If marketing were easy…

I find that there are a lot of people out there who think marketing is easy and anyone can do it. Let me tell you something: if it were easy, all businesses would be swimming in money. Yup, that’s right. If you work for a company that is not currently making money continually and growing at an unheard of pace, then it’s a bit of an indicator that marketers maybe need to know what they’re doing and have skills. Shocking, I know.

I’ve seen companies where VPs of Marketing are from Business Development or from Product Management. And the assumption is that if they know that, well, marketing is easy, so they will do a great job.

Inevitably, they don’t. Product Management and, yes, even Business Development are not Marketing. Just because you can do one does not make you qualified or clue-ful about marketing.

I’ve never seen a VP Engineering who was a Business Development or Marketing executive, so should be able to do that, too. Or a VP Operations who used to be in Sales. So…why is Marketing supposed to be so easy? Why and how did it get this reputation?

As Jon Miller, VP Marketing at Marketo, would say, Marketing used to be the “arts and crafts” of business. Pretty things, but without numbers attached. Well, that’s changing too, but also, why do arts and crafts have such a bad rap? Like it’s easy to produce something like a Caravaggio or a Picasso? Like anyone can be an Acoma or Santa Clara potter? That stuff’s not so easy either.

So…why is marketing supposed to be easy? Even if it were “arts and crafts” does that mean coming up with creative messaging or advertising or knowing which events to pick to promote your product is a snap? Well, if it were, everyone would advertise with the perfect message to the perfect audience at the right time and all businesses would thrive.

Oddly enough, they aren’t. Moral: not just anyone can do marketing well.

Published in: on November 13, 2011 at 6:42 pm  Leave a Comment  

I’m over there…

My most recent blog post is over at the Revenue Marketer blog: 5 Best Practices for Marketo NEXT. Go check it out!

Published in: on November 1, 2011 at 10:12 pm  Leave a Comment  

Incremental Change

In May, I started running. I used the iPhone app Couch to 5k by Felt Tip, Inc. (best $3 I ever spent, so if you want to start running, go check it or its sibling Couch to 10k out). In May, week one’s “run 60 seconds, walk 90 seconds” intervals were hard.

In May, I never could have imagined that in October, today, I would run 50 minutes without stopping. But over those 5 months, I have made slow, incremental progress. And now I can. In fact, I probably could have run an hour today. I don’t run quickly, but I get there.

It’s much the same with marketing. You can’t change your entire process or your nurture campaigns or your sales and marketing alignment in a day. But you can make slow progress. And when you look back 6 months, you will have come pretty far.

So instead of looking at your objectives or end goals and thinking they’re insurmountable, break them into small tasks and see what you can accomplish each day, or each week. Make slow progress. Run 60 seconds this week. Run 90 seconds next week. In 5 months, run for an hour.

Plan your first nurture campaign today. Maybe it has 4 drips. Write one tomorrow. Write one the next day. If you started with the planning on Monday, by Friday you’d have all 4 emails written for that campaign. The following week, you could set it up in your marketing automation solution, select your list or trigger, and get your proofreaders and testers to check the campaign. The week after that, you can probably launch. Do that 4 times and you might have a new lead nurture, a mid-stage nurture, a late stage nurture, and a customer retention campaign. At 3 weeks a piece, that would be inside of a quarter and could have a measurable effect on next quarter’s revenue.

Then you can plan a month of reviewing your lead scoring. Then some assessment of your results from your nurture campaigns. Then maybe some additional landing pages or new assets.

In the same way that I had weeks where I didn’t make progress because I had a slight injury, there will be weeks where you make no progress. But get back out there and run a little bit each week as soon as you can.

Let me know how much you’ve achieved in 5 months. I’ll be out running.

Published in: on October 18, 2011 at 8:42 pm  Leave a Comment  

Beer and the Art of Fundraising

This past weekend I did some volunteer work. My friend is running the Nike Women’s Marathon in San Francisco in October (yes, the full marathon!) with Team in Training. Team in Training, as an organization, raises money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, the aim of which is to generate money for research about blood cancers.

Team in Training volunteers staffed the beer booths at a music event in San Francisco on Saturday. All tips were divided among the volunteers to help with their fund raising. My share went to my friend, since she’s the one doing this. I was just an innocent bystander. If you’d like to donate, please visit my friend’s Team in Training site–she’s still fund raising!

Now, my friend and I are both marketing professionals. She mostly does fund raising and events. So it should come as no surprise that we quickly sussed out the buy (ahem, beer!) cycle to reach our aims. It looked something like this:

The Beer Cycle

Since we were assigned as part of the team at the beer booth closest to one of the entry gates, we formulated a plan, really without even thinking about it. We stood near the gate. As people came in, we (loudly, my throat hurt for 2 days) directed people to the drink token booth. Which was next to our beer booth. Where our comrades could both pour beer and collect tips. No one else was doing this. One person from another booth came out to join us and gave a half-hearted effort for about 10 minutes. Then wandered back to her booth. Weak competition.

When the organizers came by to collect tips periodically, they noted that we were doing 3x the tips as the other 4 booths. Yes, THREE TIMES. What would your company do if you increased revenue by three times? What would you, as a marketer, do if you could not only create an increase of that magnitude, but also trace it back to your marketing efforts? [Update 9/6: I recently found out that there were 6-7 other beer booths and our booth brought in $5000 of the total.]

What did it take? A few things:

  1. We figured out the buy (beer) cycle. If we’d directed people to the beer booths first, they’d have been frustrated since they couldn’t buy beer for cash and would have been re-directed back to the token booth (where they were checking IDs) and then to the beer both. Too many steps. Does your website have too many steps? Simplify your processes!
  2. We were persistent. We didn’t stand out there for 10 minutes. We were there for hours. Literally. We took rest spells and a lunch break, but we pretty much stood doing that from 11:30 am til 4 pm. Then we went back and worked in the booth.
  3. We had an enthusiastic team. People said they could hear us all the way across the meadow. Every time we got a tip, the whole booth hooted, hollered, applauded, and made it a big deal. Even when it was a dollar. Louder when it was more. People were telling others they had to get beer at our booth, just to get the response. A security guard asked us early in the day, before the gates opened, if we’d still be yelling at the end of the day. The response, “Yes we will! We run marathons!” The volunteers weren’t in it for the short term, same as a marathon isn’t a sprint.
  4. We had a competitive difference. We did something that made us stand out from the other booths. Our booth was the fun one. People want to be near fun. Especially at a music festival.
  5. We tried new things.
    1. We did take a break from the gate…to go between bands into the crowd seated on the lawn to see if anyone would pay an additional $5 tip for us to bring them their beer. My friend got one taker. I got 3 women to donate $20, just because we were collecting for a good cause.
    2. We also went out an hour before last call to walk around the seated spectators and tell them they had an hour left to use up their beer tokens. Since the tokens were “use it or lose it”, this was much appreciated by the audience.
    3. As the day wound down, one of our booth-mates suggested we could get 5 or 6 of the women in the booth to yell the men’s names if they donated…and to add an “Oh!” before the name if they donated a bit more. We had a guy come back, not for beer, but to tip us again just to hear 6 women yell “Oh, Rusty!” again. Hey, whatever works.
  6. We didn’t stop ’til last call. It ain’t over til it’s over. Rather than stopping early, we kept going right until the taps were taken off. We were earning tips right up to the end.

Not everyone who attended the event drank beer, but they were the “names” in our buying funnel. The “lead” was the person who bought the beer token. The “opportunity” was the person who came to our beer booth. Our “closed won” opportunity was the person who gave us a tip. A four step buying funnel, but a funnel nonetheless. And we moved people through the funnel as a team. The trick was getting those “names” converted to “leads” in the first place. Because you have to get people into your funnel to start with, before they can convert.

The result was over $6000 in tips. At previous events, the organizers had seen pretty much a dollar per attendee in tips. At this one we did about $1.50 per attendee. Imagine how much less if we hadn’t been out there, driving traffic, getting drink tokens sold, and thanking everyone for their donations. Imagine only $4000 instead of $6000. Imagine if tips had been per booth and we’d only had to divide our take among those dozen in our booth!

Do you know your buying cycle? Do you know what your customers want? What are you doing to get to 3x your revenues?

Published in: on August 25, 2011 at 7:50 pm  Leave a Comment  

Advertising & Nostalgia

I’ve seen some Sears ads recently where they question the ability of consumers to actually get all the appliances they need at one of the “big box” stores. In this market, at this time, it’s a good message.

Sears is targeting homeowners, many of whom are 20-40 and remember when their parents bought appliances. When I was a kid (she said, dating herself), Sears was stable. It was reliable. It was where everyone went to get new appliances because Sears had a reputation for repairing appliances, selling good quality, and taking responsibility for what they sold. People went to Sears automotive for tires then, too.

As Gil Scott-Heron said in B-Movie “Nostalgia, that’s what we want…the good ol’ days…when we gave’em hell. When the buck stopped somewhere and you could still buy something with it.” True ’nuff. And that’s why Sears’ ad campaign works so well. The people who are buying appliances now are the ones who remember when you could still buy something with it…and that when their parents bought, they bought from Sears. So, emotionally, Sears is a safe place to buy big purchases, because that’s what we remember Sears being. Not the company that has struggled in recent years, but the one our parents went to when they saved up for big purchases, put nothing (or little) on credit, and went to Sears with their hard-earned cash for a layaway or an outright purchase, one that was planned and budgeted for.

By playing on emotions that we crave right now, comfort, security, reliability, trustworthiness, Sears is assuring us that not only do they have all the brands, they’re going to back them up, the same way they did with your parents’ purchases.

It’s a great move. I hope they succeed in gaining market share. Because, well, that nostalgia works for me, too, and I am cheering the underdog that used to be so successful. The Sears of yesterday, when the country was growing and safe.

Or at least I remember it as safe. And, of course, I remember it as safe because I had parents protecting me. Sears is playing on that, too, with these ads, because if you felt safe when your parents went to Sears, you will feel safe when you buy for them. That’s a bit of built-in customer satisfaction: if you expect to feel satisfied, you’re halfway to being satisfied with your purchase.

By evoking feelings of satisfaction, security, and nostalgia, Sears has a winning campaign there. The only way to see if it actually works, is to see if their sales increase, even in this market.

Published in: on August 18, 2011 at 8:20 pm  Leave a Comment  

Really?

Twice in just under a week I’ve received a statement from health care providers, one a doctor’s office and one a dentist. In both cases I gave them my new insurance information when I was there for my appointment. In both cases they billed the PREVIOUS insurance, the medical office after a whole hullaballoo about my insurance (I will not go into it here, but what a case of bait and switch!–worst business practices I’ve ever seen in a health care provider) and even emailed me an image of my own (new) insurance card (the one they didn’t bill).

Really? Talk about poor customer service.

In the case of the medical office, I’ve emailed them suggesting they bill the correct insurance, especially after they hassled me so much about my insurance in the first place. I have received no response from any of the 3 people I emailed (both MDs in the practice and their office manager) all of whom I have emailed with previously. And by the way, no, I’m not going back there again. I plan to find a new doctor.

In the case of the dental office, the woman on the phone actually remembered my giving her the new information and said she’d resubmit the insurance. The dental office is occasionally disorganized, but they are always nice and always responsive. Of course, I will continue to go there. They’re always very agreeable and work to make sure that things are done on behalf of the patient, even if it takes a bit longer with the insurance company.

But honestly people. If a patient goes out of her way to inform you of new insurance, you document the same, you should at least UPDATE YOUR RECORDS AND FOLLOW THROUGH.

Sheesh.

Published in: on August 17, 2011 at 8:25 pm  Leave a Comment  

Transparency

If you’re pursuing a B2B sale, you probably want to get in touch with the highest level person you can, preferably a senior executive, to get buy-in across the organization and make a larger sale. But it’s different from the inside, and those same executives, and maybe the sales reps too, need to pay attention.

I see this pretty regularly, though not on a daily basis: a sales rep has done a fabulous job. The senior executive is completely sold on the solution and loves the idea of this new solution working in her (or his) organization. But…that same executive has failed to get buy-in on their end: while the executive is sold, they haven’t even told their employee who’s going to be the person who uses the solution. Further, that employee, who probably already has more than enough of a workload, is going to have to learn that new solution and may have never seen the solution yet and they don’t know what it is or how it will work or what the expectations will be. It’s really not fair.

Because I’ve been working with Marketing Automation for the past several years, this is where I’m observing this behavior, but it can happen in any industry. In the case of Marketing Automation, companies are most commonly using an email solution prior to switching to Marketing Automation. Occasionally they are switching from one Marketing Automation solution to another, but much less frequently, as it’s a young industry.

If you are switching from an email solution to Marketing Automation, it’s going to be a game changer for your organization and it’s not something to unexpectedly drop on your marketing team (or your sales team, for that matter, because it’s going to effect them, too). If you’re an executive and you’re pretty sure you’re going to go with Marketing Automation, bring your marketers to a demonstration of one or more products. Get their feedback. Ask them what they think. Find out what their challenges are with the email solution and make sure they know how Marketing Automation will make their lives easier, not harder.

Because if you’re that hard-working marketer, and you go into the office one day and your executive tells you you’ve got a major transition on your hands, you need to add it into your other responsibilities, and you can’t miss a deadline with your emails, you’re going to have a bad reaction, even if it’s a new adventure you’d normally be up for. Increased stress, more work, and becoming a student again is not for the weak of heart. Even if you’re enthusiastic, it will add to the workload.

So what to do?

If you’re that executive, be transparent with your colleagues. Let them know it’s coming, let them prepare themselves, and give them some insight into why you’re making the decision for Marketing Automation. Above all, let them see what it looks like before they’re thrown in head first.

If you’re the marketer who will become the power user, first, don’t panic. Marketing Automation is going to serve you well in your current position and learning the technology is going to give you skills you’ll use in your career for years to come. Marketers with Marketing Automation experience are hard to come by and highly valued. Second, request that demo. Let your executive know you’re enthusiastic, but that you want to know what you’re getting into so you can be properly prepared. Collect as much information as you can as rapidly as you can. There’s a lot of great information out there about the different solutions, the benefits of Marketing Automation, and best practices for the novice and the experienced user. You need to be transparent as well, and let your executive know what you need to be successful.

If you’re reading this, you already know I’m a proponent of Marketing Automation. But I’m also a proponent of communication within organizations and teamwork. If everyone works as a team, you’ll have a better work environment, a more efficient business, and a better implementation of your Marketing Automation solution–because above all, Marketing Automation requires alignment between Sales and Marketing to reach it’s fullest potential.

Published in: on August 9, 2011 at 9:10 pm  Leave a Comment  

On Being a Customer

Marketers talk a lot about using Twitter for B2B and B2C communications, but my recent experiences have shown me that quality of use is mixed.

I use Comcast for my Internet, phone and cable. In recent weeks, there have been a number of very aggravating outages. Without my usual resources, I turned to my phone, and Tweetdeck on it. I named Comcast (using @Comcast) and first pointed out that they’d said they expected the interruption to be resolved in 2 hours and 2 hours later said 4 hours (presumably an additional 4). I received no response. I also pointed out that my one-year contract was coming due soon and that Xillient was going to be visiting the building. Having misspelled Xillient (I spelled it with on L, my bad) I didn’t get a response. They’re forgiven, though they might want to follow both, considering.

Surprisingly, considering the advertisements that claim they’re focused on customer service, or perhaps not surprisingly, given actual experience – ahem, I received no response at all from Comcast.

Some weeks before that, I’d tweeted that I’d been a big fan of Virgin America, but was very disappointed by the fact that they’ve cut service to Toronto. Since they have wi-fi on every flight, you’d think they’d be paying attention, but either they aren’t or they don’t care. I received no response.

About a month ago, I was in Toronto. Air Canada’s counter staff at airports and their call in center staff were about to go on strike, and the strike was supposed to start, if no agreement was reached in talks, midnight the day before I was flying home. They were recommending that everyone do electronic check in and not check baggage in order to avoid longer wait times at counters. Unfortunately, I was blocked from doing so.

Since Air Canada’s call in centers answer after about 30-40 minute even when they’re working, I didn’t think calling was going to be helpful. So I tweeted. I said that I couldn’t print out my boarding pass and asked Air Canada for help. Within about 20-30 minutes, I had a response. Someone at Air Canada suggested I direct message them. I pointed out that I’d followed them, but in order to DM, I needed them to follow me. A few minutes later, they were. I sent my record locator and someone said I’d been randomly selected by US Homeland Security, and I would have to check in at the airport. Given the circumstances, I asked how that was going to work out, since their counter staff was going to be on strike. I was assured that there would be staff available.

The next day, when I arrived about 2-1/2 hours before my flight, giving myself a lot of extra time, I was pointed to one line by an Air Canada employee. After about 25 minutes I was told by another employee that I was on the wrong line, that was domestic flights, and I needed to go to a different line. I wasn’t particularly amused by this, but I dutifully went off to the other line.

And I waited. About an hour later, I was still “close” to the front of that line, as I had been for the entire time. Only one person was printing boarding passes. All the other Air Canada employees were only tagging bags for those checking them who could use online check-in or one of the computer kiosks. I finally stopped one woman who seemed to know what she was doing (though wasn’t printing boarding passes).

“Excuse me. I’ve been waiting 1-1/2 hours and my flight now leaves in an hour.”

Her eyes got very large, probably seeing how the rest of her day was going to go, since it was still before 7 am and I could see tempers fraying around me. “You need a boarding pass?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I’ll take you next.”

“And you might want to attend to these two as well. Their flight leaves in 40 minutes.” Though they did not have baggage to check.

When I finally did get to the desk, it took about 3 minutes to get my boarding pass. I thanked the woman, and was pleased that neither customs/passport control nor security took long. It could have been much worse. I’ve stood in US passport control lines at that airport for over an hour in the past.

When I arrived in San Francisco, my bag was coming around the baggage carousel as I walked up. I got it right away. I noticed that the nice woman in Toronto had put a “priority” tag on my bag when I checked it. I hadn’t noticed in Toronto, though I am usually very careful about making sure the tags have the correct destination code on them. It was just a nice thing for her to have done. Also, Air Canada doesn’t charge for the first checked bag, even though when they code share if it’s a United flight, United does. I always check which airline is running the flight now, because there’s a cost associated with flying United to Canada.

The upshot is this: if you’re going to have a Twitter ID for your company, you need to pay attention to it. If you have it and don’t pay attention, you can harm your brand pretty quickly. And if the customer service in person matches the quality of your Twitter feed, even better. You’re providing the customer with a consistent, high quality brand relationship.

Comcast? Fail. And if there’s another outage I am so changing my Internet provider at home.

Virgin America? Fail, though I love their planes, their electrical plugs and USB drives, their on-demand menu service, and their flights have all been great (and on time) when I’ve taken them. I’m still aggravated that they no longer fly to YYZ.

Air Canada? Pass, and with flying colors! They might not have the cheaper non-stop flights to Toronto that Virgin America had, but with a Twitter feed they’re paying attention, I know I can get customer service when I need it. And that’s worth paying for.

Published in: on July 17, 2011 at 8:58 pm  Leave a Comment  

Marketing automation as process change

Moving from an email delivery tool to a full-fledged marketing automation solution is not a small jump. In the course of this transition, business processes need to be formally defined, new ways of thinking need to be embraced, and team members who may have never worked together need to get on the same page.

There are several ways in which marketing automation causes a business transformation:

  1. prioritizing leads – where previous processes might have meant all leads went to a sales development rep, data processor, or straight to a sales rep, marketing automation enables companies to sort leads into those who are more likely to want a sales touch and those who need more nurturing. Instead of using valuable man-hours to screen leads, automated systems can be put in place that validate information, de-duplicate the database, and assign leads to the right representatives at the right time, while leaving less mature least to be nurtured until they are ready for sales contact.
  2. lead routing – if one of your staff has been assigning leads to your sales reps, you can stop that right now. Use either marketing automation or your CRM (or both, together) to deliver leads based on programmatic lead assignment rules, freeing up your human resources to do things that tools can’t accomplish, like starting a sales conversation and building a relationship when a lead wants to be contacted.
  3. the lead lifecycle – this is where worldviews can be expanded. Where do leads go? When do they transition from marketing to sales, and potentially back to marketing if the lead needs further nurturing? How are current customers treated? Do they get specific notifications or nurturing? Are they automatically informed prior to the end of a subscription…in time for them to renew, possibly without the need for human intervention?
  4. the revenue cycle – at which stages do your leads spend the most time? Is there a way to mature them more quickly? Are there any points where leads are getting “stuck” where you can apply nurture campaigns to help move them along? Knowing where everyone sits, for how long (on average) and why changes not only sales and marketing, but whole businesses: finance, the executive team, everyone can now see where the leads are and start making projections about future business. You can also drill down to understand where your process can use more attention, which lets the whole company know where to focus resources, but especially sales and marketing.

Where to start?

First, if you have a company that sells something, then you have a process of some kind. It might not be documented, it might not be formalized, but something is going on. Start with what you have and write it down. Diagram your lead flows on a whiteboard. And then ask if what you have is optimal. Should everything going to sales go right away, or would lead scoring help to throttle back leads that aren’t ready for sales? Can those then be nurtured to get them ready for sales?

Second, if you don’t know already, find out who does what. You may assume that the person next to you is a sales rep, but maybe they’re actually in sales operations. This is where sales and marketing need to come together, and marketing automation will reveal the cracks in the relationship pretty quickly…but it can also bring the teams together to solve the problems once they’re visible.

Third, look carefully at what your process tells you. If your leads are all going to sales but you don’t know what happens after that, start doing some digging and find out if they need to be recycled back to marketing. If your leads are staying in marketing and not enough is going to sales, have a conversation about what a Sales Qualified Lead looks like and compare that to your database: are you finding the right people? If you are, are they getting to sales? If you aren’t find out why not.

Both sales and marketing should remember in all cases that they’re working together for the long haul. If there are cracks in the process, find the right combination of product, people and processes to fix them. Marketing automation brings process changes for the better, enabling companies to scale and make effective use of all their staff.

Published in: on June 2, 2011 at 7:45 am  Leave a Comment  

Delightful, delovely

I’ve been working with a number of clients, teaching them how to use their marketing automation solutions. It’s been great fun seeing people learn the features and watching them discover the possibilities. Just yesterday one of my customers, thrilled with the ease of use, said, “It’s so easy I keep second guessing myself.” He went on to say that for many products, some features aren’t quite as advertised; they often need a bit of effort to get them to work. But he was enjoying his experience because everything worked so quickly and easily. Awesome.

Today I got to go to a client’s office and do some of their training sessions in person. This time, instead of hearing the excitement over the phone in a virtual session, I watched the customers’ growing enthusiasm as they realized how easy their marketing automation would make their lives. In comparison to their previous solution, they would be able to automate a lot. They’d also be able to make their responses to their prospects and customers more sophisticated. The savings, both in time for their web developer and in efficiency with automated systems and real-time responses, is going to make a world of difference to their business.

In both cases, the customers were delighted.

Meanwhile, in another part of my work, I need to write some web content and collateral about another product. Walking back to BART today from my client’s site, I thought, “What do I need to do to give the people coming to this website the same sense of delight that these customers got from the product today?”

Changing my focus, as I write, from delivering information to delighting the visitor, will make a world of difference to me, too. And to the business I’m writing for.

When you arrive at a website, you’re expecting information. You’re not necessarily expecting to be enthusiastic about what you’re reading, particularly on a business to business site. If your site visitor is not only educated, but also excited about what you’re telling them, they’ll retain more information and want to use the site. They’ll come back.

So, delight. My current preoccupation is how to delight with (1) a sales portal and (2) a prospect site.

The first needs to encourage sales reps to learn enough about a product to be able to effectively sell it, and to sell the services that go with it. How do you make a sales rep delighted? Usually sales is delighted by making and, especially, exceeding their quotas. If you give them an easy way to do that, they’ll love you.

The second needs to show value to a prospect: if you acquire this product, you’ll accomplish your goals, make your targets, and look like a rock star. Everyone likes that, they just need to be convinced that it’s not just a line, they really will get results. So this site needs to show, clearly and easily, the benefits of the product, that services will help them gain those benefits more quickly and with an increased ROI, and that the team using the product will shine.

As I continue writing, since I’ve only just started, I need to remember the goals of the reader as well as the goals of the company I’m writing for. I need to represent both…delightfully.

Published in: on May 11, 2011 at 9:26 pm  Leave a Comment  
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