Beyond Wishful Thinking: Visa's Chris Curtin On Sales And Marketing Alignment

Aligning sales and marketing is a top priority of CEOs, CMOs and sales leaders across businesses and enterprises and the impact of doing it poorly can be devastating to enterprise value. Doing it well leads to sustained success.

Visa, who will celebrate its 60th anniversary this year, is no stranger to success and the importance of sales and marketing alignment. Its VisaNet platform is the largest global payments network capable of handling a staggering 65,000 transaction messages a second and which offers solutions for a diverse group of customers including 3.3 billion card holders, 46 million merchants, and 16,000 financial institution clients. No wonder they appear at No. 27 on Forbes' World's Most Valuable Brands list.

Chris Curtin, Visa’s chief brand and innovation marketing officer, offered insights into how they approach sales and marketing alignment, as both a consumer and a business-to-business brand.

“The big unlock to aligning sales and marketing is to agree not just on the goals, but also the assumptions around those goals,” says Curtin. “Not just that we want to achieve the goals or that they are a nice to have, but truly digging into the how. You always need to ask ‘What would it take to hit that goal?’ That is the only way you know you really have a plan and not just wishful thinking.”

To avoid wishful thinking or false impressions of alignment, they utilize pre-mortems. These are meetings that you have “ahead of the action” of the campaign or annual plan to ask and answer the question “If we fail at our goal, why will we have failed?” Curtin recommends that leaders schedule a series of meetings asking questions like “What if you miss the target?” or “What if you hit the target, but it’s too late to impact the quarter?” This meeting is where you get all the worst case scenarios out on the table and have the functional experts to weigh in. “Ask the group to brainstorm all the reasons why a miss would occur,” Curtin continues. “Would it be because you’re missing the right sales materials, running the wrong promotions, setting the wrong price, missing a market window? Pretend you have a crystal ball.”

This forecasting allows you a chance to course correct before you leave the starting line heading in the wrong direction. “Post-mortems, or post-action reporting, don’t do you any good,” Curtain asserts. “You can’t change the view in the rearview mirror. But pre-mortems can change the future.”

These meetings have another advantage that gets to the heart of what often sabotages sales and marketing alignment and that is clean, clear communication across department or functional lines. “Post-mortems put people on the defensive,” Curtin observes. “They lend themselves to finger-pointing. Pre-mortems allow the staff to be more creative. To share the potential problems before they occur. Plans developed in isolation with the hope that they can reconcile after the fact never work.”

These meetings are serious business. Curtin warns that “if the pre-mortem isn’t tense and uncomfortable, you are doing it wrong. Either you’re not putting up all the risks, or your plan is too easy.” If you are to gain actionable insights, you need to get all the ideas on the table, no matter how uneasy they might make the team.

Once a list of possible misses and causes are identified, the team can do some probability analysis and conduct risk mitigation. This serves two purposes according to Curtin. First, “you can believe in your plan because you have identified the potential points of failure and are watching them more closely.” And secondly, “if things do slip [and you have done a pre-mortem], you already have language and a common understanding of what you are doing to do, together, across functions, to address.” All in all, this approach helps the team have the best chance of success at the start and throughout the year.

“It is not uncommon to find some tension (hopefully always constructive) between sales and marketing teams who are both competing for internal investment, resources and support as to which is the better ‘channel’ to utilize,” Curtain recognizes, informed throughout his career at Visa, HP, and The Walt Disney  Company. “Incidentally, that tension can manifest itself within marketing – with the brand team and the direct response teams battling it out for budget,” Curtin continues. “The key to avoid this is to acknowledge that there is a ‘one team mentality’ and all the groups are driving towards a common outcome.”

Whether you are the market leader growing the category, like Visa, or a category creator of your own, Curtin offers some parting advice to those seeking better alignment. “The role of leadership is to find the right balance between and amongst the groups and to ensure that the process pulls out the best in teamwork.”

Scott Adams - the clever cartoonist behind Dilbert (who can boast of being the most photocopied, pinned-up, downloaded, and e-mailed comic strip in the world) and now author and investor - said, "Losers have goals, winners have systems." Pre-mortems can be part of your sales and marketing alignment system to achieve greater results, or at least greatly improve your odds.

This article originally ran in Forbes on July 16, 2018

Jennifer Presents at Virtual Keynote on Sales and Marketing Alignment

It's a classic Dilbert cartoon plot line and sadly is very common in so many companies: misalignment between marketing and sales causing waste, confusion, distrust, and poor customer experience.

Whether you are a CEO, head of marketing, or head of sales, find out what misalignment may be costing you and steps you can take to bring the customer back into the center of your business strategy and get sales and marketing working together in active partnership to grow the business.

See a recent presentation that I gave for OnConferences here.

Align or Die: 4 Reasons To Align Sales And Marketing Now

This article was originally published on Forbes.

It’s the chronic, and often fatal, disease of business: sales and marketing misalignment.  I, like you, have seen it done well and poorly in my career as marketing leader and CMO. I have also experienced the impact of poor alignment myself, as a consumer and as a customer of B2B goods and services. Although it has been an issue since the creation of the modern enterprise, there are reasons to believe that this chronic disease is getting more deadly.

1. Your Customers Are Changing

An increasing percentage of your customers, even technical buyers in B2B product categories, are wanting to disintermediate your sales team and gather information about products and services online and on their own, according to Forrester. In 2017, the percentage of customers expressing this “don’t call me, I’ll call you” preference was 68%. This represents a 28% increase over the 2015 survey just two years earlier. In fact, only 16% said that they find interacting with a sales rep superior to self-service research.

Mary Shea, Ph.D., principal analyst at Forrester Research , said it even more strongly. “If marketing and sales aren’t aligned and if they don’t collaborate, they will be disintermediated. By buyers themselves who find other ways to get what they need or by more agile competitors," she challenged.

The data would suggest it is already happening.  This puts more pressure on marketing to facilitate increasingly sophisticated customers through a funnel (or around a pin-ball machine, to depict it more accurately) without direct engagement with sales.

2. Misalignment Hurts Your Customers

Forty-three percent of B2B marketing decision-makers report that their companies have lost sales as a consequence of not having necessary content at the right time for a specific customer and 77% of the rest have experienced costly delays, according to Forrester (Q1 2017 International B2B Marketing Panel).

This is further complicated by the fact that more people are involved in the decision-making process than before. Committees, panels, and groups are replacing individuals and making it more difficult to identify the influencers and meet all their needs. This is certainly true in B2B sales, but even consumers are sharing their e-commerce or subscription accounts with more people in their household and decision-making processes can fragment at home, too.

Despite this, shockingly, only 24% of organizations calibrate on the definition of target segments or accounts that will apply to both the sales and marketing organizations (per Forrester’s Q1 2018 Marketing Benchmark survey). How can we jointly hit a target, if there is more than one?

This lack of alignment is hurting your customers and impacting your top line.

3. You Are Wasting Money And Time

Sangram Vajre, chief evangelist at Terminus and former head of marketing at Pardot (now owned by SalesForce.com), asked a provocative question: “if only 1% of leads convert to opportunities, does that mean that 99% of marketing is wasted?”

Of course, it’s an unfair question as marketing is often responsible for strategy, channel, brand building, communications, and community engagement which may not directly relate to lead conversion, but if there isn’t cooperation on customer acquisition, where else in value chain might alignment be broken?

“Without shared goals and real-time data sets to drive decisions and investment prioritization, you have to wait for feedback from sales which may be late, anecdotal and with an agenda,” added Shea. “Marketing leaders can, and should, know what content, sales tools and campaigns are driving growth.”

If there is any doubt about what is driving your growth, then undoubtedly you are wasting time and money and that is impacting your bottom line. A bottom line that is getting more attention.

4. Your Boss Cares About It – Deeply

Forty-eight percent of CEOs say that poor alignment and collaboration will be a major marketing challenge over the next 12 months, according to Forrester. And those CEOs are looking hard at CMOs to lead the improvements.

The tenure of chief marketing officers is one of the shortest in the C-suite (per Korn Ferry) and there will be continued pressure and accountability around alignment, especially in times of transformation and change. Vajre agreed that high CMO turnover could be a sign of poor sales and marketing alignment. “If sales fall and budgets are squeezed, everyone pays,” he observed.

Shea concluded that “if you are doing sales and marketing the same way you did 3-5 years ago, you won’t survive.”

Now is the time to take your business’ vital signs and ensure that you have the alignment that you need to sustain and grow, putting your customer in the center of your strategy. As a starting point, look for evidence of customer preference changes in your business, create a common goal set and customer target, use real-time data for decision-making, and regularly report on joint progress.

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. 

BridgeSpan Media Presents Home Entertainment Research at InfoComm

Prior to the official start of InfoComm 2018, Avixa will host the first ever Integrated Life conference.  On the afternoon of June 5th, Jennifer Davis, on behalf of her consulting business, BridgeSpan Media together with Canvas Research, will share some new and exclusive research conducted for this event.

In May 2018, a small sample of high net worth US households were surveyed highlights were shared at the conference.  This summary research was conducted to inform a larger study that is being designed to delve deeper into trends, purchase motivations, and to provide a larger sample that would allow for regional insights (as homeowners in Dallas or Los Angeles face different issues than those in Chicago or Manhattan).

Use the Contact form on this website (or a direct message via Twitter) to express interest in the full research report once it becomes available.  It will provide insights for the whole value chain from manufacturing brands to integrators and resellers providing local design, installation, and support.

Contact the research team at Avixa to share your interest in the residential market, as we partner with them on these efforts.

Game-Changing Technologies to Watch in 2018

Here are a few technology trends I am following.  By no means an exhaustive list, so I would love to hear more about what you are hearing about, especially coming out of CES, ISE, SXSW, and other recent events.

Ultra-Fast Charge, High Capacity Batteries:  This is the key to the end of the combustion engine.  A world where torque reigns and the electric vehicle is in every garage (or at the end of every Lyft call).  At the end of last year, Toshiba announced a 200 mile battery that charges in 6 minutes, and although this one doesn’t appear to be out of the lab yet, every multi-industrial and every car company seems to be investing here.   The implications of this shift not only change industries, but our environment and travel practices as well.  But perhaps we won’t be ACTUALLY going anywhere if the next trend catches on.

Augmented Reality/Mixed Reality:  Before we go virtually landing aircraft in our living room or visiting the Louve from Los Angeles, I have seen some great practical applications for the technology in technical field repair work and training.  I also love the application of virtual reality for architecture, as despite our technology advances, humans as a species have a very difficult time visualizing.  We simply can’t imagine what a carpet tile will look like replicated across our entire office space or how a vaulted ceiling will “feel” once it is installed.  We had great success with this kind of visualization tools (here is an example) at my previous company, who wanted you to know what your space (or one like it) would look like with a big video wall installed.  So, before we replace our physical world with some dystopian future where people in grim warehouses think they live in luxury due to their headsets, I think we can build and maintain a more beautiful and functional world using these new tools.

Light Field Technology:  Related to the category above, light field technology has a promise to change the way virtual images show up in the real world.  MagicLeap gave the world a holiday present with it’s long leaked and teased light field technology, but as someone who came from the display world, the core science here is very interesting and will spark a whole lot of innovation before we are done. Check out what Leia (named less for the princess than after her “Obi Won Kenobi, you are our only hope” hologram in the Star Wars movie) is working on or geek out on some of the technical papers of the Society for Information Display.

Motion Capture:  I loved the pioneering work that OptiTrack does here (full disclosurer: I was with Planar and Leyard when we acquired the company in 2017). I also love how the optical science was originally inspired as a method for mouse replacement for a disabled family member of the then teen-aged  founder/inventor, who earlier had won a science competition at 12 years old for building a hoverboard, but I digress. Now, technology of this type is used for motion science research, as well as Hollywood productions and gaming that is changing the realism of what we see.  And all because we found a way to sensor up real motion so that we could build better models.

Internet of Things:  I would be remiss to list out a technologies to watch list without listing this ubiquitous term that is underlying the growth of companies from start-ups in garages to industrial giants like GE and Honeywell.  That said, I think that IoT should probably stand for the “instrumentation of everything.”  Why would you use a camera technology (however sophisticated it might be) to identify intruders, when you could use the door, window, or floor covering itself?  Why would you need a refrigerator to tell you whether your fruit has spoiled when your robot chef has already taken inventory and is whipping up a batch of banana bread?  Why not prevent tripping or falls (which account for more injuries and deaths each year as the population in developed countries ages) with lights triggered by personal beacons and air bags on stairways?  With modern day processing and sensors literally in everything, it will be awesome to see what simple solutions arise to real problems. 

Artificial Intelligence:  This buzz word is SO buzzy that it has spun-out a few additional buzz words to clutter the landscape: deep learning, machine learning, and data science.  It is the underlying technology behind self-driving cars and trucks and will be very disruptive to the logistics industry overall.  It is an arm’s race not just between companies and research universities, but between countries.  Even content, like news articles or promotional videos, will be created auto-magically using these new tools (and their new friends in natural-language generation, video, image manipulation, and 3D modeling).

Fake News:  Okay this is a trick one.  It really isn’t a technology, but one enabled by a collection of inter-related technologies.  We hate fake news.  As a marketer, I particularly dislike “smoke and mirrors” pre-releases that feature only Photoshop wizardry, photorealistic 3D renderings, and the promise of things not yet possible.  Add to that VoCo which allows you to “Photoshop” your voice to sound like anything or anyone.  It is amazing how the technology is advancing.  We can’t tell the filtered from the real anymore and with folks like Adobe leading the charge, this will only get harder.  This is one to watch as it will change (and has changed) the need for media literacy and the nearly impossible ability we will have to discern it.  But maybe with our sensored world, we will just trust the data and skim the news.

Building a Brand Isn't Hard. It's Difficult!

To be clear, it is not hard to build a brand. Well, it’s not complicated, at least. It is infuriatingly simple. You only have to let people know why they should care about what you do. It’s as simple as that. Yet, building a brand, and maintaining it, in a noisy world is increasingly difficult and requires some of the best-run companies in the world to invest billions of dollars to ensure that people know what they stand for. Standing is no longer enough. You have to stand out in a sea of others standing. 

You don’t want your brand to be a wallflower, the company who no one notices at the dance until it slips away into obscurity. Your brand doesn’t need to be irreverent or brash, but it can’t be shy.  It needs self-confidence. It needs to know why it is unique and why it deserves attention. If your brand lacks the courage to be itself, then you might need to mature it. For companies small and large, and even for individuals, this comes down to two things: Clarity and Conviction

Clarity: If you want people to know about your company, products, services, and people, you need to know your brand well enough to introduce it at a cocktail party. What is the one thing that makes it special among the “next best alternatives” in your category?  What is it’s value and why are customers willing to pay? Why does it deserve the market share you aspire to? If you have more than one answer about this question, you have more work to do. I love the timeless introduction to Steve Jobs’ speech to introduce the “Think Different” campaign as it speaks to the link between values and brand. To find your “one thing” might be obvious, but for most it requires some research and some soul searching. To find out what customers are buying from you (which may very well be different than what you think you are selling) and what you aspire to become.

Conviction: This is where most brands get into trouble. Companies simply lack the conviction to be clear and talk about their “one thing.” They simply don’t believe enough in their brand position or in their strategy as a company enough to focus on it. They are sustainable, AND fashion-forward AND have the best features. They are value-priced, AND celebrity endorsed AND available for immediate delivery. They are the most established AND the most current AND the safest choice. And because their “but wait, there’s more” approach to brand marketing, leaves customers confused (at best) or creates so much noise, that the signal of their true purpose can never reach their potential customers. And standing, proud enough and long enough to be noticed, requires stamina and perseverance, so can be sure your conviction will be put to the test.

I am as guilty as anyone of taking the “yes, and” approach to branding from time to time. It is human nature to want to please and make our brand relevant to more segments, more customers, and have more value (propositions) than is necessary. Branding is one area where “yes, and” - this communication tool, borrowed from improv - doesn’t apply. You can succeed in negotiations, conflicts, or even creative collaborations using “yes, and” responses, but brand conversations need a lot more “no” and “this, NOT that” clarity. What you say “no” to is the test of strategy and what where you choose not to stand is the test of your brand strategy.  It is difficult because you have to fight human nature, sustain under pressure, and have courage.  All so that you can stand, with confidence, clarity, and conviction until people think about your “one thing” when they think about your brand.

This article originally appeared on LinkedIn Pulse.

On Newsworthiness

“What people say isn’t news.  What people do is news.” – Marci Rossell (former Chief Economist on CNBC)

The Best (ahem, most effective) Marketing Copy of 2017

I recently ordered some bedding online and the package came with a printed insert that began “Dear valued customer.”  At first, I scoffed at the amateur writing (clearly written by a non-native English speaker), but upon further reflection I am convinced this is the best marketing copy I have read all year.   Or at least the most effective.

It successfully introduced their unique brand, it engendered empathy with their employees, it made me feel better about myself, encouraged me to read closely and completely, and was something that I joyfully shared with a few friends (and all of you).  I can’t say any advertising or marketing literature I encountered in 2017 was as effective as this.

Here are a few excepts that you might enjoy and the principles they illustrate.

Authenticity: The first paragraph thanked me for my business and ended with this sentence “It is really a great luck for us to be able to encounter you on Amazon.  Thank you for choosing our products, without your support, maybe I will get unemployed.” It might be hyperbole or brutally honest, but it certainly isn't boring or too "corporate" sounding.

Relational: The second paragraph talks about the product features.  They end this idea by saying “Welcome to contact us and give us some advices that will be helpful to improve our products quality and services, we will continue to optimize the service and strive to do better.”  You can just picture the eager employees awaiting the advices of customers.  The third part of the letter encouraged customers to write positive reviews and if they couldn’t to contact them first for support.  They sum up their approach like this “We convince that communication is the bridge to solve problems, we will certainly let your concerns get a good solution.”

Customer-Focused: The letter ends with a final greeting: “Finally, hope you could be nice every day ! Happiness every moment ! Have a healthier body and a sunny mood !” (spaces before the exclamation points are as printed).  I couldn’t help, but smile when I read this.

Now, perhaps it is my deep familiarly with English-as-a-second-language communication for all my years working with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean suppliers that makes this letter endearing, but I think you can agree that it stands out in a sea of well-crafted correspondence.  Although the experienced marketer in me shutters when I read the run-on sentences, improper vocabulary, and the like, this copy was effective in it’s purpose and isn’t boring!  Not every brand or company could pull this off (nor would they want to), but perhaps it inspires us all to be a little more real in our communications in the coming year.

And, I hope it gives you a “sunny mood” as well!

Forgive the poor quality scan of the flyer.  The actual was readable (mostly) and looked better than this.

Are You My Customer: a simple question that demands a strategic answer

It’s the holiday season and in the final countdown, it seems everyone is a customer. But in the world of business-to-business commerce, the basic question is oft debated in board rooms and strategy meetings: who is our customer? 

I often jokingly respond that the right answer to “who is our customer?” is “yes.” Especially if you sell complex solutions or through channel partners. But who’s voice is loudest in your “voice of the customer” that speaks into your offerings and strategies?

Seems simple enough, but for those of us who sell through channel partners or distributors or have products used by different people than those who buy, it can be a tricky question which requires a nuanced and highly strategic answer.  For instance, who is the “customer” of a diagnostic display used to detect cancer? The hospital CIO or the radiologist who uses it every day or the patient who benefits from the early diagnosis. Who is the “customer” of a publisher of a complex enterprise software tool that sell through consultants who add necessary professional services to provide a solution to the companies they find, cultivate, and service? Who is the “customer” of a lighting company who is marketed by independent reps, specified by architects, purchased through distribution by contractors, programmed by lighting designers, and maintained by corporate facilities departments or property managers? Or what about advertising-based models, where the “customer” (who is paying for advertising) and the “user” (who would really rather not have ads) are inherently at odds. The definitions of a customer can be dizzying.

And adding to this confusion is changing market dynamics in many industries. Management consultants will want to analyze profit pools to make channel optimization recommendations, all the while experienced sales people appreciate the loyalty of existing partners while market disrupters disintermediate channels using technology. Integrators, resellers, and dealers are consolidating in many markets. And manufacturers and service providers are left wondering whether their routes to market are efficient enough and capable of serving the needs of the end users effectively. And for strategic reasons, you must be informed by the past, but look to the future.

When you are start into a “who is my customer?” conversation, which can devolve into academic exercises and tribal territory defensiveness, here are three questions that should be asked to provide actionable clarity.

1.     Who sees the most value in our offering?

No matter where you are in the supply chain, there is someone out there that appreciates the value that you are producing between your “raw materials” and “finished goods.” So, who best appreciates what your product or services do and sees the productivity improvements, cost savings, or other tangible or intangible benefits of your offering? This may or may not be the entity with whom you are directly transacting. It is often likely to be a specifier or end user, but it could be a channel partner who sees your offering as part of their solution and ability to differentiate against their competition. The answer to this question has huge implications on product management, pricing strategies, and overall business approach. If the people that see the most value, are not in a position to pay for it, then it is difficult to monetize the differentiation you have built into your offering. And, of course, your offering today might not be what you are bring to market in the future and this discussion about who values and can afford the differentiation you are offering is a good input into your product roadmap.

I have lead products whose primary value proposition was to help integrator partners generate more profit with easier installation and easier service features. End users of the system didn’t necessarily have visibility to these features and were not willing to pay more, but the resellers and installers preferred the product strongly and were able to shape demand effectively and maintain a price premium. In other businesses, the value propositions are for the end user, and the channels are just there to fulfill demand created directly by the brand and help the brand influence at the point of purchase.

2.     Who best represents independent demand for our offerings?

One of the arguments for supporting channel partners is that they have customer relationships and can influence transactions to the point that they are essentially a customer and can take their business (or more precisely, the business of their captive customers) virtually anywhere they want. When Costco decides that they will only accept American Express, Visa and MasterCard are locked out and Costco members sign up for American Express credit cards. When Dell selects TechData for a multi-year distribution contract, Dell’s customers don’t know or care where their computer peripherals are being sourced. So, if you are PC peripheral brand who sells through distribution, who is your customer? In contract, when a homeowner calls their trusted “AV guy” to set up a home theater, they expect to hear recommendations and purchase product, even from brands they have never seen advertised. And when demand generation budgets are tight, it is very tempting to leverage channels (which you can pay in margin) to build demand that you otherwise can’t afford to cultivate on your own. Some channels are great at creating and shaping demand and others are best at fulfilling demand created by brands or manufacturers. 

I have seen incredible wealth created in partnership with channels who can create category and build demand. And I have seen other channels that can’t create demand on their own at all. Depending on your industry and the level of commodification, there may not independent demand represented by your channel partners, in which case you are not selling “to” channels as much as you are selling “through.” This question has huge implications on how demand generation money is invested.

3.     Do we transact with the most efficient partners to fulfill the demand?

During the consumer-driven holiday season, the challenges of the “who is my customer” question is well illustrated. In this season, we are consumers, but we are gift givers. We are transacting for others. Purchasing gifts that we might not have specified nor will we use.  Your 80-year-old grandmother might not be the best prospect to put on the mailing list of a skateboard shop, even though that is where she purchased a gift for her grandson this year. Even though she technically was the one writing the check. Gift givers are like the purchasing department at a company, who might be listed in the manufacturer’s database as the customer, but in fact, are not actual customers. Or like the role of a reseller or dealer who may just be taking orders and don’t have a real ability to make product recommendations or command any customer loyalty. They might not represent independent demand. They might just be an intermediary. And as an intermediary are they effectively and efficiently playing their role in the value chain? Are you paying a reseller a large margin percentage to transact orders you have cultivated yourself? Are you absorbing service costs because your channel can not service their customers effectively? 

These questions might lead you to answer the “who is my customer?” question with more purpose and confidence. The answer might not just be “yes” (ie, end users, channel partners, specifiers, influencers are all my customers), but it might be “no” (that we need to focus on just one or two of these groups to have the maximum impact). In fact, the real test of strategy is what you are saying “no” to and narrowing the voice of the customer and your definition of who you serve is a great place to start.

These are just a few of the questions that I have found most insightful when discussing channel strategies and customer experience approaches.  I would love to hear your ideas as well, so leave a comment or engage on my blog (www.atjenniferdavis.com) to continue the discussion. I wish you all a warm and wonderful holiday season!

Cover image is a parody of “Are You My Mother?” book, a classic children's book by PD Eastman.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse.

On Innovation

“Is it a verb, a noun, or a value?” -Mohan Nair

Looking for Pain

In the States there is a class of attorneys known as “ambulance chasers.”  They follow accident victims to the hospital and offer their services to get justice or payment for their injuries.  I am not diminishing the role of personal injury cases and the legitimate rights of those victims, but those attorneys are looking for pain and suffering.  In fact, it fuels their business.

All of us in business have a similar need to look for the pain.  The most successful companies, and the products and services that they offer, address an unmet pain and solve it in a unique way.

As innovators and business strategists we should always be in the hunt for the pain. 

• What costs too much?
• What takes too long?
• What ends too soon?
• What can we not get enough of?
• What do we have too much of?

These kind of questions, can lead to the insights that create new customers, new business models, new products, and fuel the enterprise into the future. 

If Content is King, then Curation is Queen

Back in 1996, Bill Gates posted an article that said “Content is where I expect most of the real money will be made on the internet, just as it was in broadcasting.”
 

PDX Executive Podcast

Listen in on my interview with PDX Executive Podcast, on SoundCloud or iTunes.

Thanks for talking shop with me, Dan Bruton!

The Four R’s of User Research

1. Right user
2. Right methodology (asking the right questions)
3. Right analysis
4. Right time (in the process)
   - Strategist at PayPal

Lean MKTG at PDX Marketing Forum

It was a pleasure to join with marketing leaders in Portland for the PDX Marketing Forum and discuss how we can apply principles from Lean Six Sigma and Agile Development to the new challenges that marketers face in our dynamic environment and economy.  Thanks to Dan Bruton and the organizing committee for inviting me to share some insights.

Customer Feedback

Nothing beats customer verbatims.  Marketing teams might roll-up feedback from surveys.  Sales teams may advocate for their accounts.  But nothing is more powerful than the words (or video) of a customer talking about their experience.  Find more ways to get that into the organization and your products will be better and your customers more loyal.

Rediscovery

“Grandma, you have to see this new show that we found on Netflix.  I think you’d really like it!” my son told my Mom.  “Really?  What is it?” replied my Mom, intrigued. “It’s a show about a Dad and his son and his crazy co-workers in this small town.  It’s really funny and doesn’t have bad language,” he continues.  “You’ve probably never heard of it,” he adds.  “It’s called the Andy Griffith Show.”

This conversation really occurred in my house last year, when my kids thought they had discovered this show which ran 8 seasons in the 1960s.  They were shocked to learn that their grandma already knew about the show.  In fact, she had watched it every week when it was broadcast, first in black and white and then in color.  My kids “discovered” Andy Griffith like Columbus “discovered” the new world or the world “discovered” TED talks over the past few years.  Things around for decades, centuries, or even millennia get rediscovered when new technology makes it possible.

My kids would have never watched Andy Griffith without NetFlix serving up suggestions.  Columbus would have never discovered America without the help of ships and navigation technologies (however flawed they were).  TED would have never extended beyond an event for 1,200 people in Canada each year, if it weren’t for the ability to stream video online, which extended the platform of the events and the “ideas worth sharing” to multiple continents and cultures.

What old things are worth discovering again?  What technology innovation will be required to make that discovery possible?

What Thermostats Teach Us about the B2B Internet of Things?

We just got a new thermostat in the house from EcoBee. Their claim to fame is that instead of one sensor (at the thermostat), you can put temperature measurement devices around the room or space to generate a better picture of the living environment, be more comfortable, and save energy.  Pretty cool, new solution to an old problem:  how do we allocate expensive and scarce resources (in this case, heat), more effectively?

I wonder what business problems could be solved by moving from a single point of measurement to multiple measurement points.  The sensors have to be cheap (either embedded into a process already done or solved with cheap technology).  Instrumenting various other parts of the organization might lead to allocating expensive and finite/scare resources more effectively?

LinkNYC: an experiment in wealth creation

If access to information makes you smarter.

If being smarter and better informed allows for better or faster decision making and better utilization of resources.

If better decisions, lead to better outcomes or results.

And better outcomes lead to the creation of wealth

Then, LinkNYC, with its broad distribution of broadband internet to the streets of New York, might be the largest wealth creation experiment in recent history.