Mission: Impossible and Sales and Marketing Alignment

I saw the new Mission: Impossible movie yesterday and was struck by how often Ethan Hunt, the hero played by Tom Cruise, stopped to see, empathize, and protect his team mates and the innocent bystanders of his action shenanigans. Seeing them as people, not as obstacles on his parkour course chasing bad guys.

It was a good reinforcement of some ideas from a book (recommended to me by Jennifer Daniels) called The Anatomy of Peace by the Arbinger Institute. In it, they provocatively call the objectifying of people as an act of violence itself, as thoughts precede behavior. 

What does this have to do with sales and marketing alignment? Well, everything.

I have been writing for Forbes on the topic of alignment and customer-centricity, showcasing insights from different marketing, sales, and business leaders across the country, from brands big and small. I still have a lot to share (stay tuned for some great upcoming pieces), but even in these early weeks of my research I am struck with how often the problem that manifests as misalignment is one of perspective.

Harkening back to high school geometry, here is the step-by-step proof:

We can only solve problems we can see.

In frustration or impatience, we see each other as the problem.

When we see each other as the problem, we stop seeing the real problem.

As we don't see the problem as it truly is, we can never really solve it.

In a lesson today, Dr. Mark Brewer, reminded us that in relationships you can’t think “you are the problem” or “I am the problem,” you have to think “it’s you and me against the problem.”

When we see each other through the lens (or should I say the monocle) of the problem, we no longer see the person. They are the problem. They are objectified.  They are a caricature without the complexities inherent in humanity. We see them and the issue in 2D. Over-simplified. And as a result, our minds are tuned to seek and find hardship. We are often chasing evidence of how we’ve been wronged. None of which is useful to problem solving.

In contrast, when we see the problem through the lenses of more than one expert (as you can when you are on the same side of the table, instead of opposite sides), the problem can be fully explored in 3D. The people remain people (not obstacles to overcome) and our minds are tuned to solutions and finding common ground. 

We see what we seek.

This does not mean that sometimes our colleagues are not very good at their jobs or that some people are difficult to work alongside. There are times when people do have ill intensions or have broken our trust. Sometimes role changes or people moves are required to get to solution and this can be achieved with sensitivity and respect.  But in any case, confronting reality, both the good and the bad, together leads to better outcomes in my experience.

I heard of an example recently where a high-performing executive at a prominent company decided to take a side step into a supporting role in recognition that the business needed something beyond what he could give. This highly admirable act demonstrates not only self-awareness and servant leadership, but also the commitment to face the truth and follow that truth to whatever conclusions are best for the business. 

This kind of openness and frank communication can re-center the organization on the “why” of your business or project, what success looks like, and what is required to move forward.

Ray Padron recently shared a quote from Gail Hyatt which posed that “people lose their way, when they lose their why.” So true.

And ironically, the best way to find your “why” is to start with your “who.” After all, you can’t be obsessed about your customers, if you don’t know who they are. You can’t set priorities or align your time and resources to high-impact projects, if you don’t know who you are serving. You can't own your business, if you are seeking others to blame. And we can’t determine or achieve the “why” of our business without the people “who” are our colleagues, team mates, stakeholders, and co-collaborators.

Our mission, should we accept it, is to see people as people and to find a way together.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse.

Advice to New CMOs: Be Comfortable Being Uncomfortable

In my latest Forbes article, I interviewed Martyn Etherington from Teradata.  Read the full article here.

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Martyn Etherington knows what it takes to drive change from the office of the CMO and has plenty of lessons for new chief marketing officers.  In fact, he himself is practicing being new. Six short months ago he joined Teradata, a data analytics company, drawing upon his extensive executive marketing experiences at IBM (Sequent Computer Systems), Danaher  (Tektronix), Mitel Networks, and Cisco Systems 

Being new on the executive team, the need to align sales and marketing, a perennial priority, is even more sharply in focus. “Sales and marketing can be like the Montagues and Capulets from Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet,” Etherington joked.  Even at the best run companies, alignment is hard won.

Etherington’s priorities these first few months he believes have set the foundation for the alignment that will be needed for transformation and hold some lessons for any CMO starting with a new company.

Goal Setting – tied to revenue and relationships

“The relationship between sales and marketing can also be, at times, as Winston Churchill described the U.S. and U.K., ‘two nations separated by a common language,’” he continued. “The key is shared language and goals,” not just perceptions. “We have one shared goal and that is ‘Growth’,” he summarized.

Etherington emphasizes that marketing should have intimacy with the business and that compensation should be tied to their sales peers’ goals. “I want them to know where are we regarding revenue, quarter to date, year to date,” he explains. “Are we growing quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year? Are we growing at or above market? Are we taking share? How does our collective sales funnel look?”  For this, he looks at the size, shape, velocity, and quality of the overall pipeline and then asks “How can we help improve the funnel?” to keep the focus on action. As he has found “without these KPIs, without this insight and intimacy of our business, we are stumbling in the dark.”

Every organization would like to get better at attribution, but Etherington is “less concerned with perfect attribution, or optics. I would much rather spend time determining our impact on the funnel and top-line growth,” he said.  It starts and ends with setting good Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and a desire to “do good, not just look good.”

“Other than my boss, my number one priority was the partnership with my sales peer Eric Tom, our chief revenue officer,” Etherington offers.  And those relationships extend through the sales organization and across between leaders in sales and marketing.

Etherington suggests that a good way to begin these conversations in your first few days on the job is to ask sales peers the following question: “If we were to nuke marketing, what would happen to our business?”  This can solicit a range of responses, all useful for building a relationship and getting on the same page as to the priorities.

“Sometimes you get the answer ‘nothing would happen.’ Others attribute a portion of their sales results to marketing,” Etherington recalls.  He has found that based on his B2B marketing experience, “organizations believe that, ideally, that they should get 20-30 percent of their funnel from marketing.” Some industries vary depending on the complexities of their offerings, sales cycle and whether they have a direct or indirect or blended go-to-market strategy, but no matter how much reliance there is on marketing to build the pipeline, it is important to create positive dependencies between marketing and sales that ties back to those shared goals and the relationships that are being fostered between the functions.

Teradata has an enterprise focus and sells direct.  The sales are consultative and high touch. In this model, it may be more simple to track attribution to marketing than other go-to-market models, but it still requires vigilance and a focus on the right things. “Transparency is key,” he adds. “You need operational rigor around your own metrics. They need to be real and they need to be metrics that you can manage versus just monitoring.” As I have also found in my career, marketing has lots of things they can measure, but not all things that are measurable are important or lead to action. “We are interested in conversion and ultimately conversion," he continued. "That is more important to us than vanity metrics like touch points. We want to work with our sales peers to drive growth.”

Culture – a mindset change supported by systems

“You can pontificate all you like about alignment, insight, impact and effectiveness, but you have to have a business perspective, an appetite for operational rigor and a culture of continuous improvement to affect change,” Etherington challenged. You have to operationalize the strategic plan, with the right structures and systems in place, to achieve it. He has worked for companies with exacting business operating systems, like Danahar, with red, yellow, and green dashboard indicators and he has taken the opportunity to apply best practices of lean to his team at Teradata for strategy deployment, KPIs, action plans, and “root cause countermeasure” approaches. “We implemented weekly stand-ups and have begun a standard monthly marketing operations review to make sure we are making progress and attaining our KPI planned metrics,” he explained.

Cultures are known to change slowly.  “We are at the beginning of a journey,” Etherington said. “We have begun our transformation. We have our strategic objectives in place, aligned with our company goals. We have our KPIs defined and populated, we have supporting action plans and forums for us to inspect and improve.”  It’s a start, but there is more to do.  “We don’t have all the answers,” he continued. “How much can we say that we contribute to our business? With only our first monthly marketing operations review under our belt, I can say not as much as we ought to be. Now we know where we are, our jumping off point, we have only one way to go!”

Any experienced executive will tell you that change - at the scale of a business transformation and a redefinition of what marketing means to an organization overall - can test the patience of the leadership and the organization.  It can lead to organizational fatigue, misalignment, or impatience to rush to answers when the problems are not yet fully understood.  Etherington finds that the power to achieve results first begins with a willingness to see the problems, in blaring detail, and face them head-on.

“One of the biggest challenges when moving from activity-based marketing to outcome-based marketing is the transparency, accountability, and responsibilities that come with that approach,” he explains. “We are in the infancy of our marketing effectiveness journey and most of our KPIs are currently in red.”  The ambitions of the organizations and the standards set by the team are not yet reflected in the reality of the business. “That is not a comfortable feeling for many people,” he observed. “We are all raised to covet the gold star or turn a red metric into the green.” Everyone wants to do well and wants to do well as quickly as possible.

“One philosophy ingrained in me from my time at Danaher was the notion of ‘living in the red.’ In monthly operations reviews, if your KPI was green, we did not talk about it. It’s good. It’s at plan. What we wanted to discuss was the red KPIs - the variances from plan.”  Living in the red means to ask questions like:

• What is the cause of the miss?
• What are the corrective actions underway?
• Are we making progress against our goal?
• Are the specifics in the supporting action plans to ensure we are executing strongly towards the KPI?
• Are we stretching enough?

The focus needs to be constantly brought back into focus on the things that need attention, action, or course correction.  “It could be many months before that KPI would go to green, but it forces you to think differently, adopt a growth mindset and be ok, although not comfortable, being in the red,” Etherington instructed. “The confidence comes as you use the tools and know that with applied discipline eventually, you will achieve sustainable results.”  Etherington knows this from experience.  “It works," he advocates. "It is proven and has been to a large part a major contributor to my success and some of the companies for which I have worked.”  Leaders have to be comfortable being uncomfortable and help their organizations do the same.

Of course, there are a host of strategies and tactics within these organizing principles that the CMO and teams need to implement from the start to be successful in the new role and for years to come. Seeking out data to inform decisions, building a great team and structuring them for success, influencing and being influenced by customers, and building a culture of continuous improvement take judgment and time.  Focusing on the shared goals, and the systems and mindsets required to achieve them, even if they are uncomfortable at first, is a great place to start for any new CMO leading an organization to green.

Containing Multitudes

“Do I contradict myself?  Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large – I contain multitudes.” – Walt Whitman

On Grief

“Grief does not change you, Hazel.  It reveals you.” – John Green

Putting STEAM In STEM

There is a big push in education and business around Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, or STEM. In parallel, there is a movement to put Art into that acronym (thus STEAM). There is controversy around it and opinions swirl.

The purpose of the STEM movement I have seen is to promote technical careers to under-represented groups (namely women and people of color). If that is true, including the Arts dilutes that. My experience is that women and other historically disenfranchised groups are well represented in art.  Even creative businesses, like advertising and marketing communications, is heavily populated by women. Perhaps that isn’t the case in more traditional fine art roles or in related fields like architecture. But in any event, I wondered if adding Art didn’t de-focus the emphasis on the hard sciences that STEM was meant to promote.

That said, I am a believer of the power at the intersection of art and science.  Design and technology is what drives adoption. Creativity is required, especially in the dynamic world of technology propelled by innovation. I am not opposed to STEAM, in fact, I have lived it in my own life and career.

• Hailing from a family of artists, I grew up exposed to live music, theater, and visual arts
• Even in technical roles of digital demand generation and product strategy, carving out time to redesign our office environment and building experience centers
• Creating a new category of architectural video walls enabling the sculptural and non-linear use of video screens as a finish material
• Actively partnering with video artists, licensed fine artist work for use on digital canvases, and promoted at places like Art Basel and Design Week in New York and Miami
• Introducing new digital visualization technologies with groups like TEDxPortland and the Society for Experiential Design (SEGD)
• Writing and delivering courses, certified for AIA continuing education, about video wall technologies
• With empathy for customers, pioneering the use of virtual reality and visualization tools for the marketing of digital products in physical spaces
• Being named on a patent for an interactive touchscreen technology
• Rolling out identity systems and serving as the creative and UX lead for a number of projects
• ·As a student of history, marveling at the technical innovations which artists have pioneered in the field of material science, color, and perception

What do you think about STEM vs STEAM? 

How have you used art in your work as a technologist, or visa versa?

Photo courtesy of USDigitalLiteracy

Thinking Ahead

“A year from now, you’ll wish you had started today.” – Karen Lamb

Jennifer to Contribute to Forbes

Starting this month, I will begin contributing for Forbes.com writing about customer-centric marketing and the alignment of sales and marketing. My work for the CMO Network will highlight who does it best and what we can learn from their success.

You will be able to access all my articles and follow my work here.

I am very excited about writing for Forbes.com, as this topic has the potential to impact so many businesses and their customers. We've all seen it done well and done poorly and had it impact our experience as a consumer or business customer.

Knowing that every company and organization has room to improve, I will be focusing on success stories from across a wide variety of industries, organization types, and business models. I want to use this column to amplify best practices that have helped build brand, serve customers, and facilitated growth.   

Even before my first article is published, I have already had the privilege of interviewing top researchers in the field, as well as practitioners in marketing, sales, and general management leadership roles.  I am anxious to share what I am learning along the way.  Follow my articles, like, comment, and share which will help direct me to how I can help you become better at your craft.

I am also mindful and grateful of my friends, colleagues, and mentors, and now my editors, who have so generously helped me make this platform possible. Special thanks to Moira Vetter with ModoModo, Dan Bruton, Susan Clark, and Kami Toufar especially in their encouragement along the way. 

As leaders and customer advocates, we have an opportunity and responsibility to continue to  learn from the best and develop ourselves and our teams to better serve our customers. I sincerely hope that my articles help and inspire you in this worthy mission.

P.S.  If you know of companies or organizations who align internally and focus on customers particularly well, I welcome your recommendations and introductions. They can connect with me on my blog, Twitter or LinkedIn. As this is a side endeavor for me, and there is much ground to cover, I ask in advance for your patience with me as I follow up on these recommendations. 

Your Biggest Experiment

“Live your life as an experiment.” – Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

On Choice

“We only see what we look at.  To look is an act of choice.”  John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Focus

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – Socrates

On Seeing

“Seeing too much is seeing nothing.” – Kai Wong, director of the China: Through the Looking Glass exhibit at the MET

Read more by Jennifer Davis about finding your focus.

Jennifer Shares Hiring Strategies in Virtual Keynote

Marketing holds the potential to drive business strategy and growth for the long-term, but only if you have the right talent in your organization. 

I had a chance to share some thoughts and techniques on how to hire marketers with great strategic thinking and business skills to build out your leadership teams.  This keynote presentation is now available on OnConferences, a virtual conference featuring business leaders across multiple industries and functional disciplines.

In this talk, I share the advice I give to CEOs when they are hiring marketing talent.  This same advice applies up and down the organization to make sure you have the strategic horsepower to fuel your growth.

The View from Afar

“Why do you go away?  So that you can come back.  So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors.  And the people there see you differently, too.  Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” – Terry Pratchett

Mistakes Make You

“You don’t make mistakes.  Mistakes make you.” – from The Last Word movie

Read more by Jennifer Davis about making mistakes. 

On Planning

“What and How nearly never work without knowing first the Who and the Why” – Jennifer Davis

Where Growth Stops

Growth stops when you lose the tension between where you are and where you could be.”

Hire Your Own Manager

When an organization needs to add leadership, especially in times of growth and change, the process is fairly straightforward: the senior leader crafts a job and gets help from HR or an executive recruiter to find the best candudate. But what if it worked differently?

What if you helped recruit and hire your own boss?

It is not uncommon for staff to be involved in the interview process and some companies incent employees for referrals, but I am thinking beyond that. What if you thought about what you wanted in a manager and what you thought the business needed in a leader, and actively helped recruit that person into your organization?

Here is 7 reasons why reverse recruiting makes sense. 

1.      You can make sure there is a fit

Each person comes to the job with certain strengths and interests. You have yours and your colleagues have theirs. Who better to recommend the kind of leader that will compliment and cultivate these strengths than you? What are you looking to develop and in what areas do you want to be mentored? Hiring your boss is a great way to ensure that you are getting what you need from your career. It is a wonderful thing when the development path of individual employees and the business needs align, for a long time. And being involved in hiring your manager can start building this tenure and growth into your career at your current employer.

2.      You can be more successful

If you select the manager that is the right mix of mentor and challenger, you will be successful which will translate into more opportunities for you, and your colleagues. And if there is a good fit and complimentary skills, you may find yourself being able to focus on the parts of your job that you excel at, making you even more successful longer term.

3.      You will be happier

Extensive research, like this article in Forbes, has been done on why people leave companies and the analysis shows that people rarely leave companies, they leave managers. Employee engagement begins, and can end, here. Your direct manager has more impact on your job satisfaction than virtually any other factor in your work life, more than compensation, work environment, or specific responsibilities. Choosing wisely, can have an impact on your life, stress-levels, and overall career success.

4.      You position yourself as a leader

Let’s say you are a senior marketing director for a company who needs a Chief Marketing Officer, a Controller, or a head of operations at your company. Do you want to wait until the CEO appoints a new leader or brings in a few final candidates for you to interview or should you be more proactive? To make a recommendation for a new hire is a risk, but no matter how they ultimately end up doing in the role, you having a conversation with leaders in your company to make suggestions on what they should hire and giving them some people to consider, helps position you as a leader and someone committed to the cause of growth.  If you go proactively to the CEO to find out more about the role and how you can help recruit the best candidate, it shows that you are a committed, ambitious, and high-performing employee who connected in the community.

5.      You learn more about your business and the objectives of your boss

When you ask senior leadership what they are looking for in a new hire and how their performance will be evaluated, you are getting a fresh perspective on what a successful candidate might look like and how you can help them be successful once they are onboard. Many functional leaders or individual contributors are surprised to hear how much of their boss’ performance measures are based on things like enterprise value (ie, stock price, market share) rather than on successful execution of activities. This perspective can make you a better leader in the business, as well, able to tie your own activities with the overall business goals.

6.      You can influence the company

Those conversations about the role and success measures, can also put you in a position of influence. What is missing from the job description that you think is critical, but that the hiring manager might not be aware? What competencies would make this person successful leading your team? Want more diversity in your organization? Hire a woman or person of color. Ask what is changing in the function or market that might cause the company to want to adapt what they are looking for and recommend accordingly.

7.      You broaden your network

When helping to recruit, don’t stop with the people you already know. It is always better to build your network before you need it and there is no better way to do so than to reach out to see if people are interested in working for your company. You have something to offer them. If they aren’t interested, they might know someone who is who they can introduce you to. Ask your college professors for recommendations, see who serve on non-profit boards that you respect, attend networking meetings or industry association events and ask around. Scour LinkedIn. Referrals will lead to referrals and pretty soon you have met a dozen people who might be your next boss, at your current employer if things go well, or elsewhere in the future. Or maybe some of them may go to work for you someday.

In his book, Under New Management, David Burkus describes how teams are built at IDEO, the legendary industrial design firm. The teams pick their leader, the leader doesn’t pick the teams. The talent gets to pick their place in the organization chart, under the manager and on the projects that make the most sense to them. Managers who find themselves without teams, can’t execute projects and are probably not in the organization long. I imagine those with too many employees, find themselves with more interesting work and bigger responsibilities and reward. What started as an experiment years ago, still permeates the culture. Perhaps it is time for your organization to do an experiment of its own.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse.

On Customer Success

You own the problems that create problems for your customers.  They might not be your fault, but they are your problem.

For more about your relationship with customers, read "Customer Feedback."

Color Code Your Life

Several years ago, my young daughter was helping me organize my work office after a move down the hall.  The stacks of business books that I had accumulated over the years (and referred to periodically and wanted to keep handy) promised us a very long evening. Then I considered explaining to her how to organize them, by theme or if we should painstakingly alphabetize them. It occurred to us that the easiest (and dare I say, the fastest) way would be to organize them by spine color in rainbow series. Red book covers lead to orange, then yellow, green, blue, purple, and then white and, finally, black. It took only a few minutes to organize the books this way and it had a few surprising and pleasant consequences.

It turned the practical into art:  I can’t tell you how many people have walked into my office and commented on my books.  “Did you organize your books by color?” they would ask as they smiled. This library of business books became an art installation which people wanted to talk about.  It really does look great and brings a smile to my face, and to office guests, every time. Books became a conversation piece and helped my guests and colleagues get to know me better, not just because of the titles on the shelf, but how they were arranged.  And I can tell you that I really like authors who write red books and orange books are trending.

It made things easier to find: Come to find out, I can rarely remember the exact title or the name of the author, but 9 times out of 10 I can picture a book’s cover.  This narrows the search considerably and within a few seconds I have the volume in hand. I know others’ might not have this kind of visual memory, but I suspect many of us do.  Forget the Dewey Decimal System, this is the hue-ey decimal system (I couldn’t resist). This is especially useful as I have recently relocated across the country to Atlanta, and found it was easy (and fun) to set up my home office for maximum productivity using this now familiar system.

It sparked my imagination:  As art often does, my book arrangement sparked new ideas.  I am working now on a system to organize my Outlook calendar to align appointments, meetings, and blocked time to my goals using color cues.  For me, new business development work is green, one big project is yellow, family priorities are purple, and, naturally, any time spent building out my new network in Atlanta is red (the ubiquitous color of the Falcons, Hawks, Atlanta United, UGA, GSU, and classic Atlanta brands like Coca-Cola, Chick-Fil-A, and newcomer, Honeywell…need I go on?).  Perhaps for the freelancer or consultant reading this article any paid “billable hour” work is blue and any office work is orange. You can do this manually or using conditional formatting, it can be done auto-magically as you create or accept calendar entries. You can use a more sophisticated time or task tracking tool (like a CRM) for even more insights.  Turning my calendar into a visual dashboard of how I am spending my time is generating new insights and changing my behavior. The adage is true that you manage what you measure. Try it yourself and at a glance, you can see if you are investing your time – your most precious and limited commodity – fully to your goals and priorities.

Now you might be asking a different question: why do I hold on to these physical books in a world of instant Internet searches, ebook readers, and, frankly, when often the Harvard Business Review synopsis of the book is better than the long form?  It is because I know it works for me. I like books. I dog-ear the pages and write in the margins.   Sure, I sometimes snap quotes into Evernote for future blog posts, but in the meantime, I like them stacked on my night stand and standing in a colorful array in my office.

And, I hope that one day when I write my New York Times best seller, you will all still have bookshelves, maybe even sorted by color, and will appreciate the hue of the book jacket I chose.

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This article was originally published on The Buzz on April 6, 2017.  Special thanks to Jeff Hilimire from Dragon Army for renewing inspiration to color code my calendar.

A Secret About Excellence

“Only a mediocre person is always at his best.” – W. Somerset Maugham, Playwright