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Category: Vision

  • Key Marketing Element – Define “Value”

    Key Marketing Element – Define “Value”

    Whether we’re creating a marketing plan, implementing a creative campaign or setting up for a key sales call, there is always a big question lurking in the background of all of our efforts – “What is the value of our product/service to the customer?”

    Most marketers can create a list of features that show off their product, might even do enough to differentiate it from competitors, but features don’t really drive response or sales. A list of benefits, what good things your product or service will result in for the customer is better, and will drive response and sales. But showing value, real intrinsic and perceived value, is where the true art of observation, listening, distillation and research converge to drive real results. This is where experience will pay off.

    Take for example a simple cleaning service: the features they might offer include trained personnel, bonded service agents, natural or organic or hypoallergenic cleaning products, long-term contacts and one-time specials for realtors and landlords. But those features will make the reader work to derive the benefits from them, if you’re lucky. More likely they will go on to the next competitor.

    Benefits derived from these might include peace of mind for landlords and homeowners, high quality cleaning jobs above and beyond the normal, fixed and reasonable pricing, flexible scheduling for repeat customers etc. Good benefits, if you know you have a need and understand how such services work and the challenges that they can bring. Again, a lot of work for the reader to figure out whether this service is for them.

    But what is the real value – a good impression on viewers or potential renters or buyers of the house or it’s residents, reduced risk of disease and infestation because the house is clean, reduced risk of allergic reaction due to reduced dust and allergens, and the bottom line – you don’t have to put in the work to clean the house! People hire a cleaning service because they don’t have time or expertise or inclination to clean it themselves. Luxury, convenience, time saving, thoroughness and a quality result are the key value triggers for marketing those types of services, so make sure you highlight them in your outreach efforts.

    Those values can be derived from some quick customer and ex-customer research, maybe a card after the service is SOLD, not after services are rendered, that’s a service-level evaluation, not a buying reason. Maybe a quick online survey or e-mail survey to your current and past customer list would reach the audience effectively. But you have to ask the right questions to extract this actionable information, and some analysis is needed to apply the newly derived data to your creative and strategic executions – that’s where the experience comes in – a highly experienced marketer can do that distillation of data and analysis and derive a strategy based on that knowledge and execute it for real results.

    Do your homework, do the analysis, and show the VALUE in your offering, not just features and benefits – value finds a home in buyers minds every time.

    If you found VALUE in this post and would like to receive even more, be sure to pick up a 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” 

     

  • Is Failure Life’s Greatest Teacher?

    Is Failure Life’s Greatest Teacher?

    As business people and entrepreneurs, most of us don’t like failure in general, and largely feel that failure is bad. True entrepreneurs, however, often tout great failure in the past as the driving force behind their current success. They’ve looked at their past objectively, dispassionately, and impersonally, and taken strong lessons from the failures and used the knowledge to fuel success. A very healthy approach, but one that is often difficult to adopt in other circumstances. If you’re not the boss, continual and ongoing failure in your work will not likely lead to a long career, unless you work at a Wall St. bank!

    Failure is a terrific teacher. It shows you when you should have zigged when you zagged. And often, the ultimate failure of a business enterprise is not caused by any single event or decision – its usually a cascade of seemingly small, inconsequential decisions and actions that take you down a path leading ultimately to collapse. If you could review any one of those decisions separately and out of context, you’d be hard pressed to find logical fault with it, taking into account it’s isolation and the information available at the time. But couple it with incomplete or inaccurate information that fills in or corrects later, and couple that with other seemingly innocuous decisions, and when you step back you can see a pattern developing. You can almost watch the slide in the wrong direction, but at the time you can’t see it and are powerless to stop it.

    Someone smarter than I once said, “it’s not what knocks you down, it’s how you handle getting back up that shows your true character.” I firmly believe that to be true, being an optimist, and believe that this kind of thinking is what powers the entrepreneurial spirit that makes this great country what it is. No matter what obstacles people put in your way, no matter how many times they knock you down, if you just get up, brush off, restore your dignity, regroup and come out swinging with a new action plan, you’ll eventually be alright and prosper. To do that repeatedly and not be insane, you have to examine the failures and learn from them to avoid repeating the mistakes that led to the failure.

    We closed down an ancillary business unit this year, as it produced insufficient revenue to be self supporting after 2 years of investments in time and money. The research told us we were right to launch it, the market should have been there, our advisers and others told us it was a great idea, but in the end, not so much. Now it’s time to do the autopsy, find out what went wrong, and file it away so we don’t repeat it in the future. Without this final, often painful, step, the failure has little positive value. Simply chalking it up to experience and loss without the analysis only yields negatives. Eventually enough negatives can weigh your efforts irretrievably downward to the point of being unable to recover.

    What’s the recovery plan? Once the analysis is done, the lessons learned, the mistakes and missteps identified, we move forward in a positive fashion, richer in the knowledge that we can apply that learning not only to our own endeavors, but apply it on behalf of our clients as well. That’s progress.

    In short, don’t hide from failures or hide the results when they are less than optimal. Own them, learn from them, use them to your advantage. Those who say they only succeed are lying or selling something.

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  • Innovation – Courage or Survival Technique?

    Innovation – Courage or Survival Technique?

    Modern corporations that want to grow and prosper must innovate to survive and differentiate themselves from the competition. Simple statement, not so simple to do.

    Does your firm innovate? Are you a leader, first or second in market share in your vertical or industry? If so, you are likely an innovator in your arena. If not, you are likely a follower, and destined as such to toil away to maintain the status quo, fighting to find and keep customers, build sales, create and use buzz and maintain your brand.

    Innovation comes in a variety of forms, some in internal structure, some in product, some in technique or offering. And it doesn’t have to be something complicated. Sometimes the simplest thing is innovative. Just because it hasn’t been done that way, doesn’t mean it can’t be, its just that it seems so obvious, you think someone else must have thought of it before. Not always true!

    Like most things, especially marketing, it all starts with research. Figure out what others are doing, and improve upon it. Find out what the audience wants, and give it to them. Find out what causes your customer’s pain, and alleviate it.

    Sometimes the research can be done within your own company. Talk to customer service, talk to reception, watch how customers react to things, listen to their grievances, hear their stories, see how they behave wit respect to your product, or organization. They can tell you things about your company you might not know . . .

    Innovation can create challenges. That’s the point. You need an internal champion to shepherd the change created by the innovative approach throughout the company, to nurture it, to answer questions, to guide it’s development, to protect it from the nay-sayers. It can start at the top with a visionary leader, it needs buy-in from the top, and must have universal buy-in up and down the chain to succeed quickly and completely. Once that universal acceptance and understanding is firmly rooted, you’ll notice that champions appear, and the organization as a whole starts to embrace and live the story of the new offering – transparency becomes apparent.

    Once you’ve gone through this learning curve so you know the steps to innovation, you can apply them over and over again, creating an environment of innovation, keeping your company ahead of the competition, permanently!

    Innovate, differentiate, dominate! Sounds like a plan to me . . .

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  • Planning Tools You SHOULDN’T Use

    Planning Tools You SHOULDN’T Use

    Hopefully, if you’re a corporate marketer, brand manager, Marketing Director or Manager, you and your organization have a marketing plan that is reviewed every 4 months and updated, adjusted, reworked to maximize return on investment and protection and polish of the brand.

    If you don’t, you’d better get one.

    Most folks work toward having that plan include several different ways to measure their progress or success, often on a monthly or quarterly basis. Good for them. Not everything is directly measurable, but there are some indirect measurements you can use to gauge your effectiveness. Use them. Always.

    For those of you forming a plan, here’s a few common things that marketers face when crafting a plan internally. Picture the planning meeting, and get a good bead on the personnel included in that meeting. These are things you shouldn’t succumb to from those in that meeting:

    5) “We did it last year and it worked.” Marketers are supposed to be innovative, progressive, forward-thinking. Before you even get to the “and it worked” part, you should have a response ready that shoots this down. If you’re not moving forward you’re going backwards. Its a new year, use it.

    4) “Our competitors did it last year, and it worked.” See above, plus how do you know if it worked? Unless you have espionage reports from inside the competing firm, you’re guessing. Plus, if you’ve stooped to the level of stealing from your competitor, why bother planning at all, just steal theirs.

    3) “We don’t need new research, we know our customers.” Contrary to popular belief, your “gut” is not a primary research method, and won’t yield adequate or accurate data on your customers unless you have only one – you. Field intelligence is invaluable in helping to shape perceptions generated by research data, but if you use it as the basis of your planning, you’re missing a large part of your potential customer base. Why guess, when you can KNOW.

    2) “Customer Service only deals with whiners, we don’t need to include their data in the plan.” CSRs and receptionists who answer the phone are a major source of information on your brand perception and characteristics. They are also key sources of information on the clarity, transparency and effectiveness of your sales promotion efforts. When the complaint call volume rises, it does so for a reason. Find out why, and fix it. Then take the list of those affected, and send them something nice, and ask them to tell their friends how nice you’ve been. Converting complainers to evangelists is a very effective way of expanding your reach and polishing your brand. Listen to the CSR traffic and respond quickly, include that metric in your plan.

    1) “We don’t have results yet, but it looks like it’s working.” Some initiatives take longer than others to bear fruit. Unless you’re a start-up, you have at least some transactional data to work from, and can project results from that to gauge effectiveness of your previous efforts. If you really can’t get a bead on the impact of a campaign, don’t build your new initiatives based on that one – you could end up throwing good money after bad. Your plan needs to be broad spectrum enough and flexible enough to work around such issues without affecting the whole program.

    Now that you’ve killed off all the bad ideas in the meeting, you can entertain the new, innovative and intriguing ones that you’ve forced everyone to come up with by taking away their crutches.

    If you liked the thoughts presented here, find the best tools for marketing planning in my book, “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Who Do You Seek Advice From?

    Who Do You Seek Advice From?

    Before all you English majors go off on me, I know the title is making use of poor grammar -but “From Whom Do You Seek Advice?” doesn’t really “sing” when used as a headline. Nuff’ said.

    The real question is, how do you select, solicit and filter advice on the topics in your life and work that matter? Most folks have an informal network of influencers and advisers, people they turn to when they have a question, want to validate a choice or point of view. Some have a small circle, some have a very large network of various family members with a range of levels of expertise. Sometimes its just that you want to hear another opinion, from someone who thinks like you do, who will dilute and sugar-coat their stance and feed your own back to you, just as a feel good.

    But sometimes, picking the right expert really matters. Sometimes its a case of hiring a professional who you happen to know under other circumstances. Selecting a realtor, picking a doctor or dentist, finding a tax preparer or accountant, an attorney for non-criminal work. Most of those selections are based on referrals or references from our known network of advisers. Sometimes the professional themselves is part of the network! But how do you really make the choice? Is it emotional, is it pragmatic, is it price sensitive, is it strictly relationship based?

    Studies have shown that reaching those influencers is the most powerful way to prompt word-of-mouth transference of brand and product information. But how do you find them and reach them? Most of the advisers who are non-family are close friends from various stages of our lives. College roommates, fraternity brothers or sorority sisters, high school buddies, team members from sports activities, vendors of various services we use routinely – familiar faces. To find these people and gather them as a list for someone else is virtually impossible – until now. Social media does exactly that and more. Those influencers and advisers are now called “friends”.

    That’s the real power of social media – reaching the influencers of your target audience. If you wanted to build the killer marketing app, it would be one that selects all the Facebook pages from people that fall into your target demographic based on data presented on the pages, and selects the five most prolific friend commentators that appear next to a question mark. You’ve asked the audience for help with a question, and those top advisers answer it. Select them and market to them socially, and they will bleed that influence into the key purchaser. We can only dream . . . so far.

    For now, we’ll have to settle for joining the online conversation in a corporate but personal way, and hope that those influencers see us, hear us, and most importantly, believe us, so that they pass along the attributes we offer to their list of “friends”.

    Keep at it, the tech geniuses will eventually create the key that unlocks the real monetary power of social media, and when they do, look out . . .

    Did you find this interesting? You can more like this delivered right to your inbox weekly – for FREE! Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Be An Agent For Change

    Be An Agent For Change

    At it’s root, marketing is about change. Changing perceptions, changing appearance, changing buying behavior. But if marketers are to conquer the C-level chambers and earn a real seat at the management table, they have to be an agent for change in the business. Simply executing within the frame isn’t good enough any longer.

    It’s up to us as marketers to lead the charge into the future, to examine and adjust business models, to question the status quo and come up with workable solutions, without reservations, obstacles, roadblocks, and excuses. Lots of platitudes surround this type of behavior, but the ones that i prefer are “Better to ask forgiveness than permission” and “If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward, there is no standing still”. Food for thought . . .

    CMOs have it within their power to revolutionize their businesses, they just have to give themselves permission to do it. Use the powerful imagination you were blessed with and put it in gear to create the next step in the logical growth path of your business, or better yet, leapfrog the next step and go ahead by two! The competition will never catch up!

    Change effected is usually change managed. Making changes for change’s sake is a short-lived phenomenon, one that shakes things up, but doesn’t move the needle for long. To affect long-lasting change, the path must be plotted before it can be blazed. Note the spelling, Plotted, not Plodded. You don’t have to take a year to plan the next two – change can be made quickly and still be lasting. Better to try five or six different things now than plan one thing perfectly.

    Go forth bravely, boldly, and be a change agent – you’ll be surprised what just the change in mindset will bring . . .!

    For more on becoming an agent of change, subscribe to my blog above, or follow me on Twitter @docpoulos – let me know what you think! and don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

  • 10 Things Marketers Can Do To Help Them Succeed In 2014

    10 Things Marketers Can Do To Help Them Succeed In 2014

    As the year 2014 hits the mid-point, I wanted to give readers some forward thinking, rather than reviewing the past year’s events – we all know what happened, and we can’t change it anyway. So, here’s a few basic things to keep in mind as you move forward through the new year:

    10) A “Market” Never Bought Anything – people buy things and services and ideas. When you think about or talk about your “Target Market” keep in mind that a market is actually a group of people, with ideas, moods and feelings of their own. If you can conjure up a visual image of a representative of that group, it can help focus your ideas and your copy.

    9) It’s The List, Stupid! All the creative design, top quality printing, conscientious mail services or hot offer in your direct marketing fails miserably in the wake of a bad list. Do your homework, check all the possible angles, find lists that make sense, that are fresh and accurate, and that have a recognizable reason to buy your product.

    8) Sheep Get Slaughtered, eventually. If you’re trying a new technique, a new media, a new idea or trend that’s being touted as the next big thing, ask yourself “How does this help me reach my stated goals, and how will I measure its impact?” If you can’t answer those honestly, you really don’t have a good reason for doing whatever it is. Just because a competitor is doing it, or “everyone’s” doing it, doesn’t make it right for you.

    7) Be True To Your Brand. Period. When you get ready to launch a new campaign, or start a new service, dust off your brand characteristics inventory (you have one of those, right?) and review those traits, and see how well your new idea matches up or illustrates those attributes. If you miss more than 25% of them, rethink the idea. You’ll do more damage putting out off-brand stuff than you can make up in incoming revenue or awareness.

    6) Test, Test, Test – You can’t do enough research, you can’t know enough about your customers, but their buying behavior in a real situation tells the strongest tale. Test as many variables in your mail campaign as you can, and trust the response data. When it comes time to review your results, the data will back you up a lot better than your “gut”.

    5) The Harder You Work, The Luckier You’ll Get – Ideas are like those tempera paints you used in grade school – the more you throw at the wall, the more color you get to stick. Keep churning out ideas and executing them as best you can with your time constraints and budget – if you throw out ten ideas and three of them bomb, that means the other seven were good enough and made up for the three duds. You win.

    4) Strive for “Works Well With Others” comments – the more people you involve and get ideas from, the better those ideas will become. It spreads the workload, spreads the blame, and takes advantage of cooperative vibe that really generates the good stuff. Don’t try to be Superman and do it all yourself.

    3) Lead By Example – Show buyers why you have great products or a superior service, don’t tell them. Don’t talk about features, illustrate benefits. Demonstrate, don’t describe – you’ll be surprised how much more powerful your approach becomes.

    2) Good Enough In the Mail is Better than Perfect On the Drawing Board – You can massage copy all day long, try different shades of blue until you’re blue in the face, but it’s not making you any money if its not in the mail. That doesn’t mean hurry through it, it just means don’t worry it to death.

    1) Trust The Data, Listen to Your Gut, Value Others’ Ideas – It all comes down to pushing more work out the door and having it be productive, effective and impactful. Don’t let ego make you an impediment to your own success. Keep fueling the idea machine with every resource you have, and you’ll succeed in spite of yourself!

    Now, go forth and market effectively in the balance of 2014!

    If you found the above list valuable, you can have this type of information delivered right to your inbox weekly, just subscribe to this blog above. And don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” 

     

  • 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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  • 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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