You gotta get it out there and let the public know you’re there, and by doing it a few at a time, you might not ever reach critical mass needed to make it a viable business. So a strong marketing strategy, including some form of outreach promotion and advertising is usually in order. Often it’s something simple, a small ad, even a classified ad is a start. Maybe a postcard to the local area, or a short letter to the neighboring zip codes. Maybe it’s a little league soccer or baseball sponsorship. But at the heart of it, it’s the business owner’s personality coming through all of it, selling hard and showing that passion for their business that makes it all work.

    If you’ve started a business in the wake of a layoff or change of life status due to the recent recession, you’re in good company. SBA is reporting a record number of applications for funding and loans, and services that support small business start-ups like insurance, permits, licensing and other things are having a good year. You’re off and running, congratulations!

    Now it’s time to turn to marketing to make that little kernel of an idea grow and flourish. If you haven’t done so already, decide how much you want to spend, and start saving now to fill that budget line. There is no hard and fast rule for how much to set aside. Some businesses spend over 20% of their gross income on marketing expenses, some as little as .5% – it depends on how you spend it, and what your goals are. The important thing is to get started, do something, make it happen, so the results can start working for you!

    Don’t be shy about self promotion, it’s not a crime, but if you just can’t bring yourself to tell everyone about your new endeavor, hire someone to do it for you – it’s the best money you’ll ever spend.

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  • Human Resources Are Your Finest Resources

    Human Resources Are Your Finest Resources

    We get asked for advice and guidance by firms large and small every day, and when reviewing whether or not to work with a new client, we try to do our due diligence and determine for ourselves whether this going to be something beneficial for both client and consulting firm. One of the unspoken, immeasurable, but over-riding factors we consider is: “Do we like working with these people”. The human factor is an “X” factor that is hard to quantify, but is crucial to a successful outcome.

    How do you find, and keep those “Good” people in your organization, the ones that are loyal, hard working, dedicated and passionate about their work? Top talent requires top treatment, but how do you craft an incentive program that keeps them challenged, interested and passionate? What kind of carrot do you dangle in front of those talented executives to keep them in your stable?

    According to some of the region’s foremost HR experts, a one-size-fits-all approach to benefits, incentives and retention is no longer viable, and I tend to agree. If you think about it, as marketers, we know that you can’t expect great results by sending the same package to wildly different audiences. So why would you expect great results making the same offer to a broad range of employees? Internal segmentation is just part of the story. If you dig deeper, you’ll find there are other elements that add to retention that you might not have thought of. Transparency is a tough issue that many private or family firms struggle with, but that can make a huge difference in your retention of top senior executive talent – they are savvy enough to want to know where the money is going and how decisions are being made that affect the future of the company. The lower- and mid-level employees should share this access to information, but for them, some more intensive and extensive education is coupled with the information, so that they can understand what they are seeing and how to interpret the data accurately and draw reasonable conclusions.

    Most of the experts agreed that while retention is an issue, making good hiring decisions in the beginning is the single largest factor in keeping good talent on board. Some suggest pre-employment screening tests and inventories of various stripes, but most agreed as well that any single instrument should not be weighted too heavily, and certainly not weighted above the interviewers insights and impressions, background checks and due diligence. In general, their feeling was, skills can be taught, attitude can not, and that those with the right mindset that will fit in culturally with the mission and goals of the organization will do better long-term than those with top skills but behavioral issues.

    What does any of this have to do with marketing? It strikes me that there are parallels between how you select and retain employees, and how you attract and retain customers. Aside from the obvious connection that the marketing department are crucial hires for your organization, and often some of the highest turnover ones. Good marketing talent is difficult to find, even at a point where double digit unemployment is quickly becoming the norm. If you find such individuals, you should strive to assess their needs and hold on to them using any means necessary, because they can make or break your company faster than any other department. Marketers can do more damage with a slipshod approach than any embezzler or bull-in-a-china-shop manager.

    Spend as much time on hiring your marketers as they do segmenting their customer lists and researching the target market, and all will be well. Spend time to get to know them, make sure they’re compatible with your mission. Don’t worry if they seem a little “off” in a couple of social areas – these top talents are trained to think way outside the box, to innovate, to be renegades, not to be the round peg in a round hole. Don’t hold that against them in the hiring process, for these are signs of their future success . . .

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  • Marketing Leadership Means Asking the Right Questions

    Marketing Leadership Means Asking the Right Questions

    Ever wonder how market leading companies got that way? Ever wonder who lead the way and how they knew to veer in the direction they did? Based on our analysis of hundreds of business cases, we’ve determined that there are some key decisions that top marketing executives make in common with market leadership, the result of which is moving that company to the next level of market penetration.

    5) Select Partners Carefully. Ask yourself this question: Would i want to do business with this company regardless if I made a profit or not? If the answer is no, then it’s probably not a good fit. For a partnership to work, both sides have to support the mission equally and enthusiastically. If you don’t enjoy your interactions with the partner and they’re not tremendously fruitful, cut your losses and dissolve it before things get bad.

    4) Know When To Call it A Day. Ask yourself: Is this effort as effective as it was the week it started? If the answer is no, is it fatiguing and lagging due to lack of support, saturation, market shift or getting stale? It may be you’ve reached the point of diminishing returns, and the ROI of continuing it is no longer viable. If that’s the case, you’re throwing money away, just pull the plug and initiate another effort. Clinging to a failing program costs you more than you imagine in lost opportunity, time, and it’s negative effect on your audience, staff and company morale has a measurable value.

    3) Have a Purpose. Ask yourself: Why exactly are we doing this again? If the answer resembles something like “we did it last year”, or “our competitors tried it,” or “The Boss wants it that way” than it might be time to rethink the effort from the beginning. Legacy programs whose rationale have changed due to altered circumstances can be doing damage to your brand, losing you money, and wasting time. If the purpose no longer exists, don’t do it!

    2) Are We Winning, and If Not, Why Not? One thing most market leading companies use as a mantra is that they have to be in the top 1-2 positions in each market they compete in or changes need made. They feel a need to lead, and they do everything in their power to lead their particular category for every product or service they offer. A quick analysis of the leader will tell you what you’re doing wrong, and you have to make a decision whether to fix it or bail out. The Cost/Benefit analysis should be performed regularly, and a market scan produced quarterly with ruthless honesty.

    1) Where Do We Go From Here? Market leaders don’t often have to ask this question, because they think 8-9 moves ahead and plan strategically each move and have three contingencies based on research and market intelligence. They ask “where do we go” long before they get there! Draw the roadmap before you leave the barn, leave room to be flexible to respond to unforeseen challenges, and stay the course, and you’ll be surprised how far you’ll go. The control and discipline it requires to do this is what separates the men from the boys, but you can bet that market leading companies spend more time planning than executing, and spend significant time asking “What if?”

    If your company wants to be a leader in their market, it comes down to asking the right questions, and probing until you get an answer that satisfies your needs. Keep digging . . .

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  • Engagement Means Understanding

    Engagement Means Understanding

    We’ve been working with several B2B clients recently on outreach programs to help them find and engage new customers, and one of the tactics we’ve had success with is the use of dimensional mail. The main reason is that while overall mail volume is down in the last two years, the amount of mail reaching top executives is up slightly, as gatekeepers have been removed through attrition or layoffs as company’s pare staff, and we were finding that we needed to break through the clutter in the C-suite to get noticed and to actually engage these busy executives with our message.

    While the list is still king, the package is gaining in importance. We’re not talking about a simple A-B test between red and blue carrier envelopes, we mean a full blown package – a box of some type – that contains illustrative media, video, audio, print collateral or other physical, three dimensional object that requires time and thought to understand. It takes a few moments to open, to pick through the parts, to see the story unfold as you peel away layers and get to the meat, the point, the main message. Once you get there, it’s got to make sense to the recipient, to be relevant, to be personal in a way that says “hey, these people know my business and are here to help me run it better!”

    Personalization plays a large part in these packages. Good use of personalization has been shown to boost response significantly, and the combination of personalization and 3D engagement means your target spends a good deal of time with your message, enough to thoughtfully consider your offer and put it in the “investigate further” pile. Now, it’s time for the follow-up!

    The dimensional package is a great way to bait the hook, it’s intriguing, interesting and gets people thinking about your message. It may not be enough to close the sale by itself, few DM packages are when there’s a service or high-ticket item in the mix. But by pushing personalized, strategically-timed follow-up messages through different media, your product is now what we call “Self-vetted” – it appears to come from a variety of directions, and sources, so that it appears to be very safe, legitimate and reasonable. Since top executives are generally a conservative bunch, financially and emotionally, this plays on their natural caution and lowers their defenses, usually enough to make them receptive to a phone call, which is the knock-out punch of the campaign.

    So far this scheme is working for clients, and we have several variations in the works, tweaking timing, packaging, levels of personalization and frequency. The key to effective execution of these campaigns is the homework you do on the list of recipients – each of these packages represents a significant investment by direct mail standards, and you want to keep your waste level low and your responsive recipients ratio as high as possible. Better to send out 5 and have 2 hit with real sales, than to send out 20 and have that same 2 hit.

    A good list, an intriguing, personalized package, heavy follow-up and a persuasive phone call may seem like a lot to go through to reach a handful of individuals – but if they’re the right individuals and the sale is worth thousands or tens of thousands or more, the discipline and forethought is certainly worth it.

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  • The Battle Between Sales and Marketing Rages On . . .

    The Battle Between Sales and Marketing Rages On . . .

    There are many areas of ongoing controversy in the world – Alien v. Predator, King Kong v. Godzilla, Greece v. Turkey, Israel v. (Pick one) and Sales v. Marketing.

    I’m not going to come down on a side for most of the above, but the Sales v. Marketing one intrigues me, because the two combatants should be best friends. They share a common goal, they have separate methods and approaches, they both want more customers. They do compete for financial resources in some companies, so that may set off some minor turf scuffles, but I think each is misunderstood by the other, and it’s a case of walking a mile in the other guy’s shoes.

    Add to this the fact that management executives in many companies confuse the role of each in their organization, in fact use the terms interchangeably. This kind of thinking simply adds to the controversy, and pits one against the other.

    The functions are different, they have different ways of measuring success, have different individual goals on a small scale, and use resources differently. In some firms, the sales function is placed underneath a VP of Marketing, correctly or incorrectly depending upon the structure of the company, it’s size and the product or service being sold. My guess is that if that VP had to actually go out and sell to a lead list, they would not fare very well. That doesn’t make them an inappropriate manager for that function, but it does weaken the case for non-peer review. On the other hand, if the leading salesman were asked to assess the company’s current brand health, determine their most likely next move in entering a new niche vertical, or have to craft an outreach marketing strategy, they would likely come up with something that might have some value, but not the whole ball of wax.

    The reason is that they are different skill sets, not interchangeable and with different focus points. The salesman focuses on customers one at a time, creates and environment where they can use their powers of verbal or written persuasion to tell people what they want to hear about the product in a way that motivates them to make a purchase, big or small, right then and there.

    The marketer is in the mass communication business. They set up a virtual environment in the mind of a predetermined prospect type without ever having met them, make a case in a variety of ways for that product or service being the best choice among many, and motivate through written or spoken word (radio or TV) to create an impression that drives huge numbers of prospects to understand that product or service in a certain way, and helps them decide to make a purchase at some point.

    Success is determined for the sales person by dollars driven in, or clients gained, or products moved. Success for the marketer is about more product moved over time, a rise in brand awareness, the number of conference attendees at a tradeshow, and a host of other metrics determined by the goal of the exercise.

    But these two can each do their job better in the presence of the other! They should be buddies! But they’re often at odds within the organization. They each think the others’ job is less important, likely because they’ve not done the others’ work for any length of time. But by working together, they can each improve.

    Sales, you need to understand that the marketer’s mindset is more focused on hitting the most common denominator the most often, because it’s easy for prospects to ignore their messages – delete them, throw them out, hang up, you name it, it’s a one-way conversation. Marketing, you need to hold onto the understanding that if the prospect hangs up on or ignores pleas for a meeting, Sales takes it personally, because each one counts for a lot! They invest a lot of emotion and time into each approach, planning, investigating, researching, so they “know” the prospect much better – therefore when things to get accepted right away, it’s a bigger loss.

    A little understanding goes a long way. If Marketing took the challenges Sales faces to heart when creating one-sheets or promotions, they’d be simple, answer the most often asked questions, and be nearly weightless so the briefcase-carrying arm doesn’t drag on the ground at the end of the day. If Sales realized how much time it takes to say things in just the right way, how hard it is to determine what the most often asked questions are, and how long it takes to “just redo it”, they’d make their wishes known early and often, and get better tools to work with in return for their efforts.

    We can’t fix Greece v. Turkey, or even know whether it’s Godzilla or King Kong that wins the battle for Tokyo, we do know that when Sales and Marketing work together things go much more smoothly and there more money all around.

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