“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.” – John Green
My latest article for Forbes has been published. In it, I speak candidly with CMOs and marketing leaders about how to have more influence in their organization. The perennial topic of "marketing marketing" is a key one across businesses and industries. It requires great cross-functional partnerships, communication, and, most importantly, a keen sense of self. I haven't ever done it perfectly, but has learned lessons through the years that may be of use to others.
Check my page on Forbes for all of the recent articles.
Special thanks to many leaders, mentors, and friends who have influenced my thinking on this topic, including Steve Buhaly, Angela Dowling, Balaji Krishnamurthy, Gerry Perkel, Amy Walker Barrs, Alyssa Gasca, Wade Clowes, Sam Runco, Ben Clifton, Jerry Viera, Carolyn McKnight, Douwe Bergsma, Erick Petersen, Jerry Dawson, Steve Bryan, Mick Connolly, Tanya Young Stump, Paul Gulick, Steve Seminario, Rob Baumgartner, Adam Schmidt, Karen Howells, Samantha Phenix, Susan Clark, Rob Morton, Jon Quillard, Esther Diez, William Efird, Julie Naster, William Walker, Greg Turnbull, Jack Raiton, Zach Zhang, Victor Li, Kelly Kannwischer, Teresa Caro, Helene Lollis, Dan Bruton, Terry Trover, Mark Ceciliani, Rob Stewart, Doug Barnes, Patrick Herguth, Annie Ho, and many, many more. I am also indebted to authors Seth Godin, Patrick Lencioni, Eli Goldratt, Barry Trailer, Jon Maeda, Clayton Christensen, Danny Meyer, Ben Horowitz, Peter Drucker, Michael Porter, Gino Wickman, Michael Watkins, and Guy Kawasaki for their insights. Although I have been blessed with great counsel, the opinions expressed here are my own.
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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.
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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...
5. 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.
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
There is a big push in education and business around Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, or STEM. In parallel, there is a movement to put Art into that acronym (thus STEAM). There is controversy around it and opinions swirl.
The purpose of the STEM movement I have seen is to promote technical careers to under-represented groups (namely women and people of color). If that is true, including the Arts dilutes that. My experience is that women and other historically disenfranchised groups are well represented in art. Even creative businesses, like advertising and marketing communications, is heavily populated by women. Perhaps that isn’t the case in more traditional fine art roles or in related fields like architecture. But in any event, I wondered if adding Art didn’t de-focus the emphasis on the hard sciences that STEM was meant to promote.
That said, I am a believer of the power at the intersection of art and science. Design and technology is what drives adoption. Creativity is required, especially in the dynamic world of technology propelled by innovation. I am not opposed to STEAM, in fact, I have lived it in my own life and career.
- Hailing from a family of artists, I grew up exposed to live music, theater, and visual arts
- Even in technical roles of digital demand generation and product strategy, carving out time to redesign our office environment and building experience centers
- Creating a new category of architectural video walls enabling the sculptural and non-linear use of video screens as a finish material
- Actively partnering with video artists, licensed fine artist work for use on digital canvases, and promoted at places like Art Basel and Design Week in New York and Miami
- Introducing new digital visualization technologies with groups like TEDxPortland and the Society for Experiential Design (SEGD)
- Writing and delivering courses, certified for AIA continuing education, about video wall technologies
- With empathy for customers, pioneering the use of virtual reality and visualization tools for the marketing of digital products in physical spaces
- Being named on a patent for an interactive touchscreen technology
- Rolling out identity systems and serving as the creative and UX lead for a number of projects
- ·As a student of history, marveling at the technical innovations which artists have pioneered in the field of material science, color, and perception
What do you think about STEM vs STEAM?
How have you used art in your work as a technologist, or visa versa?
Photo courtesy of USDigitalLiteracy
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.
“Openness doesn’t come from resisting our fears, but from getting to know them well.” – Pema Chodron
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.
“A year from now, you’ll wish you had started today.” – Karen Lamb
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.
“Live your life as an experiment.” – Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
“We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.” John Berger, Ways of Seeing
To solve the problem, you must first define it. And your first question probably isn’t the right one to ask.
I recently heard Beau Lotto, the neuroscientist whose TED talk on illusions has generated over 5 million views, speak at a conference* during which he said:
“courage is more important than confidence”
As I have been reflecting on this in my own life and work, including the current search for my next career step, I think he is right. If you are given the choice to be confident or courageous, you should always choose courage.
Confidence is believing you can. Courage is knowing that you might fail, but doing it anyway.
Confidence’s posture is upright, which makes it fragile. Confidence can’t fail. Courage leans into the wind, gets up when it falls down, and is more resilient.
Confidence is proud and can push others away. Courage is vulnerable and draws others in.
Confidence can be external facing, seeking the approval of others. Some acts of courage are public and heroic, but many are private and quiet. Doing the right thing, even when it is hard and no one is looking.
Confidence is complete and closed off to learning new things. Courage requires it.
Confidence requires prior relevant experience (otherwise it starts slipping into the danger zone of “over confidence”). Courage can forge it’s own path.
Confidence is a feeling. Courage is a decision to act.
In your own life, in your family, in your business, and in our communities, how can we put our personal and societal pressure for confidence aside, and instead cultivate more courage?
*The conference was TIDE (Technology, Innovation, Design, and Experience) produced by Avixa in conjunction with the InfoComm show. Amazing event. You should go!
This article was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse.
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – Socrates
“Seeing too much is seeing nothing.” – Kai Wong, director of the China: Through the Looking Glass exhibit at the MET
Read more by Jennifer Davis about finding your focus.
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.
Marketing holds the potential to drive business strategy and growth for the long-term, but only if you have the right talent in your organization.
I had a chance to share some thoughts and techniques on how to hire marketers with great strategic thinking and business skills to build out your leadership teams. This keynote presentation is now available on OnConferences, a virtual conference featuring business leaders across multiple industries and functional disciplines.
In this talk, I share the advice I give to CEOs when they are hiring marketing talent. This same advice applies up and down the organization to make sure you have the strategic horsepower to fuel your growth.
“Love makes you brave.” – Rich Kannwischer
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” – Terry Pratchett
I recently spoke at the GeekOut on Marketing Technology hosted by the Technology Association of Georgia. As promised, here is the presentation with resources and references of case study examples noted. There is so much more to know about each of these case studies and the portfolio work of the talented firms I mentioned. Happy exploring! Download here.