“Not all ideas are businesses. Not all passions are businesses.” – Cher Jones
Viewing entries in
#wayfinding
“The right time to start a business is when you solve a problem.” – Nick F. Nelson (Brandprenuer)
“Shouldn’t loss change a person, for the better, forever?”
“What if it was less important that anything ever gets fixed than that nothing ever has to be hidden?”
“There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you’re good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills.”
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.
“Ask yourself this, ‘In light of my past experiences, my current circumstances, and my future hopes and dreams, what is the wise thing for me to do?’” - Andy Stanley
"This is a new year. A new beginning. And things will change." - Taylor Swift
In hindsight, the anticipation was part of the gift.
“Reality is what you bump into when you’re wrong.” – John Ortberg
“Life doesn’t stop for anybody.” – Stephen Chbosky
“The far enemy of joy is envy.” – Pema Chodron
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” – Suzuki Roshi
“Everything – Love = Nothing”
- Paul’s letter to the Corinthians as summarized by John Ortberg
“There is no cure for hot or cold.” – Trungpa Rinpoche
“The beggar gives us the opportunity to learn to give. Without the ones who irritate us, we never have a chance to practice patience and loving-kindness.” – Pema Chodron
“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” – Stephen Hawking
“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.” – Jalaluddin Meylana Rumi
There are a lot of people who are looking for their next career opportunity. Either they left their previous companies and are in transition or they have outgrown their current role and are looking for a new challenge. Possibly both. Perhaps your are one of them. Or maybe things are humming along nicely for you at work, but you don’t want to get stale or forget your own development as you grow in place or seek promotion. Thinking about this in my own experience has led to me to some insights that might be useful to you.
1. The hiring manager has a reason they are recruiting
Chances are the hiring manager for your next role had to go to bat to get the requisition approved. They have an immediate need. They have lived without someone in the role and it is taking its toll on the remaining team and the business results. So much so, that their management has seen the gap and approved the spend. There are specific things that need to get done that are either going undone or being done poorly. The business is suffering. This is true in many cases. The hiring manager has asked the recruiter or posted a job with a very specific list of attributes for which they are searching. They don’t want to hire a generalist, just like you wouldn’t use a Swiss Army Knife to cut a sirloin, if you could use a proper steak knife. Recruiters will complain, I mean, observe that hiring managers ask for a purple unicorn steak knife with pink polka-dots, their requirements are so specific and unique. This is true. Why? Because…
2. The hiring manager doesn’t want to look the fool
Once getting approval to hire, the manager wants to make a smart hiring choice. They know that unless you have someone in the role who is highly productive in short order, they won’t be successful. Hiring a warm body isn’t enough. They want a candidate with the elusive combination of past experience, personal motivation, and future potential that will allow them to fill their need (see #1). Anything misstep in this search and they might be stuck with a bad performer (worst case scenario), have to swap out talent (losing more time), and damage their reputation as a leader and team builder in the process. All of these things are out of the question. The stakes are high to find the steak knife (see what I did there?). So, they go on the hunt for the perfect candidate for their role and you want them to find you in their search, so let’s switch focus to you.
3. You are bigger than the job
You are an experienced, successful professional in your field. You have done some amazing things. You have more capabilities, more raw potential, and undoubtedly more experience than your next job can fully appreciate. That is okay. It is preferred. Otherwise, you’d go into a role that would immediately bore you or to which you couldn’t apply your diverse background to make it your own. If you are not clear on what you want in your next role, you will confuse a hiring manager. They want a steak knife. You are a Swiss Army Knife. If you go on about all the things you can do (“I can uncork wine, pop bottle caps, open tin cans, and cut fingernails, and have experience cutting pork chops, cheese, and Duct Tape”), you aren’t going to jump out as the obvious choice to a would-be hiring manager. Plus, everyone describes themselves the same way. You have to stand out.
4. You are best in class at some things
Sure, the company probably does need a well-rounded athlete (more on that later), but they are recruiting for a runner, cyclist, or swimmer, not all three. Even the accomplished triathlete has an area of strength. So do you. If you are honest with yourself, there are parts of your past experience that have been sources of joy and energy and things you have done (perhaps even done exceptionally well) that drain you of energy and motivation.
Only you know for sure, although others can provide some useful insight you might be too close to see yourself. You can use assessment tools (like StrengthsFinders, Insights Discovery Kolbe, DiSC, Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, and others) to gain insight. You can hire a career coach to ask you better questions than you are asking yourself. You can read books. You can seek counsel from networking groups or colleagues. You can take a self-discovery or professional development class. You can spend time with yourself.
However it happens, you need to get clear about what you want and get good at describing your differentiation. What you do best. Not what you have done, but what you want to do in the future. What skills you want to use, what kind of role you want, what kind of company would suit best (by name preferably), what title would suit, and how you want to be measured and managed. This is essentially your personal marketing plan.
5. The job is bigger than you
It is highly likely that the job requires some things you haven’t done, or done in a while, or done well. That is just the nature of the dynamic, changing nature of the workforce. Technology, competitive pressures, globalization, and other trends are causing jobs to change rapidly. Sure, you can invest in training and certifications (you should!). You keep up on your industry. You join networking groups. You do some mentoring and reverse mentoring to stay current. All those things are important, but likely you will need to make some effort, starting in an interview process and through onboarding, to translate what you have done as transferrable skills to the role. And for the rest, you and the hiring manager will need to develop a plan (more on this in a second). The manager will need to be incredibly crisp on the non-negotiables for the role; the personality traits, motivations, and skills that translate to success in the role. Notice I didn’t say “experience.” Experience may not be a measure of future performance in the role and, frankly, as a manager is a really hard to differentiate on experience since everyone who applies and makes it through initial screening seems incredibly and equally competent.
Looking at these things visually, each candidate has a certain degree of overlap with the success profile of the role they are applying for. The overlap are the familiar responsibilities, personality traits, motivations, and skills that the job requires that you can confidently accomplish. Both hiring manager and candidates are well-served by having a high degree of overlap.
On one side of that Venn diagram will be all the skills and experiences that you don’t directly apply in your new role. Perhaps it is your experience in hardware electronics, when you take a role for a software company. Let’s say you don’t use your experience in Javascript, when you take a job as a Python developer. Perhaps it is your experience in organizational design, when you take a job as in talent acquisition. Maybe it is the fact that you play the saxophone in a jazz band, you are an accomplished jewelry designer, or you are fluent in several Asian languages, but have a sales territory in Latin America. In these cases, if you want to find an outlet for those talents you might have to look to volunteer somewhere to take them up as a hobby. In past roles that didn’t require much writing, I found myself contributing to other blogs or publications as a guest contributor. As a writer, I just couldn’t help myself. You will do the same.
Or, ideally, you will find a way to shift the role definition itself (the edge of the job profile circle) to the left to encompass more of your skills. Let’s say you join the company as an individual contributor, but have management experience. Perhaps as the company and role grows, you can take over a team and be a people manager again to use those skills. Perhaps you can look for ways to expand the scope to cover things you are developing in yourself, like strategic thinking, new technical skills, or leadership.
On the other side of the Venn diagram are the job responsibilities that are not in your sweet spot. Perhaps you have spent years selling through channels, but now need to apply skills in direct selling models. Perhaps you have done digital demand generation using tools like marketing automation and PPC advertising and now need to add intention and analytics to your skill set in order to do account-based marketing. Perhaps you need to add cloud computing to your impressive list of IT credentials. Perhaps the job calls for other things that you are willing to do and have been wanting to do, but haven’t demonstrated yet. For these you and your manager have some choices:
Development: you could learn and practice the skills required to be good at your new (next) job.
Delegate: you could bring people onto your team who are experts in these areas to do the work and for you to learn from.
Design: you and your manager could actually design these tasks out of the job itself, giving them to another person or group, shifting your role to play to your strengths.
The alternatives to these things also start with D: disappoint and disaster. Let’s try to avoid that with some frank discussion and good planning and organization design at the start. In the past, I have found that having people on my team who could help me follow-up on detailed accountability plans was a useful corollary to my strategy and idea-generating creativity. Everyone has strengths and we should use ours and allow others the opportunity to demonstrate theirs. We have all had these things in our jobs in the past that we either had to get good at or find ways to accomplish in other ways.
Finally, if you are finding success and satisfaction in your job and want to continue to moving forward, these are still great principles to apply. Keeping up on trends in the job market, understanding the career pathing at your company, investing in yourself with additional reading, courses, and experiences, and talking with trusted mentors and advisors can help you continue to develop your skills and capabilities to be a high degree of overlap for your next role.
And one last note: Everyone can use a good activist shareholder on their personal board of directors (don’t know what an activist investor is? See here). You should have people in your life that are asking the tough questions, making sure you are growing, and sponsoring you for stretch roles. It may be uncomfortable to invite a disrupter or agitator into your inner circle, but it is necessary to combat complacency and avoid developing blind spots around your own development. If you don’t have an activist among your career advisors, find one.
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Special thanks to Richard Banks for introducing me to personal marketing plans, for Minh-Ha Nguyen and Teresa Caro for helping me filter my own experience more clearly, to Rebecca Larson for helping me articulate my strengths, to Kelly Kannwischer for Younique and Susan Clark for HeartSpark, to Mike Allred at TechCXO for the Enneagram-based Print Report, to Brian Scudamore and Vistage for introducing me to Kolbe, Alyssa Gasca, Michele Sarkisian, Tanya Young Stump, Gina Riley, Balaji Krishnamurthy, Ben Clifton, and Herve Fage for being activists to me, to Sarah Carr Evans and Kevin Hickey for recently dissecting job success profiles for me, and for so many of my LinkedIn connections, friends, and colleagues for your help and encouragement in my own professional journey. So grateful for their investment in me and I hope that I have done a few things to make them proud (mistakes and opinions my own, of course).
As a marketer, we are asked to make smart investments without all the information. The ever-increasing pace of industry, competitive pressures and rising investor and customer expectations are having their effect. To remain at the top of our game, we must demonstrate a bias for action and the ability to quickly pivot and learn. We are often asked to be change agents, which implies some conflict with internal and external stakeholders, or even our own bosses. We want to make smart decisions. We want to make a difference. We want to be confident and gain the confidence of others. How do we accomplish that? I believe the answer is in being fearless.
The word “fearless,” is often used to synonymously with fear-free. “He ran fearlessly into the burning building to save the child,” the newspaper will report of the local hero. “She has a fearless brush stroke,” they will tell of an artist’s boldness. “He fearlessly changed the business model from traditional transactions to a pay-as-you-go service business,” magazines will report. “Her fearless investments in the new market segment put her ahead of her competition,” followers will admire. "We fearlessly moved our business to the cloud, leading our industry in digital transformation," the annual report will boast. But any of these people will tell you that they have doubts. They were not guaranteed success. There is not a sub-species with superhuman abilities not to feel anxiety (although, in fairness, sometimes when I see the professional snowboarders flipping through the half-pipe or surfers attacking a crashing wave, I might be convinced otherwise). But for the rest of us mere mortals, it isn't about being fear-free, but rather they are overcoming their fears.
What does it mean to be fearless in your business and how can fearlessness be cultivated?
1. It is a mindset change
The answer might be hidden in the word itself. The term “less” is a relative word. It implies that it is less when compared to something else. I am sure you can sting your eyes with “tearless” shampoo, but it is meant to imply a relative safety to other products on the market. We use words like seamless, matchless, baseless, careless, effortless, heartless, motionless, priceless, and thankless as if they are absolutes, but they are really descriptions of relation. You can be seemingly tireless, but still get tired. So, being fearless is to fear less than you did before when faced with uncertainty. That is a choice that you make each day. In marketing, we may shift investment from traditional advertising channels or events to new digital initiatives or approaches. We may change our go-to-market structures, introduce new solutions, target new markets, go after new types of customers. All of these can be seen as fearless moves in hindsight, but if we live in the moment and in the data fearing less, we can improve our chances of success, even when we face internal opposition or hesitancy, without taking on unnecessary risk.
2. It requires practice
Extreme sports athletes seem fearless, but they train for years, risking life and limb, to build up the skills and stamina to wow us in prime time. They overcame their fear one run at a time and practice managing their mind along with their bodies. Entrepreneurs are known for their fearlessness, but that was also trained with small bets and experimentation throughout their lives.
In my experience, confidence is not the opposite of fear: it is action. Fear can be paralyzing, especially when combined with a vivid imagination, but the fearless face it down, give it a name, and move forward. Not recklessly, but with calculated intention, identifying and mitigating risks. To be fearless is just to strive to fear less than you did the day before and you do that with action. Before long, you are accomplishing things never before possible and bringing others along with you on the journey.
3. It builds confidence
I recently heard Beau Lotto, the neuroscientist whose TED talk has generated over 5 million views, say that “courage is more important than confidence.” The best leaders are right a lot of the time and are worth betting on, but more importantly, they have a bias for action. You only have confidence after someone had courage and proved it could be done. Hopefully, of course, that someone is you and you can reap the early mover advantages. Others see the success and what is possible and may live a bit more fearlessly as well.
4. It changes your priorities
You can be 100% correct about things that happened in the past (like last week's lottery numbers), but since we live our lives looking forward, we do not have that luxury. Quite the opposite. In today’s changing landscape, the tactics and strategies that worked in the past might as well be guaranteed not to work in the future. Be skeptical of anyone whose marketing plan, marketing metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are not changing over time. That is something to be truly afraid of. To fear less means to learn more and that is bound to change what you are measuring and where you are aiming your attention and resources.
5. It changes the way you work on a daily basis
Sometimes as leaders we see fearlessness demonstrated in bold business strategies or big M&A investments, but not all fearlessness happens in the boardroom at scale. It is seen in the conversations we have that are awkward or difficult. The coaching conversations with a struggling employee. The negotiations with stakeholders for input or support. The fierce disagreements that result in a strong commitment to the decisions, whether they aligned with your ideal or not. This is where the strength of our backbones are tested. Where our fearlessness and our commitment to strategy is demonstrated. This is where we build our confidence, reveal our new priorities and practice our new mindset.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com.