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I was recently reintroduced to a great definition of branding (thanks, Lisa). The best-selling author Seth Godin wrote “a brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for a customer or client’s decision to choose one product or service over another.” This provides a bit of a framework that one can use to evaluate the strength of your brand, how you think about your brand building activities, and how you track and measure success of your business.
Expectations: the standard to which your brand is measured
Expectations can take many forms and can come from multiple directions. They can be set when a customer or potential customers sees your advertisements, hears a warranty claim, or is told about a product or service by a trusted colleague or friend. Sometimes expectations are set by competitors or by those performing services in other industries that raise customer requirements. Managing expectations is a key contributor to all successes. The dynamics of expectations exist in personal relationships and shows in company stock prices. The same holds true for companies wishing to build a brand. Understanding the expectations and requirements of the customer is critical. As Clayton Christensen said in his “theory of jobs to be done”:
When we buy a product, we essentially "hire" it to help us do a job. If it does the job well, the next time we're confronted with the same problem, we hire the product again. If it does a crummy job, we "fire" it and we look for an alternative.
The evaluation of the product as being well-suited for the job or “crummy” can be expressed as the ratio of how well the product actually performed as compared to how well it was expected to perform.
When I helped grow the desktop monitor business back in the early days of flat panels, we offered an industry-leading 3-year warranty with 2-day advanced replacement. Something we eventually named the “Customer First” warranty. Unheard of in the industry, but it immediately built trust for an unknown brand in a new category of product that few had purchased yet. It contributed to a fast growing and sustainable business. Sometimes, as the authors Eddie Yoon and Christopher Lochhead propose, “first mover advantage” goes not to the original innovator or even the company first to market, but to the one who understands their customer best and creates the category.
So, ask yourself how well do you know the expectations of your customers? What is the problem they are trying to solve? How well do you solve it (in their evaluation, not yours)? Who in your industry “owns” the standard for expectations for your product or service? Who is setting the standard for quality, delivery, and performance that are now table stakes in your industry? What can you do to set customer expectations higher in a place where you are better suited to deliver than others? How can you fashion a warranty or service pledge that sets the bar? How do you measure customer satisfaction and is it truly capturing the expectations of your customers? Are there some unfulfilled expectations in your category, or in other industries, that you could uniquely address for your customers?
Memories: the impressions your brand leaves behind
Memories of your brand are centered in the customer experience. User experience (UX), often manifested in user interfaces (UI), or the larger field of customer experience (CX) has been of growing interest to companies and is seen as a key differentiator to those who do it well. But memories are experiences reflected upon. The American philosopher and educational reformer, John Dewey, once said, “we do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.” Experiences must be harvested for insights for true learning or change to occur. Memories of brand interactions is what builds your brand and shared memories build your reputation.
Because memories are not facts, you can frame how people remember. When online retailing start, the idea of returning a product through the mail was a hassle. Companies thought of returns as a necessary evil of doing business. Then came disrupters. Nordstrom is said to have allowed a return of tires (even though they don’t sell tires). Zappos, the online footwear retailer bought by Amazon, likes to say they were a “customer service company that happened to sell shoes” and offered free returns from the start. This was deemed genius. They created a customer by making it possible to comfortably buying a personal product like shoes over the internet. Even though some people would buy two sizes to send back one, most still viewed returns as something to avoid. Returns were still reverse logistics. Today, there are companies like StitchFix (personalized styling) and Warby Parker (prescription eyewear) that rely on returns as an expected part of their business model. This reframing, enabled by data, is where business model innovation lies.
What do you do to measure the experience that people have with your product or services? Is there anything negative in their perception that might be reframed to solve a customer pain point? What is their experience with you before they use your product or service in the sales or marketing processes of your company? What is their experience after they use the product as they seek out service, support, or higher utilization? How do your customers describe their interactions with your brand after the fact, when they are recommending you to a friend, or warning a friend never to use your product? Where did they experience frustration or a feeling of success? What emotions are associated with your product or service? How to you measure the weight of a memory?
Stories: how your brand lives forever
Stories are powerful. The stories brands tell about themselves, or more importantly about their customers, can have a meaningful impact. Brands build trust by talking about their history of innovation or featuring case studies from other respected brands. But even more powerful is the role that your brand plays in the stories of your customer. A customer holding a Starbucks cup is not telling the a story about a coffee grower or roaster. It might be part of a larger narrative where a person is hard-working, prosperous, and deserving of a personalized reward like a tall, double, non-fat, caramel latte. Wearing Nike shoes might not just support their arches on the track, but reflect their belief in personal achievement or social justice. The old adage “no one gets fired for buying an IBM,” spoke to the trust that the brand built among corporations. It was the story individuals would tell about themselves when they, too, bought an IBM and were part of the club of insiders who knew best.
You might think you are in the business of synthesizing chemicals, renting hotel rooms, or decorating cupcakes, but to your customers, your brand might very well be a prop or a setting of their own unfolding story. Your product might compete with other categories in fulfilling the emotional needs of your customers. Does expertly navigating through the city with Waze have the same emotional payback as getting unique access to a concert because you hold a premium Mastercard account? Is your service contract helping your customer qualify for a promotion? Your product could not just be something they use or something they do, but it reflects on who they are. This is where contextual insights are so important.
What do customers do immediately before and after using your product or service? How does their choice of brand affect their self-worth or the perceptions of others? What other products or offering might fulfill the same emotional job as your product, but in another category and what can you learn from them? What emotions arise when customers tell others about your brand? Where else do these emotions show up? What else can your customer do because they are using your product or service? Do you need to add new kinds of research, like ethnographic studies, to your toolbox to contextualize your customer’s buying journey for new insights?
Relationships: how your brand becomes personal
Relationships are important in all industries and business categories. Sometimes the relationship is with a person: the account manager whom they consult with and trust, the executive who they admire, or with the counter clerk who knows that they like extra cream cheese on their bagel. Some leaders, of companies big and small, are the manifestation of their brand (or perhaps their companies are the manifestations of their personalities). These human relationships are influenced by corporate culture, the language and customs of your social environment, and the mechanisms of conversations and human interaction. And for the purposes of branding, relationships can be defined broadly at all the critical touchpoints.
A family favorite movie from my childhood was “The Music Man.” In it, the little town of Gary, Indiana waits with bated breath as the Wells Fargo wagon approaches. It carries important necessities. And, more perhaps more importantly, it contains the mystery and delight of wonders of far-off lands. Raisins from Fresno, grapefruit from Tampa, and salmon from Seattle. Even a canon for the courtyard square. As was moistly sung by a young Ron Howard, in that wagon “could be somethin’ special just for me.” I don’t remember them mentioning the name of the Wells Fargo wagon driver. The relationship was with the promise of the wagon (the same wagon, you will note, is still featured prominently in the Wells Fargo bank logo). The relationships that business-to-business sellers have with their customers can be so valuable that in mergers or acquisitions the key sales relationships are measured and secured with special stay-on incentives. In other industries, the relationships are more fungible and often scaled to objects or interfaces. The relationship with the brown uniform of a UPS driver or the highly-trained manners of a Chick-fil-A employee.
So, ask how would your customers describe the relationship they have with your employees? What other aspects of your business or touchpoints do customers think about in relational terms? Where, how, and with “whom” do they have conversations, make requests, or receive services? Who or what do they trust with their credit card number or identity? How do they invest in the relationship with your physical product or software tool? How do you measure engagement and loyalty? How do they engage with your brand communications, events, or other points of contact? How would you value or prioritize these relationships as they contribute to loyalty or customer lifetime value?
Customer Decision: the ultimate test
These dimensions of a brand are not mutually exclusive, of course. The relationship someone has with a software app is informed by the user experience, what they have come to expect, and makes memories that can be shared. In the combination is brand preference and loyalty.
For the famed musical, Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda penned the following lyrics:
Let me tell you what I wish I’d known
When I was young and dreamed of glory
You have no control
Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.
The same is true of your brand. You can decide which research and development projects you fund, what metrics you measure, and how you lead your organization, but you don’t get decide if your product or service achieves the glory you wished for it. You don’t get to decide how customers adopt or engage with your brand. Although you try, you don’t even control how people talk about you where it matters most. All those decisions are squarely in the hands of your customers. They are the ones making memories and telling stories. All you can do is to make it easier for them to craft good ones.
This article originally appeared on LinkedIn.
Photo by Vitalis Hirschmann on Unsplash @hirschmann_photography.
A lot has been written and tried with regards to content marketing, account-based marketing (ABM), and advertising in all of its forms. New regulations, like GDPR, are sending marketers back to the drawing board to craft campaigns and mechanisms for communication with their customers and going into a new year, it is a good time to step back and think about the idea of relevance. Drew Neisser, founder and CEO of Renegade, is an author, podcast host and advisor to CMOs and leadership teams on having courageous and courteous strategies. He has some insights that will help business leaders rethink the basics.
Listen Like Your Life Depends On It (because it does)
Before we can make sure companies are as good at listening to their customers as they are talking at them, we must “start with the reality that just about every product or service is moments away from being disrupted by a competitive offering,” Neisser said provocatively. “That sense of urgency needs to inform how brands approach their listening activities. It needs to be a company-wide priority, not just the responsibility of one department.” There are numerous ways to conduct this research. “Customer satisfaction surveys, brand health tracking, in-product rating, and social listening are table stakes,” he said. They are necessary but insufficient. “These necessities will help identify shortcomings in your product and service offerings that you must address ASAP and let your customers know that you’re at least trying to be responsive,” he added. But defensively listening for problems or risks will not lead you to major breakthroughs. “Here you’ll need to do a different kind of listening,” he continued. “One that requires genuine creativity and foresight, reinterpreting what you hear, discarding the obvious for the courageous.” Insights that lead to focus in your communications and the direction of your product development are the ones that are your long-term lifeline.
Ask Whether Your Content Deserves to Live
“Sadly, most branded content is not cutting through,” Neisser observed. “With more than eight of 10 marketers embracing content marketing, the increase in blog posts, videos, emails, webinars, social shares, and podcasts, among other formats, has dramatically outpaced the hours in the day for actually consuming this stuff.” Marketing organizations don’t want to be left behind their more verbose competitors often drive towards consistent and predictable communications that keep their brand in the forefront of their customer’s mind; thus the “content calendar” is born. Neisser advises customers in a different direction entirely. “Content calendars typically push brands into a puddle of mediocrity,” he said. “Rather than focusing on creating truly inspired content that is unique, engaging and imminently sharable, marketers become slaves to their self-imposed schedules, rushing out content that is of little interest or value to anyone.” Instead of inspecting and interrogating each post or asset for its value, the brand keeps pouring announcements out assuming they are valuable.
“These calendars are brand-centric, not customer-centric since no prospect or customer is going to ask on any given Friday, ‘Oh, gee, where’s that email from brand x?’ unless, of course, your content is extraordinary.”
“Content calendars may mask the absence of a true strategy, one built around an insight that helps prospects reimagine how a particular product or service could change their work lives,” Neisser offered. If you don’t know how your product or service will change a customer’s life, then they may not want to hear from you yet. Not all the content you produce is deserving of the attention you are asking your customers to pay.
Zig When Others Zag
“What is working in marketing is what’s always worked in marketing – a courageous strategy that sets up an artfully told story,” he offered. “One expression is courage is to zig while others zag. For instance, Airbnb recently sent me a travel magazine.” That’s right a print magazine at a time when many are saying print is dead.” It is an interesting and unexpected choice for a company born digital, but it made an impression. “I spent an hour devouring the fascinating experiences shared from cover to cover,” he recalled. “This magazine is a vivid expression of Airbnb’s unique promise to provide an immersive and indigenous travel experience.”
This unexpected approach can turn up in more than just your marketing campaigns. It can be a differentiating feature in the product itself that stems from the customer insights. It could be a way of doing with the company that makes it easier or faster. It could be the style and voice of the brand that helps it stand out in the marketplace and be more relevant to its target customers. It’s the “Blue Ocean Strategy” that helps brands create distance between them and their customers and even create new categories.
Decision By Committee is an Invitation to Personalize
Metrics like email open rates or click-through conversions can be misleading, even when you think things are trending well. “Marketers are shifting how they measure the effectiveness of content campaigns as marketing automation and account-based marketing software make it easier to track engagement,” he said. Whether in B2B or B2C selling environments, “most are able to track a prospect’s journey from awareness to interest, to readiness based on their interactions with content.”
In the consumer world, individuals are increasingly relying on peer reviews and social recommendations and in the B2B landscape, “we are definitely in the era of the decision by committee and as a result, the customer journey is more complex and convoluted than ever.” Traditional “journey-tracking can lead to false positives.”
Consider this example:
A CMO could express interest in an e-commerce platform by watching a demo but her colleagues in IT, finance, security and merchandising may have a completely different solution in mind. Six months into the process, the CEO could suddenly jump in and essentially restarts the investigation. Generating another new lead for sales. In this example, the buying committee is likely to take over a year to make a decision and the CMO is unlikely to able to control the process, even if they are the original sales qualified lead and might sign the agreement in the end. The enlightened B2B marketer is prepared for this situation, creating all sorts of tools and resources that address the proclivities of all the participants. For example, they could create an ROI or TCO calculator for the CFO, a security report by a respected 3rd party for the CISO (chief information security officer), a functionality comparison chart for the merchandiser, a service program overview for the customer experience team, a strong customer reference for the CEO, and a peak under-the-hood with third-party developers.
Marketing might call it an MQL and then sales talks to the person and might even reclassify it as an SQL, only to have unconverted lead months or years later and the finger pointing begins. This is where ABM can play a role as it “helps resolve this age-old dilemma since it requires both Sales and Marketing to agree on the prospect list. From there, ABM allows for tracking of various engagements.” These can be business specific. “For example, at least one ABM system integrates FedEx shipping data, so a salesperson knows exactly when a package arrives and who signed for it thus allowing them to plan exactly when to make the follow-up call.” Others tie closely to social listening systems and provide multiple points of insights. “Assuming the target list was truly qualified, ABM makes it a lot easier for both Sales and Marketing to track what’s generating what kind of responses and when,” Neisser observed.
The more you know about your customers and their decision-making process, the more you can tailor your content and create a cadence of storytelling that isn’t by rote but is highly relevant to your customers.
This article was originally posted on Forbes.com.
You can’t talk about sales and marketing alignment without addressing the topic of “marketing marketing.” Some companies devalue marketing, considering it sales support or the group that makes things pretty (the “arts and crafts department” as a friend once quipped). Other companies strongly value the strategic importance of marketing in branding, product roadmap, strategic planning, and industry thought leadership. I have been blessed to work for organizations that model the latter, but I certainly am familiar with the former.
Forgive my tough love, but if you are a marketer and want to do a better job of marketing marketing in your organization (and building your own personal brand in the process), here are five questions to get you on the right path.
Would you having a seat at the decision-making table improve the company results?
You may be a great third baseman, knowing all the throwing and catching moves that make someone fantastic at executing this role in a baseball game, but if you don’t know how to read the scoreboard, understand sports commentary, or know how your actions impact the outcome of the game, you are not a very strong ball player. Similarly, if you don’t know how the score is kept in your business, you may not yet deserve a seat at the table to influence decision making.You must remember you are a business person. No matter your role in the company. When you are pitching a new idea or defending your budget, can you frame the results you hope to achieve in financial terms? Are you prepared to advise senior leadership to make strong economic decisions?
Now, this emphasis on financial results doesn’t prevent being a hands-on, servant leader who knows the technical details of the functional work and gets things done. That is required. It doesn’t prevent a business from having a strong mission, culture, and a balanced scorecard that includes giving back in the community. That is increasingly critical. But if you are tasked with allocating resources, you should be able to describe it in the language and thought process of a business leader.
Best advice: Lead with the financials. Don’t put them in the back of your deck or neglect to make a business case for the things you are doing. Tell your peers and boss what they can expect in return for the investments you are advocating, whether that be revenue, profit, lifetime customer value, or some other economic driver that your shareholders value. And if you aren’t sure how to do this, learn. Get a mentor. Take a class. Ask your CFO to lunch. Read a book. Be curious about the economic impact of your choices and let that guide your thinking.
What is the perception of you and that of marketing in your organization?
Before you would embark on a brand-building campaign, you would begin with data to identify the "as is" state and some visioning to determine "to be" state, so that the gap could be identified and closed with careful planning and execution. Often this “as is” state is determined with surveys, voice of the customer, share of voice analysis, or other tools, both formal and informal. Why not do the same thing within your organization to gauge how far away your brand perception within organization is from what you envision as the ideal?I also know that many business people have scars from previous wounds in the battle to align sales and marketing. You may be in an organization where the marketing function is mistrusted or undervalued, and that was true long before you were on the scene. Making positive change in this environment requires more individual attention: to understand where detractors are coming from, their concerns, and how to lead the organization forward.
Best advice: Know your strengths, weaknesses, and how you are perceived, personally and as a function. Asking a few trusted advisors within the company might give you enough to know your starting place. There are organizations - like Gartner ( CEB ), SiriusDecisions, or consultants - who can assess the strength of your team across a variety of frameworks. Determine how you want to be perceived and take action to close the gaps. Build alignment with peers with by delivering results and with open communication.
How are you mentoring and developing your team to be better practitioners and better business people?
You are responsible for the work output and business acumen of your team. Going back to my first point, one of my best practices is to give my marketing teams a primer in reading financial statements. This includes creatives, new college grads and interns, and experienced functional experts brought in for their expertise. As I said, everyone should know how the game of business is played. This is just one example of the learning objectives you can set for your team that set you apart. Other topics for exploration might include new practices in digital demand generation, insights into changing customer preferences, or developing a point of view of how technologies like AI, bitcoin and blockchain might impact your business.Best advice: Have a learning and development plan for each individual on your team and for the team overall. Assess your talent against your goals to make sure you have the right horsepower to get you there. Don’t be afraid to make changes or redefine roles as necessary. Think critically about what you in-source and outsource, through agencies, contractors, or service vendors to ensure you are maintaining the right amount of capability and curiosity in your organization.
What "marketing" does your customer really need?
This should probably be the first question, because anything that isn't seen and appreciated by customers, probably isn't worth doing (besides that which is required for regulatory, legal, or financial compliance). If the customer can’t see it, then it’s waste. What specific value does the customer perceive in the marketing you do?Are your empowered customers able to make better and faster decisions because of their access to technical information?
Are your resellers able to reduce their costs with more accurate quoting resources?
Are your clients able to achieve business results because of the value proposition of the products and services you provide?
Are they more loyal because of your differentiated customer service approach?
Do you make it easy for your customers in ways they value, throughout their customer journey?
Best advice: If you can’t think of examples of adding value that customers perceive, it is time to rethink your strategies. If customers only see themselves being “sold to,” then it is unlikely that you are providing them the value that will lead to long-term loyalty and maximize lifetime customer value. If you can think of solid examples, use these success stories as a platform to build credibility and to inform your investments of time, money, and energy.
and finally...
What is working that is worth repeating?
If you want to answer questions 1-4 and put a plan of action in place, a good place to start is to build upon your successes. Where are some situations that have gone well, that you think are worthy of replication and celebration? Use formal employee communications and informal networks to tell the story of the wins. Remember, you serve a role in building positive momentum throughout the whole organization when you market marketing and let everyone participate in the success.
Best advice: Go back and analyze a big order, a design win, a record-setting campaign, or a successful product launch and ask everyone involved how it came to be: the touch points with the organization, what sales tools or marketing resources were used, and what made the difference. Listen for examples of cross-functional teamwork. Use that case study as a cause for recognition, a chance to tell employees about how marketing is playing a role in your shared success, and as an example to replicate in future campaigns or plans. Make sure the CEO and the leadership team knows the story and ask for their help in congratulating those involved in the win.
These questions, and the follow-on discussions they have triggered, have helped develop my leadership and have been useful to leaders I have mentored. What has been your experience? What are your best practices around marketing marketing? Connect on Twitter or LinkedIn and let's continue the conversation.
This article was originally posted on Forbes.com.
In this latest post on Forbes, I talk about 5 ways to bridge the sales and marketing gap referencing experts from the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals, Microsoft, and other leading companies.
Special thanks to Rakhi Voria, Bob Perkins, Shelli Keagle, and Trip Jobe for lending their expertise to this piece.
_________
Pointing fingers is a familiar and repetitive motion between the sales and marketing groups of many companies. “It is very common to have marketing people complain that sales isn’t following up on leads and salespeople complain about the lead quality and quantity,” explains Bob Perkins, the founder and chairman of the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals (AA-ISP). According to the organization’s 2017 report “Top Challenges of the Inside Sales Industry,” as a category "Leads" was the number one challenge for both leaders and sales reps alike. It was listed as a larger concern than quota expectations by a factor of 2.5 to 1. “This challenge moved up from previous years and indicates lots of work and change needs to happen to solve this issue,” Perkins observed. “When sales reps are not meeting their quotas consistently, the pressure is high and there are even more visibility and attention on lead quality and quantity.” The same is true across the organization as expectations continue to rise on corporate performance and the importance of sales and marketing is emphasized.
Does this sound familiar? If so, here are five best practices and approaches to bridging the gap between sales and marketing that have worked successfully.
1. Take a Walk
“On the top of my list of best practices is to have marketing listen to live sales calls,” Perkins proposes. “In and of itself, this can cure some of the ills of misalignment and the complaints that sales and marketing have about each other.” How this happens will be different for each company. “You don’t want marketing listening into more calls than the inside sales manager,” Perkins counsels. “But they should listen regularly.” It could be a standing “call week” event set each quarter or it could be tied to a specific marketing campaign that needs monitoring and optimization. In any case, best practice is to sit together and use that time not only as an opportunity not only to hear the prospect call, but to debrief on what went well and what didn’t. “By having a marketing person walk into a sales group, you send a message. That you are open to feedback and want to learn how to make sales successful,” Perkins observed. That short walk across the building can go a long way. If a walk isn’t possible, use video conferencing. Perkins said that among his members, sharing in calls provided a powerful way to get early feedback on campaign effectiveness, rather than waiting for the lagging indicator of pipeline growth.
2. Open Your Meetings
Invite sales to participate in regular marketing staff meetings. Trip Jobe, whose experience in sales and marketing leadership spans senior roles at Oldcastle, Neehah Paper, Kimberly-Clark, and International Paper, had this advice. “When you can have sales or sales leadership involved in a marketing meeting, they typically gain a perspective on the many levels of execution needed to tackle a program.” Better to do this regularly and ahead of the action to get insights that are usable by both teams. “By getting the opportunity to hear the 'sausage making' process, they gain a perspective on many of the details involved in certain marketing programs,” Jobe continued. “Sales can also shed light on what it views as priorities or not.”
And that openness goes both ways. Perkins suggests that in his experience consulting with leading sales organizations “the best companies invite a marketing representative to sit on the weekly inside sales team meetings to share updates on campaigns and feedback from the field. Both learn about the campaigns from the first-hand experience."
However, how you conduct those meetings matter. “My experience is when you can create this two-way dialogue you will more quickly gain alignment,” Jobe advises. “When either sales or marketing is preaching one way, the other side will tend to start tuning out.” Keep it a conversation with opportunities for feedback and you can watch partnership building.
3. Build a Council
Sometimes, physical proximity, the scale, or the leanness of the team prevent regular cross-functional communications. In those cases, you can build representative councils to provide input. Jobe used this approach in several previous companies to create sales councils of several sales reps (3-6 at the most) involving them in 4-6 meetings a year (mostly over the phone, but maybe in person at a national sales meeting or industry convention) and matching them with key marketing leaders. He has used the council to get feedback on product development, but it can extend to other topics like lead generation campaigns, sales effectiveness, or new marketing initiatives. “This does a few things," Jobe observes. "First, it gets sales more involved in the business and their peers know they have an advocate working with marketing. Second, it gives those marketers a few sales reps they really get to know and can use them to set up a market visit.”
4. Visit a Customer
Shelli Keagle, managing director at Canvas Research, a boutique marketing research and strategy firm, says that “the customer is the great equalizer.” Without a deep understanding and empathy with the customer or consumer (or even the channel), both sales and marketing can lose. Jobe added that he is “a big believer in gaining an understanding of your environment, your customers' problems, what do they face every day. Within your company, the more that sales and marketing can understand each other and communicate effectively, the better the combined output will be.” So, send marketers out with field sales reps to visit customers, work trade show events together, and create opportunities for the team to connect with customers together both formally and informally. Facilitate listening sessions at customer gatherings. If face-to-face meetings are impractical or incomplete, conduct and share customer research and verbatims. Videotape customers using the product or talking of their experience with products or with the sales process. Encourage marketing people to build relationships with key accounts. All of these can be important sources of common truth for groups trying to work more effectively together.
5. Scale Your Approach
Rakhi Voria is a senior business manager at Microsoft who has helped to build out a world-class inside sales organization with eight different sales center locations around the world for this leading technology company. “We now have around 1,800 sellers in our organization,” Voria explains. “One thousand of those individuals were hired in the past year alone. Seventy percent of our team was hired externally from over 70 different companies.” This represents a huge scale and velocity for the organization and a great opportunity for shared listening, but at this magnitude, it is prohibitive to rely on informal structures around customer visits or call observation. While sales and marketing leaders in other organizations “have gotten creative about bridging the gap between marketing and sales by having the teams sit under the same umbrella organization or by physically putting marketing managers and salespeople side by side, however at Microsoft, marketing and sales report up through different organizations and marketing managers often aren’t based in inside sales center locations.”
They solved the problem in a different way on a scale that matched the enterprise. “As part of our organizational design planning, we invested in creating resources called Sales Program Leaders who are based in our sales centers and aligned by the solution areas that we sell,” Voria described. These roles are hybrid roles with elements of both marketing and sales. “These individuals meet with sellers daily to gather insights and are able to use these insights to drive improvements across our products and offerings, to remove blockers, and to take corrective actions to ensure achieving business goals.” They also provide feedback on demand response campaigns, corporate account or channel programs, and real-time from conversations with customers and partners.
And the results are reflecting the intention. Here is how Voria describes one success story.
We were recently engaged in a deal with a healthcare customer in Latin America who was struggling with one of our cloud product offerings. This feedback was shared with our marketing and operations team, and within a few months, we were able to offer a new SKU in the market that addressed the concerns directly and packaged the offering in a way that was well-suited for customers in similar situations. It is this kind of feedback loop that makes us better, not only aligning sales and marketing, but also aligning the company to our customers."
These five approaches are some of the best practices used by sales and marketing teams seeing better alignment and better-shared results. These steps are, in themselves, quite simple. Easy, in fact. Maybe not as easy as finger pointing, but a lot more effective. When done with purpose, they can build and maintain the bridge between sales and marketing and perhaps even create onramps for new ideas and approaches.
Disclaimers:
Rakhi Voria is a contributor to Forbes in her advisory capacity on the Business Development Council. Also, I collaborated with Canvas Research on some original investigation into the use of IoT and high-end entertainment products in specialty consumer segments which I presented in the “Integrated Life” seminar at the InfoComm conference produced by Avixa in June 2018.
I am humbled to work with the great editorial team at American Business Journals to share some insights on digital signage marketing.
In today’s hyper-competitive world, it’s not enough to offer up the right products and services in the hope that people will seek them out.
As the business consultant and blogger Peter Evans-Greenwood has pointed out, you must make your business a community hub or a religion. Otherwise, you resign yourself to being a commodity.
Companies like Apple and Harley Davidson get this, and they’ve worked hard to create a cult following for their brands. How? They don’t just sell a product, but a lifestyle. And it’s a lifestyle that their customers deeply identify with and are eager to adopt.
Today’s digital signage can help your company move beyond product features by turning your brand into a lifestyle that has broad appeal. Digital signage is fresh, it’s immersive, and it’s a way to clearly distinguish yourself from your competitors. From eye-catching digital window displays to interactive brand activations, digital experiences in the built environment can extend your brand messaging.
Here are four ways digital signage can help create a cult following for your brand:
It enables you to stand out from the crowd. A key way to move your brand from commodity to religion is to set yourself apart from the competition. Digital signage, with its ability to scale to enormous dimensions, has a huge “wow” factor that helps you do just that. It captures people’s attention from a distance and draws them in, giving your brand a powerful way to create lasting impact.
It can help you tell your story. Successful brands don’t just sell products and services. They tell stories that capture the imagination of their customers. Digital signage provides an influential medium for telling stories that resonate. With its ability to engage, digital signage enables marketers not just educate their customers, but to inspire them. In fact, it’s the ideal medium for offering up stimulating content that captivates the customers you want to reach.
It engages your customers. Brands that develop a cult following are extremely adept at engaging their customers, which is the opportunity that digital signage offers. With advanced touchscreen technology, for example, digital signage allows multiple users to interact with your brand, obtaining the information that interests them without affecting other users. In addition, facial recognition software can be built into digital signage to detect the presence of a person, collect demographic data, and then serve up highly targeted content that captures their interest.
It has the ability to go viral. People want to belong, and they love to share the experiences that excite them. Digital signage offers the opportunity to develop highly unique content that draws customers in, and motivates them to share with others. By creating stimulating visual content, you’ll soon have people telling their friends, and your installation will become a “must see” experience that turns prospective customers into loyal brand enthusiasts.
Digital signage can be a powerful ally as you work to transform your brand from a commodity into a cult following.
As you prepare for some well-deserved R&R at the end of the year, you might want to catch up on some leadership reading. Besides the perineal favorites like Seth Godin and the ever-prolific HubSpot blog, here are a few you might want to add to your reading list in 2017.
- Leadership Freak
Dan’s provocatively-titled blog focuses on servant leadership principles. - Lolly Daskal
Lolly’s writing focusing on self-awareness in leadership - Brian Solis
Brian writes about the intersections of technology and user experience with unique editorial - Conversation Agent
Valeria is a thoughtful writer who brings an academic bent to the broad-reaching topics related to communication and branding. - Heidi Cohen
Heidi prides herself on actionable marketing insights and she has some great data and infographics on content marketing. - Grow Blog
Mark has assembled a great team of contributors to his blog and the insights there are pithy and interesting. - Michael Hyatt
I personally like Michael’s quote card images (but you know I am a sucker for these). - John Maxwell
John’s posts are short and thought-provoking. - Skip Pritchard
Skip writes about leadership from a practical perspective. - Leadership Now
As an avid business book reader, I appreciate Michael’s summaries of new publications worth checking out. - Great Leadership
Dan and his guest collaborators, cover a range of topics from employee development to conflict. - The Context of Things
I like Ted’s style, which mixes trend watching with leadership with a dose of self-depreciation. - Leader Chat
David, who works for Ken Blanchard companies, publishes a mix of articles that are how-to for managers, especially those dealing with difficult issues. - Berger Leadership Blog
Dan is with the National Association of Federal Credit Unions (NAFCU) and he writes from a practical perspective about the challenges and rewards of leadership.
Here is a few more from marketing vendors who write about topics of particular interest to marketers.
- https://radius.com/blog/
although focusing pretty narrowly around Radius’ predictive tools, they provide some great round-ups, so when you are done with this list, check theirs out as well! - https://mention.com/blog/
Mention provides a range of services, but their blog is a treasure-trove of specific how-tos related to digital marketing and media monitoring. - https://www.semrush.com/blog/
semrush is another tool-kit maker and their blog is practical and action-oriented for marketers looking to up their digital game. - http://www.roojoom.com/blog/
The Daily Lead is about storytelling on digital platforms. - http://www.oktopost.com/blog/
Oktopost is a service provider who offers great content on B2B digital marketing techniques and best practices.
Okay for those keeping count at home, there are more than 17 on this list. There is simply a lot of great material out there and if you are interested in being a better leader in 2017, we can always use more inspiration.
"You don't want a theory about the customer. You want to really know the customer." - Norman Winarsky
While American Idol recently said farewell finishing its final season in 2015, it was once the most loved television show in America. Looking back on the early days of the show, we learned that there are three types of judges in this world.
- The Simon Cowells - harsh and brutally honest (ahem, rude) with their criticism, but usually accurate
- The Paula Abduls – sweet and supportive of all the contestants with genuine concern for their success
- The Randy Jacksons - fun loving, knowledgeable, with a knack for soul
So, I am set to judge the Max Awards for the American Marketing Association’s Portland Chapter this year and I am wondering what kind of judge I will be. Coming from the client-side, instead of the agency side, will I be quick to criticize or encourage? Will I keep my comments short (like the commercial break is approaching) or provide specific guidance? And like the open auditions, will the entries provide me enough information to truly judge the talent of the submissions?
Get your submission in by this Friday, August 26th and let’s find out what kind of judge I will be!
American Marketing Association’s Portland Chapter Max Awards 2016 are underway and Jennifer will be judging the projects to determine the most talented and exceptional marketers in the Portland area.
The submission window is open until August 26th and they welcome agency submissions in a variety of categories ranging from print to social, from branding to video, from email to integrated campaigns. The awards will be announced in September. Nominate your projects at http://ama-pdx.org/maxawards/.
I am joined on the judging panel by industry luminaries Kerry McClenahan, Tore Gustafson, Simon Tam, Bill Piwonka, and Lisa Williams.
It was a Throwback Thursday on Facebook, and the picture that popped up was of my daughter’s seventh birthday.
That year, the jewelry and accessory store Charming Charlie’s had opened in a local shopping center and had captured her imagination. I swear she could hear angels singing when she walked into the store that a friend dubbed the “IKEA of jewelry,” for its low prices, overwhelming product selection, and color-coded simplicity.
So that year, my daughter made an unusual request. She wanted to hold her birthday party at Charming Charlie’s. This is not a birthday party location. They have no seating. No party rooms. No catering packages. It is a retail store. I tried to talk her out of it, but when she was persistent, I thought I’d call the local manager and see about possibilities.
The manager was enthusiastic (although not sure how it would all work), and we started planning the event. She set up a small table in a corner of the store to organize. I limited the guest list and invited some girlfriends to be grownup chaperones. We planned a scavenger hunt around the store, a fashion show (where the girls picked accessories after getting different prompts like “fashion designer” or “your mom”), and we took a lot of pictures.
The girls had fun spending their small gift cards before we headed across the parking lot to a restaurant where dessert was served and “Happy Birthday” was sung.
And the whole experience taught me something about retail and GenZ (which is the emerging generation of my children).
• Shopping is an experience. Retail is a place: My daughter did not understand at all why a retail location couldn’t be an amusement park. She was entertained there and liked the shopping experience so much, she wanted to do it with friends and call it a party. To her, Charming Charlie’s represented an experience. I think that is the future of brand retail. Not just to move product in a location (and trust me, the company benefitted from our party being there that day), but to create a lasting experience and build the brand.
• Shopping is personal and expresses the shopper. Retail is impersonal and reflects the brand: Sure, she is a strong-willed 7-year-old, but my daughter thought the store was there to serve her and her friends. The shopping experience she wanted was a social one. And with some creative maneuvering, that is what we achieved. The store, in fact, was not built for her. And certainly not built for her birthday party. But the shopping experience we orchestrated absolutely was.
Today’s options for shopping and product procurement have never been broader. There are stores you can go to, websites you can visit, apps you can browse, styles you can pin, there are stylists you can hire, pop-up stores to discover, showrooms to browse, appointments with designers to make, and programs you can subscribe to. The choices are endless, and we expect more to come once Uber and Lyft drivers or drones start making package deliveries.
This creates opportunities in retail that cross beyond the brick-and-mortar stores to the full range of customer engagement that is possible. This also creates opportunities for the retail stores to become more experiential, more visual, more engaging--the kind of experience that you can’t have online or on social media.
Perhaps it won’t be long before retailers start offering birthday parties, bridal showers, and other milestone events.
This article was published on CMO.com.
Recently I heard NBA Commissioner Adam Silver speak about how professional basketball coverage is perishable. Even though games can be streamed days after they are actually played, they rarely are.
Silver said that years ago, games that were played in Los Angeles on Thursday would be played in prime time internationally on Friday, with local commenters creating new wrap-around context for the game, because the final score wasn’t already known globally. That is simply no longer the case.
With the internet, fan apps and feeds, and social media properties, basketball fans can get real-time updates and know the score as the baskets are made. The internet has, once again, revolutionized an industry.
Silver did mention something they have done to fight this trend and keep their content relevant for viewers long after the final score has been posted. He called it “packaging for permanence.” The edited video of game highlights and the coverage of the slam dunk challenge are examples of this.
This same principle and practice can be applied to event-based content for your company. After all, trade shows, product announcements, and grand opening coverage can be just as perishable as a basketball game.
Here are some ways that content marketers can follow the NBA’s lead and package for permanence:
Take photos and videos from the event and use them for general marketing
With all of the preparation that goes into events, companies are often looking their best on event day. Don’t let the moment slip away without making the most of it. Capitalize on your hard work and capture as many photos and videos as you can for later use in your marketing materials.
- Tip: When you post your photos to social media, be sure to include your company logo as a watermark – this will increase brand recognition and provide extra information for viewers who might come across your photo without other context.
Create an infographic (think scoreboard) of the highlights of the event
Want to communicate with your customers and stakeholders quickly and effectively about the event? Use infographics. If your event’s results aren’t quantifiable, you can create a text-based infographic. If you had an event that produced data, use it for an attractive graph or chart that shows the success of your company.
- Tip: If you don’t have a top-notch in-house graphic designer, this is a good time to contract with a gifted expert who can bring the creativity that will make your graphic compelling.
Publish an event recap and send it to customers
Write a news report about the event. Capture the highlights in writing, add some photos, include the infographic if you made one, and send the recap out to your customers and post it online.
- Tip: Less is more. Don’t give in to the temptation to write down all the details or list all the attendees. Keep the newsletter short and sweet and only include the real highlights.
Create a recap video and post it on the company Facebook, Twitter and website so that customers who weren’t there can have an idea of what went on
There are bound to be amazing moments at your live event. Don’t let them perish on the spot. Capture them on video and repackage that video as a recap, a comedy video of a funny moment, a bit of wisdom if something wise was shared at your event, etc.
Each shorter video can be shared on your company’s social media channels and emailed out to customers and stakeholders.
- Tip: If you have enough content to make several short videos, do it. You will get more views, and different clips will appeal to different viewers.
In the world of instant information where events are over as soon as they are over, it is still possible to capture them and extend their shelf life. Plan to package permanence for content marketing success.
This article was posted by The Business Journals.
It’s in the background. Always on. Always flowing. Taken for granted. Doesn’t need to be mentioned.
Digital marketing is just marketing.
Digital Out of Home (DOOH) advertising is just advertising.
Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality might just be…reality.
Marketing ROI has never been sexier… or more possible.
With today’s data analytics, digital marketing spend, and marketing automation systems, the opportunities are ripe for changing the ways that we approach marketing and its management.
Direct marketing professionals are ahead of the trends here, having focused on response rates, revenue generation, and list management long before these things rose to their current level of popularity.
See Also
- How to be a champion of data-driven decision-making
- Business Analytics: How small businesses can use 'big data' (Part 1)
- Why big data analytics is no longer just for big companies
There are new positions showing up in marketing organizations to address this need, ranging from marketing operations managers to marketing data scientists. CEOs across industries are now learning a whole new set of acronyms (like SEO and SQL) as the CMO and CIO are working more closely together.
This change has very real implications for the marketing organization overall. People who were attracted to marketing and have performed exceptionally well in their previous roles might make a smooth transition to the new world of data accountability.
Here are three ways to help:
Demystify Data
Wanting to make data-driven decisions is all well and good, but if the data that would drive those decisions are not easily accessible, then the effort is for naught. Make sure that the metrics you want to see are available to your team.
This requires the insight to be in data form (that is, systems and report structures in place) and for the team who needs the data to have permissions to access it. I have heard of organizations where the marketing organization wanted to measure lead-to-opportunity conversions, but didn’t have access to the CRM system from which this data might be pulled.
This article was published in the Puget Sound Business Journal, Denver Business Journal, Los Angeles Business Journal, as well as other American City Business Journals.
Many companies devalue marketing, considering it the department that makes pretty pictures or the administrative support for the sales team. Others strongly value the strategic involvement of marketing in product strategy, branding, strategic planning, and industry leadership. I am blessed to work for an organization that models the latter, but I certainly am familiar with the former.
This topic is a big one (worthy of more than one post). To get the conversation started, here are four key questions that you can ask yourself to help you answer the question of how to market marketing in your organization.
1. Can you express your motivation for wanting to market marketing in terms of overall business results?
Do you think that investing in a marketing automation system and nurturing campaigns will generate 20 percent more revenue next year? Do you believe that improving the brand consistency across the organization will lead to higher customer perception of quality and improve gross margins by 2 percent for the next product launch? Do you believe that developing a new interactive platform for sharing product benefits with your sales channel will reduce the sales cycle by two months resulting in a 13 percent increase in revenue with the same effort? These are the types of questions you should be asking, when you are thinking of advocating for anything in a business environment.
If you don’t know how to answer these questions, it could be an indication that you are not yet ready to advocate for a larger and more impactful role for marketing in your company … and that you should get ready. That in itself should be a call to action to learn more about your business, your drivers of value in the market, your customer problems, your solutions, and overall business strategy … and how score is kept financially.
2. What is the perception of your brand and that of “marketing” in your organization? What should it be? What is the gap?
Before you would embark on a brand-building campaign, you would always begin with data to identify the “as is” state and to quantify the “to be” state. And to identify the gap between these states. Often this is accomplished with surveys, voice of the customer, share of voice analysis, or other tools. Why not do the same thing within your organization to gauge how far away the organization is from what you envision as the ideal?
It is also important to know whether your brand is strong enough in the organization to lead that charge. What are you known for in the organization? Why do people come to you? Does that align with what you need it to be to advocate the change you are advocating? What can you do to change the perception and reputation?
3. What “marketing” does your customer really need?
This should probably be the first question, as anything (besides that which is required for regulatory, legal, or financial compliance) that isn’t seen and appreciated by customers, probably isn’t worth doing. It is the definition of waste and the hallmark of bureaucracy. But coming back to my point, what value does the customer perceive in the marketing you do?
Are they able to make better and faster decisions because of their access to technical information? Are your resellers able to sell more because of the sales tools you provide? Are they able to reduce their costs with more accurate quoting resources? Are they able to achieve business results because of the value proposition of the products you provide?
Some service firms have found that dedicated sales and marketing staff is not nearly as effective as sending their consultants right out to their clients to share expertise directly and wet their appetite for more (a topic covered extensively in Patrick Lencioni’s book Getting Naked). Some technical engineering firms, website developers, or agencies find that their engineering teams are best equipped to sell and market to their technical buyers and that all that is needed from marketing is some communication tools to help facilitate these conversations. Each business will be different.
4. What is the winning formula that is worth repeating?
Like any system, it is important to look at inputs and outputs. If you want to answer questions 1-3, a good place to start is your wins. What are some situations that have gone well that you think are worthy of replication? Go back and analyze a big order, a design win, or project award and ask everyone involved how it came to be, the touch points with the organization, what sales tools or marketing resources were used, and what made the difference. There is no sense automating or “improving the efficiency” of things that are not effective.
Photo Credit: DRivers@WorldLaw via Compfight cc
This article was published on the TalentCulture blog.
“By definition, remarkable things get remarked on.” – Seth Godin
It is a frequent request from sales teams: create products that are more competitively priced or competitively featured. It sounds good and this kind of request has send product marketing and engineering teams off to create me-too products for centuries. The trouble is that is hardly ever works out as well as one would hope.
See, when you set out to make a competitive product, you have actually given up the one thing that might just be the key to your success: the ability to set the criteria for which products are judged and buying decisions are made. You have let your competition decide what is important and make you play catch up.
If you have the creativity and capability, it is much more fun (and probably more successful) to do something your competition isn't doing. Create a new product category. Solve a new problem in a new way. Sell to new customers in a new way. Go after a Blue Ocean or a Purple Cow, as the authors' suggest. Do something to set the pace and decide the rules of the game and then get your competition chasing you (or better yet, dismissing you as an outlier and you can be successful without them even noticing).