Category: Innovation

creativity

Three Ways to Find Your Marketing Creativity Again

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It would be hard to find a marketer who would not agree that marketing has become much less creative and much more process-focused.  We tend to idealize the 1960s world, stereotyped by the television show Mad Men, where the creative team ruled the business and the great idea was the best product marketers had to offer their client or employer.  At the same time, we lament the rise of technology, complaining that marketing and sales automation has forced us into a never-ending loop of justifying our value based on whatever numbers our client or bosses choose to watch.

What Happened to Marketing Creativity?

It’s easy to blame the shift to more process-focused marketing on the rise of marketing technology and the associated capabilities of measurement.  But it’s also true that we have used technology as a crutch, a substitute for our own creativity, in order to get things done faster, or, at times, with less hard work.

Don’t get me wrong:  Automation and measurement are important to a functioning marketing team.  Without it, you can’t scale and you just don’t know what’s working and what’s not. You need automation to deliver just the right message to just the right person at just the right time and to know whether you succeeded and whether the person took the action for which you were hoping.  As marketing gets more and more personal, the need for technology to handle more tasks at a higher level of functionality will only increase.

Is marketing creativity getting lost in automation?  I don’t think so.

Creativity, though, marketing creativity is the role―and the greatest contribution―of humans in marketing (and beyond).  You can’t delegate that to an automation system.  I think it’s time for us, as marketers, to remember it is still human creativity that drives our work; our automation systems cannot be the source of our creativity but rather the tools we use to automate and scale that creativity.

Is your marketing really as creative as it could be?  Here’s an example of using technology as a substitute for marketing creativity.  See if this scenario sounds familiar:

Your digital marketing team is about to launch another email campaign (the last one worked pretty well, right?).  They decide on the new target audience.  They then look at the last campaign in your marketing automation system and copy it.  They edit the content to more closely match the new idea.  They swap out the calls-to-action with new ones (which look surprisingly similar to the old ones―with apologies to Pete Townshend).  They check it over and hit send.

This is how the vast majority of marketing is being done today.  Email campaigns are being copied.  Ads are being tweaked.  Even paid search parameters don’t really change much. It’s comfortable.  It’s easy to understand. It’s low-risk―both from an investment perspective and in how you have to explain the lower results (it was just like the last one―we thought it would work!).  We accept incremental change and incremental results, because we can understand it.  And because our marketing automation systems, which were designed to automate tasks, are being used as a substitute for creativity.

Nobody ever made a difference in any market by doing something just like what they had done before.  You can insert the Apple branding story of your choice here, because the ways they changed thinking and changed consumer preferences is exactly the point (My personal favorite story about how ads changed minds and the market is the “Reach Out and Touch Someone” campaign.).

How do we put the marketing creativity back into marketing?  It’s not easy, but it’s critical if you want to make a difference in your market, to your clients, and to your company.

Three Ideas for Putting Creativity into Your Marketing

Here are three ideas I use to get my creativity back into my marketing efforts:

1)  Kairos

Morgan McLintic, managing director for the U.S. for Lewis Global Communications wrote an interesting piece for LinkedIn, titled Why You Aren’t Creative Anymore.  He discusses the ancient Greek culture’s two different expressions for time:

Chronos, he explains, is the concept we understand as the ticking of the clock as time passes.  It’s the way time gets measured and how time passes.  It’s how we synchronize (notice the root word, chronos) to get a common understanding of when things happen.

Kairos, on the other hand, is a qualitative passage of time, similar to Csiksgentmihalyi’s concept of flow.  It’s the place where we take the time to focus and create.

McLintic argues that the endless distractions and demands prevent us from creating the space for creativity.  We are not just endlessly busy; we are distracted.  We might be with our families, but we are thinking about work.  We might be meeting with a colleague but really worried about the meeting with our CEO tomorrow.  Focus―a key element of flow―is hard to come by.  Plus, we live in a culture that values busy-ness.  We are always under pressure to appear busy, even if we are not.  That ends up creating more stress as we force busy-work on ourselves to meet the expectation we think our surroundings―especially our work environments―force upon us.

Getting that space is hard, probably harder than it’s ever been.  But it works.  Here’s how I saw that happen recently.

I was leading a messaging project for my company.  We needed to not just revise our messaging but simplify it and communicate it in a clear, simple, concise way that anyone―in our market or elsewhere―could understand.  Even if you do every day, you know this is no easy task.  I took the usual steps, interviewing lots of people, consolidating feedback, looking for common threads and so on.  When I looked at my output, I had four PowerPoint slides with messaging statements and explanations― anything but simple.

I threw it out. I found a quiet place and put on the music that, for me, tends to inspire but not distract me (Mozart’s Symphonies No. 40 and 41).  I thought.  I recalled everything every customer and prospect had said.  I wondered why they bought from us.  More importantly, I wondered what they were trying to achieve when they bought from us.  As I sat there, the image came into my head of what must be in their heads.  Then the word showed up that described it.  Then I used the word in just the right sentence.  And that was it.  I had my answer.

Now, I stop just like that for every campaign I launch.  I encourage my team to do the same.  The result is I am starting my work with creativity―the critical element of marketing success.  I’m not letting my marketing automation system be my crutch for marketing creativity; I’m doing the creative work and letting the marketing automation system do its job of automating what I created.

2)  Finding Our Inner Four-year-old

Sir Ken Robinson discusses how our schools kill creativity.  It’s worth the nearly 20 minutes to watch.

He tells this story (slightly edited for readability):

When my son, James, was four in England―actually, he was four everywhere, to be honest.  If we’re being strict about it, wherever he went, he was four that year.  He was in the Nativity play.  Do you remember the story?  No, it was big, it was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel; you may have seen it: “Nativity II.”

But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about.  We considered this to be one of the lead parts.   We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: “James Robinson IS Joseph!”  He didn’t have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in?  They come in bearing gifts, gold, frankincense, and myrrh. This really happened.  We were sitting there, and I think they just went out of sequence, because we talked to the little boy afterward and we said, “You OK with that?”  And he said, “Yeah, why? Was that wrong?”  They just switched.  The three boys came in, four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads, and they put these boxes down, and the first boy said, “I bring you gold.” And the second boy said, “I bring you myrrh.” And the third boy said, “Frank sent this.”

Kids will take a chance.  If they don’t know, they’ll have a go.  They’re not frightened of being wrong. I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative.  What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original―if you’re not prepared to be wrong.  And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity.  They have become frightened of being wrong.  And we run our companies like this.  We stigmatize mistakes.  And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.  And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.

Trust me, it’s much funnier when he says it.  But he’s right.  He tells the story―now pretty much folklore in the education business:  when you ask a class of kindergartners who is an artist, pretty much everyone raises their hand.  When you ask a class of sixth-graders the same question, only one or two raise their hands.

You probably can’t go to work and act like a four-year-old.  But you can take the time and focus to let yourself play with your thoughts and ideas like you did when you were four, then take what you come up with, and put it into grown-up terms your colleagues will understand.

I can pretty much guarantee you show more marketing creativity than anyone―including you―ever expected.

3) Avoid Groupthink

This should be pretty obvious to anyone who’s ever tried to make a decision in a meeting. You know the pattern all-too-well:  Everyone speaks, carefully avoiding stating an opinion, until the boss chimes in, then everyone suddenly agrees with the boss, showing how what they already said supports their agreement.  This is not just a business phenomenon.

Brainstorming sessions are a really good way to avoid this.  But most brainstorming sessions fall prey to the exact same malady.  We are afraid to offer ideas that might seem too far away from the norm―or worse, too stupid.  We want to be seen as part of the team, and we want to be seen as intelligent.

One technique I have seen used is to let everyone do their brainstorming alone, while in a group.  In this approach, you might hand everyone slips of paper or post-it notes.  Ask everyone to write down everything they can think of, one idea per slip or post-it.  When everyone is done, collect the notes so they are not associated with any individual.  Let the group get together and look at the ideas, then start sorting them out and prioritizing.

Groupthink is a very dangerous and insidious bias that can kill any attempt to offer anything creative before it is even stated.  You probably know this intuitively.  Avoiding the fear of groupthink will let you find a way to offer your marketing creativity and maybe make a big difference in your next project.

These three suggestions are far from the only ways to reestablish marketing creativity.  I’m pretty sure you have a few other ideas (please offer them in the comments below!).

Reestablishing the role of creativity is critical to the success of your marketing efforts and to the success of your organization as a whole.  It’s time to stop letting automation drive all our thinking and let it do its job―automating the creativity humans bring to the work.

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Innovation

Three Ways Data Has Changed the CMO: Two Things to Look Out for and One Glimpse of What’s Next

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One thing most CMOs seem to agree on is that the availability of data and the ability to process it into information have dramatically shifted the role and effectiveness of marketing in an organization.  This data-centric approach to marketing has had several very positive effects on the function, including:

  • Increased accountability of marketing within an organization.
  • Increased effectiveness of programs with better targeting and knowledge of outcomes.
  • Better understanding of the contribution of marketing, resulting in more powerful CMOs.

The Impact of More and Better Data

Data cuts both ways.  It can help make decisions.  It can show you exactly what is happening in any given operation without introducing bias or opinion.  But it can also show you where you are achieving results and where you are not.  It can open a very clear window into the CMO’s performance, which allows for evaluation in ways that are far more objective than were previously possible.

Robert Carroll (@robcarroll), senior vice president of marketing for Gild, notes that just seven or eight years ago, “Marketing accountability didn’t exist.”  It’s not that there were not metrics, but it was much more difficult to establish hard-data success criteria.  With the rise of both CRM systems and marketing automation systems, the data has become available, and it can be turned into analyses that provide these criteria.

One notable way this has changed the marketing organization is in how results are measured.  With these systems and their underlying data in place, it is far easier to determine the exact outcomes of any given program, often from initial engagement all the way to closed sale.

While some organizations are still learning how to make this work for them, many marketing teams use a range of outcome measures such as engagement or conversion to determine everything from cost of sales to whether programs have targeted the right market.

This has also given rise to an opportunity to shift the way marketers operate.  The availability of hard data showing the effectiveness of specific activities and the speed with which that data becomes available allow marketers to try many different hypotheses about which specific items—such as target audiences, content pieces or messages—will be most effective in achieving any given objective.  It lets marketers do the kind of testing and retesting that makes success possible in experimental sciences (such as lab experiments) or in manufacturing design (such as rapid prototyping).

The data and systems are also helping marketers understand media in ways that our profession had only dreamed of.  We can tell exactly which media are most effective to carry our messages and reach our desired target.  Carroll notes, “Email is still the most effective media for outreach.”  But he also has seen a rise, especially with the increasing number of Millennials in both marketing organizations and as members of our target audiences, in the effectiveness of what we might call old-fashioned outreach methods.

“Most Millennials are not used to receiving a telephone call or a postal mailer,” Carroll says. “The sheer novelty of the outreach method is starting to show some unexpectedly positive results.”

While accountability and measurement, in and of themselves, are generally considered good things.  The result of this new level of accountability and the success that has accompanied means that CMOs are gaining more power in the organization.  Now that it is easier to quantify contribution, it’s also easier to show the exact effect the marketing organization has had on the overall business.

As a result, Carroll points out, “More and more, CMOs are becoming CEOs.”

In my own opinion, this also has the potential to result in organizations that are more focused on serving their markets and building better customer relationships.  It certainly will create a different kind of organization than those that followed the historical trend and were led by CFOs or operational executives.

Data Caution!

So far, it’s starting to sound like the rise of the data-based marketer has brought incredibly positive changes and garnered promotions for CMOs.  But the rise of data is also fraught with possibilities to go awry for CMOs:

  • Measurement measures failure just as effectively as it measure success.
  • Data can mislead as easily as it can reveal.

CMOs have jumped on the data bandwagon, and it is, without a doubt, changing their careers.  But where marketers were once able to explain away failure of programs with everything from rebranding to fancy footwork, the ability to look at the data can expose exactly where and why programs failed.  John Philpin, a serial CEO and author of Beyond Bridges, says “Marketers are being found out.”

Philpin also expresses an opinion common to many of us:  “Marketing is as much art as science.”  It’s hard to say that just because a program failed, and we can pinpoint the source of that failure, that the error did not lie in our approach, strategy, judgment, or other human-created idea that was an assumption of the program.

Data can also mislead.  There’s an old saying that the numbers (if you’re an accountant, or the analysis if you’re a statistician) can say whatever you want them to say.  We see this every day in social media where those with specific points of view create charts that appear to be authoritative but are clearly designed to lead the viewer to specific conclusions that benefit the creator.  This happens not just with political pundits, but with marketers as well. We would love to convince the entire world that it has the exact problem we can solve.  And then, of course, sell them the solution.

The data on which we rely for measuring our own success and for proving our success to our organization suffers from the same limitation.  It can be used to show the kind of outcomes we want to believe we have achieved and can be manipulated to hide the outcomes we know will not lead to proving our own effectiveness.

These two concerns—the exposure of failure and the inclusion of human judgment—along with the ability of data to mislead the reader show the limits of reliance on data as the sole measure of success and accountability for a CMO.  It is incumbent upon the CMO to know when data will be useful, how it is most useful, and when to rely on it as a measure of success.

What’s Next for CMOs and Data?

CMOs are seeing the opportunities brought by an increased ability to analyze data and are seeking ways to both expand data access and analysis and find more effective ways to understand and use data.

We’ve all heard about the rise of so-called big data, which Carroll calls “too buzzy” and Philpin calls “a misnomer.  Philpin goes on to add, “Big data is about the relationship among the data—not the data itself.”

Data gets “big” when there’s lots of it, notably more than traditional databases can handle. But it is just this ability to store and analyze unstructured and often unrelated data that can provide insights into our markets and our customers in ways we are only beginning to see.

Carroll sees how the mass of unrelated data Gild is pulling together has started to show them how best to reach their audience, such as where telephone and postal mail can be effective.  He also sees a bigger picture.  “Prepare to be disrupted,” he says, “and all of that data can point to a potential disruptor of your business.”  Since all businesses are potential targets of disruption, it seems like a valuable use of data.

I also agree with Philpin’s answer to my question, “Have you seen big data work in a marketing effort?”  He responded, “Squirrel!”  Staring at data for too long can distract you and lead you to conclusions that are mere mirages.  You start to see things that are just not really there.

More and better data and data analysis are critical to the future of marketing.  Even more critical, however, is the human ability to know how, when, and where to use that data.

Knowing how to turn data into useful information will become more and more important to the success of marketing organizations—and the CMO.

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Collaboration

Please Stop Collaborating with Me!

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(this is a repost of a post written by me for Nimble.)

Collaboration is all the rage in the business world these days — you can’t go more than a few minutes in any business conversation, journal, site, blog or anywhere else without the word coming up. And there’s no doubt that improved collaboration (often enabled by technology) has led to leaps and bounds in productivity.

But are you — like me — starting to feel like we’re overdoing it? I know there are times when I just want to say, “Leave me alone and let me get some work done!”

I’m just old enough to remember the days when everyone in the company had an office. I mean a room with a door that could fully close. While very few office doors were closed much of the time (there was a lot of debate about open-door policies and the like), you could close the door when you needed to concentrate. Or have an important phone call. Or — in the case of certain nameless colleagues — take a nap. In fact, in my very first job after college, I had just such an office.

Then the age of the cubicle arrived. In the 1980s, companies such as Intel were admired for their devotion to the cubicle culture — meaning the collaboration that came with the broad adoption of cubicles. At Intel everyone, even the CEO, had a cubicle.

There was conversation. We talked with each another far more than when I had an office. It became useful, productive, even fun. Prairie-dogging became a game.

Then we discovered the dark side. We couldn’t have the challenging conversations with customers, partners or even our bosses without everyone knowing about it. There were no more moments of concentration; there was collaboration, but there was also constant interruption. Recent studies have shown that constant interruption and multi-tasking are far less productive than concentration and single-tasking.

But are we ready to go back to closed-door offices? For most companies, no. Many companies are going even further and eliminating cubicles in favor of open-plan offices — just a collection of desks in a room (think the secretarial pool from any random 1950s movie).

Tele-Smart consultant Josiane Feigon recently published an article about an un-named client who gave inside salespeople closed-door offices. From her article, it’s easy to tell she did not agree with this move. She seems to feel that having salespeople in closed-door offices defeated the collaboration that she thinks is at the core of their job, and, as is common in other companies, they should have kept the salespeople in cubicles or an open-plan office.

I, however, agree with this client wholeheartedly. In fact, I think they might not have gone far enough. Here’s why:

Inside sales — at least the core piece of the job, which is making calls to prospects — is not collaborative at all. The employee’s (inside sales rep’s) focus is entirely outside the company, and that employee needs the ability to focus their attention outside (at the prospect) rather than dealing with the inside distractions of noise interruptions and over-hearing other outbound calls.

My friend and inside-sales expert Anneke Seley, CEO of RealityWorks Group, points out that there is a critical component of the inside sales rep’s job that is collaborative: training and preparation. These parts of the job benefit from working with managers and colleagues, collaborating on strategy and working to improve skills.

So these parts of the job should be done in an environment that promotes collaboration and interactions (intentional and accidental), and this can be done in a group setting such as a conference room or open area.

But the outbound calling should not be done in “public.” The highest productivity from that part of the job is achieved when the environment isolates the inside sales rep.

In our zeal to achieve ever-increasing collaboration, maybe we’ve forgotten why we want collaboration in the first place: to increase productivity and effectiveness.

Looking at collaboration through the lens of where the focus of the work is pointed (internal, external, solo, team, etc.) can suggest a new way to evaluate whether a collaborative work environment is going to help or harm our productivity. And then maybe we can find ways to collaborate when it helps and leave each other alone when it doesn’t.

And yes, I said “collaboration” (or “collaborative”) 16 times in this post. We might just be overdoing it.

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Customer Success

Building an Exceptional Customer Success Culture: How Buffer Does It

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If you’re like most recurring-revenue companies, you’re not just looking for skills when you hire customer success people, you’re looking for cultural fit and that intangible-but-oh-so-important natural customer-happiness focus. If that’s the case, the person you’d want to hire is Carolyn Kopprasch (@carokopp). Sorry, she’s not available.

Carolyn is chief happiness officer at Buffer (full disclosure: I am a user of their service), a social media posting service that schedules or meters your posts (for me, it keeps me from inundating my followers). I quoted her in my previous post on customer success culture as a great example of how to get customer success right.

I had the pleasure recently of interviewing Carolyn to find out why she is so good at customer success and how she hires and trains Buffer’s people to make sure they are, as well.

If you are leading or part of a customer success team, or you want to be, there’s a lot you can learn from her.

Making empathy a part of the culture

“One aspect of Buffer’s mission is to set the bar for customer service,” Carolyn says. She adds that the definition of customer success is evolving as the company grows — and as the Happiness team doubles in size from three to six people.

I’ve had a number of interactions with Buffer, most with Carolyn herself. Her direct honesty and ability to make me feel cared for impressed me. Why is she so good at this? She points to two things:

First, she was a user of Buffer before joining the company. Having “been in [customers’] shoes and experienced their frustrations” gives her the ability not only to understand the situation, but also to know what will help this particular user get what they need.

Second, she cites empathy as critical to great customer service. “We have to be able to understand not just what the customer means, but their frustration, obstacles and needs.”

To even be considered for a job at Buffer, you have to be an established customer and be familiar with the product. When hiring, Buffer is looking for “someone who has used [Buffer], run into the little frustrations, been confused by this or that, who generally has experience using technology for a purpose and knows how joyous it can be when it’s successful and how frustrating it can be when it’s not.”

Carolyn says this ensures there is some basis for empathy in everyone they hire. This is true not only in the Happiness team, but throughout the company. The people on her team feel “privileged to be doing what we are doing and to have customers who give us the opportunity to do what we are doing.”

Buffer also puts prospective hires through what sounds like a practical exam. Candidates are given a series of actual requests from customers and asked to respond. How they approach the response is a key factor in the hiring decision.

But the culture of empathy extends beyond the walls of the company. “If you are not practicing [these values] in your everyday life, then it’s really challenging to put away your habits and just start it when you show up for work. So we do it in every area of our lives,” she says.

[Note: If this sounds like you, Carolyn is hiring. Just remember they only hire Buffer users.]

Creating a new kind of customer success culture

Buffer handles customer success differently from most organizations. “We don’t assign cases,” Carolyn explains. The team is still small enough that everyone can see all the open cases, and everyone is tasked with taking whatever action they can to help. With a team that now spans the globe, cases are often resolved overnight while the U.S.-based team is sleeping.

This makes communication important. “We have weekly meetings and an ongoing exchange of ideas” to keep that going, she says. The email threads among the Happiness team at Buffer include everything from making sure a response actually meets a customer’s need to discussing the most understandable tone and words to use in email.

Buffer does not try to scale its customer support with technology. They have made the decision not to try to push customers toward helping themselves, but rather to focus on hiring more people to respond to and support their growing customer base. They will add online help (“some people just like to figure things out for themselves” Carolyn says), but they will continue to make email support the primary way customers get the help they need.

Buffer also publishes — yes, publicly — a monthly happiness report on their blog and on Facebook. Here’s the October report (note the summary graphic at the bottom of the post). They let the entire world know just how well (or not) they are doing. It’s a manifestation of their transparency value, and it lets all their customers know they are a part of Buffer’s ongoing improvement.

Measuring customer success can be challenging. Unlike many companies, Buffer does not count the number of replies or exchanges it takes to close an issue. “We disregard replies per conversation. Most customer success teams look at this as speed to resolution, but we know that happy customers reply back and forth a few times,” Carolyn says.

Carolyn has two measures of success for her team: “First we work on the hypothesis that a faster answer leads to a happier customer. So, we track how fast we respond to the first email and get the solution started. Second, we track self-declared happiness. Every email to a customer has emoticon ratings (provided by Hively). We track how many customers are happy with our solutions. Or not.

“Customers can also add comments to their rating, which only go to the support individual who responded, not for review or to management.” This, she explains, allows the “Happiness Heroes” to learn what they have done well and what they have not.

The best possible response to being hacked

Buffer was hacked recently. Their response was impressive, fast and very revealing, and customers responded with astonishing support. I asked Carolyn how they put together an effective customer communication plan so quickly.

“There was no plan. There was no one person defining the voice. It was a natural reflex for us to tell everyone,” Carolyn says. “That was the extent of the plan. We could not have imagined it going any differently.”

Buffer posted several times per day on their blog and social media on their progress and about the resolution. Instead of one “please change your password” email, customers knew every detail of the issue and resolution, and exactly what to do about it. Look at the overwhelmingly positive and supportive response. It’s the kind of response of which most companies dream.

Changing customers’ expectations

Carolyn sees Buffer’s approach of quick and direct responses as starting to overcome a culture in which customers expect to be angry and frustrated before they even get the help they need.

“We live in a culture that has trained customers to start on the offensive just to get good service, and it’s really easy for the customer service rep to react to that,” Carolyn says. “Often, you don’t get to talk to a manager or someone with authority to solve your problem unless you say a curse word.”

Carolyn and her team are working to get better and better at providing help that takes away the customer’s frustration and, she hopes, changes the starting expectation of her customers.

It’s working

Buffer’s and Carolyn’s ideas on how to create a customer focus in the business are groundbreaking. Even for those of us who are working to disrupt the customer relationship models that have done so much damage to the tech industry over the years are moved by companies such as Buffer to rethink our assumptions. Buffer is an example of what can be done when you throw out your experience and start with a customer-focused set of assumptions.

Buffer is a young, growing company, but it’s experiencing very low churn rates (5-6% at last count). Only 2% of customers are paying for the service, but they see conversion rates increasing month-to-month (note that the Happiness team is not compensated for conversion).

I say it’s working.

What do you think?

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Engagement

Has Marketing Failed Sales?

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A few weeks ago, at the Sales 2.0 conference, I noticed a trend: Salespeople are generating their own leads. In fact, I heard pundit after pundit offer justifications for salespeople to be more proactive and take lead generation into their own hands, including statistics showing that as few as 30% of the leads sent to sales by marketing are worthy of pursuit.

Isn’t it marketing’s job to deliver qualified (or at least pursuit-worthy) leads to sales? So has marketing failed?

Well, no, not exactly. There are two significant (you might call them disruptive) trends happening at the same time in lead generation: the indivdualization of technology and social selling.

Marketing is less-well-equipped than sales to take advantage of these. Sales, especially the individual salesperson, is far better equipped to experiment with new methods, processes and technologies than any marketing department can be, if only because of the scale. And marketing has significant responsibilities beyond lead generation, including leading and developing the company’s relationship with its prospects, customers and all other stakeholders, and stewarding the company’s brand.

But in order to be successful, marketing will have to watch these trends — and how salespeople take advantage of them — and figure out how to make them part of everyday marketing in order to stay relevant.

Trend One: The Individualization of Technology

Technology has migrated from huge systems only practical for large institutions to apps any individual can use anywhere, anytime. In the same way, systems which large corporations use to manage their resources are now available for individuals, including cloud-based (SaaS) services, such as CRM and marketing automation.

Companies such as Nimble and Contactually provide cloud-based services that are designed for (and priced for) individual salespeople to do the essential parts of what a more cumbersome CRM system once did. They manage everything from contacts to social relationships to follow-ups to engagement opportunities.

What is important about this is these services can be used by an individual salesperson to find opportunities and generate leads entirely on his or her own, even while working within a larger corporate CRM system.

In fact, my friend Matt Heinz offered a wealth of tips and tricks (he calls them “sales hacks”) for individual salespeople to use a range of tools to create a robust lead flow — all independent of any marketing department (yes, this works very well for sole proprietors, too!)

Trend Two: Social Selling

Social selling means salespeople can use their social networks and the activity they generate to find prospects and identify buying signals. For example, if I were selling marketing automation software, and a 2nd-degree LinkedIn connection just took a new job as CMO (a possible buying signal) for a company in my market, I would want to contact that person. I might find that out through the activity generated in my own social network, then find out more about that person through their own social and other activity. I would then have a connection that can introduce me and would also know how to approach my newly discovered prospect.

Notice I am not looking in my CRM system for a lead that has not been touched in a while, nor am I looking for an introduction from my management. Salespeople (presumably) have their own networks they can use to find the connections they want and need.

Services such as TwitHawk and Newsle offer this kind of social signal search service, and Nimble and Contactually integrate it into the activity stream.

When you put all this together, you have a powerful new source of very well-qualified leads for the salesperson to pursue.

So Where is Marketing?

Marketing departments have done a very good job of adapting to the world of on-line and social media, and they have found ways to successfully get the word out. Marketing departments have also become very good at doing this on a large scale, just as they became very good at large-scale communication in traditional media.

But even the most targeted integrated email and social media campaigns reach thousands — sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands — of people in the hope that a small percentage will be sufficiently interested to become leads and prospects.

Salespeople are looking at this from the other direction. They are ignoring the scale of reaching mass markets and large target audiences, and instead, using the power of atomized technology and social media combined to find the proverbial needle-in-the-haystack — who they are pretty sure is an interested prospect.

Can Marketing Adapt?

Should marketing change its approach and focus on finding individuals? No. Well, maybe.

Marketing must look after its whole scope of responsibilities and ensure there are strong relationships with customers, prospects and other stakeholders. Marketing must also continue to use its ability to scale communications to ensure large audiences are reached.

In fact, without doing this first, the salesperson may never have the chance to find that one interested prospect

But marketers must also become proficient in a world that has become individualized. This individualization has happened not only in how sales leads are found, but also in how relationships and brand preferences are developed. Marketers must be able to take all the activities where they focus on the mass market and find ways to translate or evolve them into individual relationships.

It’s easy for individual salespeople to experiment with new methods and technologies, and they are finding some of them very useful. Marketers must find ways to experiment with new methods, processes and technologies to find the ones that work in this changing world.

The challenge marketers face is learning how to scale this individualization to reach the mass audience so the company can scale its individual relationships.

And marketing can deliver more relevant leads.

Join the conversation: post a comment telling us how you are addressing this issue.

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Collaboration

Making Remote Work Work: Nine Ways to Succeed and Five Myths Dismissed

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If you’ve been paying attention to the news out of Silicon Valley recently, it would be hard to miss the uproar about Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s decree that Yahoo! would no longer allow its people to work from home.

I spent several years leading marketing and internal communications for the remote work program at Cisco Systems.  During that time, our policies evolved and grew into a sophisticated program designed to create competitive advantage for Cisco in both its access to skilled workforce and in serving its customers.

I don’t want to jump into the debate about Yahoo!, nor do I want to discuss how organizations and employees benefit from remote work.  My colleague Faith LeGendre has covered that very well.

I want to take a closer look at how to make remote work (which includes working from home, working in a remote location, or even just having a geographically diverse team) actually work well and benefit both the company and the employee.

First, let me dismiss a few myths:

  • Working from home is not just for mothers with young children.
  • Working remotely is not just about wanting schedule flexibility for personal needs.
  • Working remotely to achieve a flexible schedule does not reduce productivity.
  • When remote work programs fail, it’s generally because of poor technology planning or a lack of good management practices.
  • Collaboration and informal interaction do not require being in the same location.

Making a remote work program work for the benefit of everyone requires hard work and a shift in thinking on the part of both the employee and the company.  The goal of a remote work program should be to make employees just productive from anywhere as they would be in an office.

For the company and the remote worker’s manager, these practices will help make you and your people successful and productive no matter where they are:

Shift your thinking from presence focused to results focused.

One of managers’ most common complaints about people who work remotely is that they can’t see whether they are working. I suggest that your inoffice workers are probably also pretty adept at making you think they are working even when they are not.  But it just doesn’t matter.

Whether your people are in your office or somewhere else, remember that you hired them to produce results.  It may require a bit more rigor on your part, but make sure both you and they understand what those results are and how you expect them to be achieved.

Be honest:  if your people are producing great results, does it matter whether they did all the work between 9 and 5?  Or is it OK with you if they did some of the work at 3 AM?

This also means you need to set expectations and have an explicit agreement on when the remote worker will be reachable for emergencies and other time critical matters.  Make sure you know what you actually need and what is reasonable to expect.

Be reasonable and allow yourself a learning curve.

Managing remote workers is not easy. You will find that shifting your thinking, measuring results in a different way, and trusting your workers more completely than you likely have before is challenging and requires a learning curve.

Don’t expect more from your remote workers than from your inoffice workers (though you will probably get more) and watch yourself for inequities in your treatment of the two. This will get easier with time, and it will be much easier if your company’s HR team provides support and training.

Create formal agreements and stick to them.

Your remote workers should know what you expect from them, and you should know how they are meeting those expectations.

When you either hire a remote worker or change an inoffice worker into a remote worker, create a formal written agreement.  Outline everything from objectives, expected results, response times, and availability to reporting and collaborating with colleagues across the company.

Get the technology right.

Don’t skimp.  The technology available in today’s market for making remote workers effective is both very good and very affordable.  Make sure you have the technology that allows your remote workers to get the job done as efficiently as your inoffice workers.

For the remote worker make sure you work effectively and follow these ideas to help your management realize as much benefit as you do from your working remotely:

It’s not about your convenience; it’s about producing results.

As with so many communications you have with your management, explaining why you need this “privilege” just doesn’t cut it.  Explain how it will benefit your manager and the company.  Show how you will make it work.  Sell your manager on trusting you to make it work.

Take it slowly.

Don’t walk into your manager’s office and announce your plan to work remotely full-time starting Monday.  Start with one or two days per week.  Create milestones that show your part-time remote work plan works.  Then go to three days per week.  Then four.

When you are choosing which days to start with, intentionally choose days that will show that you can work effectively.  For example, choose a day when a weekly team meeting occurs, then demonstrate your outstanding participation in that meeting while sitting in your living room.

Demonstrate results.

If there is one single key to success in remote work, this is it:  create external objective evidence of your work.  Your management will not see every bit of work you do remotely. But they can always see the outcome of your work.

For example, let’s say your job is to run email marketing campaigns.  You and they both know lots of planning and collaboration go into creating those campaigns.  But they may or may not see that.  What they will see is that the campaign launched and produced results.

Learn to collaborate online.

Both structured and impromptu collaboration can easily happen from anywhere.  But for most of us, it’s not natural to strike up informal conversations electronically.

I can’t put too fine a point on this:  learn how.  Getting good at making connections and developing relationships with people you can’t (and may never) see is critical to your success.

Overcoming resistance is about proving success.

This is generic but critical to making it work.  Some managers will resist the idea of having someone work remotely.  You can’t change the culture overnight, but you can create opportunities to prove success.  Create trial remote work times.  Develop result focused plans for making it succeed.

When the trial period ends, make sure you have lots of evidence of success to show your manager the benefits and start planning for a larger trial.  Make your success available to others also:  the more people who show and prove success, the faster the culture of resistance will change.

The list of benefits of remote work for both employees and employers is seemingly endless, so there’s no reason not to get started.  Remember, if your people can’t work remotely for you, they might just work remotely for your competition.

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Decision Making

Elephants and Data: The Missing Link to Making Sales & Marketing 2.0 Work

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This week I had the privilege of attending the Sales and Marketing 2.0 Conference in San Francisco (thank you to the conference team for the invitation!).

While this edition focused on social selling and marketing (as expected), it also focused heavily on what leaders need to manage a social selling or marketing team.

But this is not a summary of the conference. If you would like to see the very useful and interesting learnings from these two days, my friend Matt Heinz has an excellent post you should read.

This is my view of the most important lesson learned this week, and what I think is the missing link to making all of these new ideas in sales and marketing work. First the data.

Data

For the past five years or more, I have been hearing conference presenters, pundits and all sorts of others talk about the new way to market and sell in a social world. While some of it is just hype (isn’t it always?), when you sort through all of the information out there, you reach a few simple conclusions:

  • Technology has and will continue to disrupt how products and services are marketed and sold
  • Social technology has shifted the balance of power to the buyer, so that sellers now have to work not to sell, but to help buyers buy
  • Most corporate organizations and the systems by which they measure their people have not adapted to this new reality at all, meaning we are all essentially doing what we used to do, just with new technology (yep, I wrote that five years ago!)

The focus of the conference for the past two days offers some hope for addressing this last point. Much of the focus was on managing in what they call a “sales and marketing 2.0” or “social” world.

Speakers showed us how they are helping their people do certain things differently – or do entirely different things. They showed how they are figuring out what those things should be. And – since we know what gets measured gets managed – they showed how they are measuring success in the social selling and social marketing process, and how they are rewarding people for that success.

These management practices are all based in what we have come to call big data. For example, you have to merge and interpret data from your company’s traditional systems (e.g. CRM), your other internal data (e.g. email communications, chat and other interactions), customer data, social network data and other public data to gain a deeper understanding of how a Facebook campaign or a sales rep’s blog helped generate revenue and specific deals. And yes, this can be measured. But no, it’s not easy.

We saw examples of how every aspect of management from governance to measurement to evaluation, to hiring to leadership and coaching (yes, coaching) can be improved when driven by the effective use of data.

Elephants

Here’s what I think was the elephant in the room: In order for individuals to succeed at anything at all in a corporate organization, they have to know what success looks like.

Your sales leadership can be the best at understanding and directing a social selling organization. but does your newly hired rep know what to do when she is on the phone (excuse me, web conference) with a hot prospect? Do they know how to use the social tools at their disposal to make that a more successful call?

Your marketing leadership can put in place all of the social tools and programs, and even hire people to manage the various social channels. But when your demand gen manager executes a new campaign, do they know how and when to incorporate those channels?

Do your people know it when they see it?

What leadership needs is a way to institutionalize the knowledge, learning and assumptions needed to become a social sales and marketing organization. We need not only a way to not just communicate to our people what this is all about, but also a way to make sure that when our people do their work, they know – intuitively – how to do it in this new way.

Do you give your people the knowledge and skills to be able to do their jobs in whatever new way your organization is adopting? Does it work?

Add your story to the comments below. And I’ll see you at the next Sales and Marketing 2.0 Conference.

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conversation

Making Better Investments in Your Customer Relationships

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(this is a repost of a post written by me for PAKRAgames. It is part four of a series of four.)

Business relationships are not this intuitive (though I contend they should be), but let me ask you this (if you’re in a long-term relationship, think back to when you were single).

When you started dating, you had opportunities to begin and pursue relationships. How did you make the choice of which woman/man to pursue? Was it the best looking? The smartest? Maybe the most accessible or one you thought would say yes? And if you were lucky enough to have several people from which to choose, into which relationships did you invest your effort? Was it with the cutest partner? The one who seemed most likely to succeed? The one most likely to commit to you?

I’d be willing to bet you made these decisions based on some form of intuition. You probably agonized, analyzed and got lots of advice from your friends and family, but some sense of the “right” choice probably made itself apparent, and off you went.

We don’t do the same with business relationships. We look at forecasts, financials and, if we’re smart about it, marketing and culture compatibility. Specifically, when we look at our customers, we have pretty much one measure of desirability: Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), which is essentially a net-present-value of expected future revenue from that customer.

But if you ask your sales people and customer service and support representatives, you might see a very different story. You’d hear endless anecdotes that go something like this: This customer may not produce much revenue for us, but they (pick one or more of these) helped us fix several critical bugs, showed us some new uses for our product, are really devoted to us, use only our products and never our competitors’, or have been our best reference customer and a big advocate in the market.

How much value do you place on any (or all!) of those things? My guess is that when it comes to making decisions on how much effort to put into the customer relationship or how hard to try to save them if they suggest they may not come back next year, you put not much value at all (or maybe a little, as an exception).

But you should. Companies that do have customers who keep coming back to them and not their less-successful competitors.

Here’s one example of why: Clayton Christensen’s (@ClayChristensen) “Innovator’s Dilemma” suggests (among other things) that as companies grow, they miss the customer doing something weird with their product. Smaller entrants see it, find the new market based on it and can disrupt the larger company’s market in doing so. But if you — I presume you are the larger, growing company — found the customer doing that weird thing and knew they were valuable, then worked to keep them, you would be able to see the new opportunity and capitalize on it.

There are similar examples for any number of the possible reasons noted above that customers can have value beyond CLV.

So what do you do about it? It’s a simple yet hard answer: Develop a model that can evaluate any given customer’s true value to you (building and helping you manage this model is one of my firm’s main services). That model must include revenue (CLV), but also must include the other dimensions that could make a customer useful and valuable to you. Not all possible dimensions will apply to all companies and, even among the subset that applies to you, not every customer will have much value in each one.

Once you have a model that can assign a quantitative value to each customer relationship, you not only know how valuable each customer is, but how to rank them and know who is genuinely more (or less) important to you. Then you can make well-conceived and well-informed investment decisions. You’ll also know why exactly you are making those decisions.

So when it comes time to allocate budget, time and people to ensure customers are happy, you’ll know who to make happiest. It’s not exactly intuition, and your friends may not have much to say about it, but it will ensure you are doing the best for your customers and for your company, and building relationships that last.

Conclusion:

Over the four parts of this series, I’ve suggested a new way to approach improving and deepening customer relationships, which can reduce churn and ensure customers who walk in the front door this year don’t walk out the back door next year.

I’ve covered:

– Rethinking our business model to ensure we’re making the most of recurring revenue

– Building an effective and measurable sales and marketing process for renewal revenue, and why that’s just as important as your acquisition process

– Learning to understand the value our customers place on our services

– Valuing customer relationships and making better investment decisions

I hope this has helped you think about your business model a little differently and more clearly, and that it has helped you focus your efforts on maximizing the power of your recurring revenue model.

We’d love to hear your story about how you are making the most of your recurring revenue model. Tell us in the comments. And thanks for reading!

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customers

The Missed Marketing Opportunity: Your Customers

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(this is a repost of a post written by me for PAKRAgames. It is part one of a series of four.)

Why would you let as much as one-third of your revenue walk out the door every year? And knowing it will, why include it in your forecast, and consider it a “success” as long as it’s no more than one-third?

This is exactly what many companies with subscription-based business models are doing.

The move to subscription-based business models has accelerated in the past decade, led by technology-services companies moving to cloud-based offerings. Most companies that have made this shift have benefited from having a recurring revenue stream and the ability (generally) for more automated sign-up and service options for prospects and customers.

But we missed something.

Recurring revenue means it’s critical to ensure that customers who walk in the front door this year don’t walk out the back door next year. Put another way, it means the value of renewing your customer’s subscription is just as high as starting the subscription in the first place.

A few of you who are doing this right may take exception to this, but in most of the organizations with which I’ve worked, the effort devoted to renewing customer subscriptions is not even close to the effort put into acquiring the customer in the first place. Ask yourself this: In your organization, how much of your budget and staff are devoted to ensuring customers renew? I’ll bet you’ll be surprised at the answer.

Conventional wisdom says it is far less costly to keep a customer than to find a new one. But translating that into action is far more challenging than it sounds (isn’t it always easier said than done?). Some companies do a good (sometimes great) job of bringing a customer up to speed with their products or services (called on-boarding), but then don’t do much of anything else until it’s time to renew. At that point, many companies will alert their customers of upcoming renewals and even assign so-called renewal reps to solicit the renewal.

Which means those companies missed numerous opportunities in between to understand how the customer uses their product and gets value from doing so.

Is it any wonder that as many as one-third of customers walk away every year?

How do we do better?

I propose three areas on which we need to focus to do a better job:

  1. Treating renewals with the same respect we do new customer acquisitions: This will ensure we gain the expected financial and market benefit from our customer relationship.
  2. Gaining a better understanding of how customers value our products and services: This will help us understand why customers renew or don’t — and what do to about it.
  3. Understanding how valuable our customers are to us: This helps us understand how to prioritize investment in our customers and in our renewal efforts.

Parts 2, 3 and 4 of this series will discuss these and how to make them work for you.

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Engagement

Reacting is not a process, but must be learned #s20c

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At the Sales 2.0 conference today, my friend Caitlin Roberson asked me about how looking at the sales process from the customer perspective makes buying easier

 

Another one of the core tenets of Sales 2.0 is that we as sellers should make the buying process as easy as possible for our customer.
But again, we work hard to remove friction from our selling process, we do what we think our customers want and we remove some of the friction. But still we are left with friction and complexity that drives away some of our prospects.
The key to decreasing friction by another order of magnitude is the same thing that marketers are just learning to do in social media marketing, and that companies are learning to do (often with our help) in deepening the value and return on customer relationships. You must:
Look at your process from the buyer’s point of view
In marketing, we call this “listening” and the obstacle that we faced is that listening isn’t (or wasn’t) an activity we could measure on our status reports and so we didn’t do much of it. We’ve learned how to do this and why it’s valuable.
In sales,  it’s called reactivity. Sales reps need to learn how to be reactive to buyer needs and readiness to move along in the buying process. But reacting is hard to put into a process and measure, but we must learn how to do this.
Leading-edge sales organizations are now starting to incorporate reacting into their process, learning to monitor social and other points at which buyers take action and making sure that sales reps deliver appropriate responses at those times. Early data is showing significant increases in likelihood of close when just a few reaction points are included in a sales process.
How are you reacting to your buyer’s expressed needs and readiness to I’ve along the buying process? Tell us in the comments!
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