Get Out of the Office

Sales Readiness

“Everyone lives by selling something,” wrote Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson.
And perhaps the ONLY thing I disagree with Peter Drucker on is his observation that “the aim of marketing is to make selling unnecessary.” Selling is necessary. While marketing is about understanding and preparing customers to buy, selling is about turning marketing programs into transactions.

That said, the lines between marketing and selling in the digital commerce age have become increasingly blurred. In many cases, when you buy online, it is without human intervention. Gerhard Gschwandtner projects in SellingPower that the number of outside sales personnel will decline from about 18 million today to about 4 million in 2020. He writes, “as the number of software applications is exploding and computing power is accelerating, we will see more sales tasks move online, requiring fewer salespeople. ”

The sales process (human or digital) requires the right collateral, sales tools, presentations and demos and comparative value propositions, albeit it in different formats. Take reference selling, for example. Spokespeople and endorsements are important in both B2C and B2B sales (either through advertising or through a list of references the buyer can call). In the digital world, online ratings and comments by buyers are now supplementing and may eventually become the standard for reference selling.

As this shift occurs, marketers, with their understanding of buyer motivation, will have an important role to play. But to take on this role, many will need to expand their worldview to include revenue generation. Says Sergio Zyman, ex-CMO of Coca Cola, the definition of marketing success is to "sell more stuff, to more people, more often, for more money, more efficiently." To do this, marketers will need to develop a deeper understanding of the sales process.

And the best way to do this is get out of the office and accompany sales people on sales calls.

*Gschwandtner, Gerhard “How Many Sales People Will Be Left in 2020,” SellingPower

Make Haste Slowly

Effective Communications Briefs

Once you've developed a differentiated value proposition, you've got to communicate it to the target audience, using powerful language and visuals. You've got to find out where that audience “hangs out” – what television programs they watch, what magazines they read, what radio stations they listen to, what social media they follow and where they spend their time online.

Creating a winning (and by winning, I mean winning in the marketplace, not winning awards) marketing communications program requires a team of specialists: communications strategists, copy writers, graphics and layout artists, media buyers and, increasingly, social media specialists, often found in marketing or communications agencies.

How well your awareness-building initiatives succeed depends on your ability to harness the full power of these talented individuals. A good agency won’t start work without a good brief, which ensures that their team stays focused on your objectives. But developing a good brief takes time and hard work, and if you leave most of the effort to the agency, not only will you receive a hefty bill, but you and your internal non-marketing clients may become frustrated with the process. Plus, leaving it to the agency risks that they will only work with the marketing department, losing you an opportunity to engage with key business stakeholders.

The solution: create your own brief, which gives you the opportunity to harness the best thinking of your organization’s talent, and not just the marketing team. Here are some guidelines:

1. Start with your market insights. What's the big picture? What's going on in the market? What are the opportunities or problems in the market?
2. Who is the campaign talking to? The more precise and detailed the better. Describe demographics, firmographics and psychographics. Explain how the audience currently thinks, feels and behaves in relation to the product category, your brand, and your specific product or service.
3. What is the objective, the purpose of the campaign? A concise statement of the effect the communication should have on customers. Typically expressed as an action, focused on what the communications should make them think, feel, or do.
4. What's the most important thing to say? What's the single most compelling statement we can make to achieve the objective? This should be a simple sentence and certainly no more than a few sentences if absolutely necessary. Avoid generalities.
5. What are the supporting rational and emotional reasons to believe and buy? Explain why the customer should believe what we say, and why they should buy. Include all the major copy points, in order of relative importance to the customer. It is also helpful to include other information the agency might need, such as a description of the brand personality, positioning tag lines, creative thought starters, terms of direct response offers, result expectations, and mandatory elements such as the logo and Web address. 
6. What do we need from the agency team? And when do we need it?

Finally, make haste slowly. While it takes an effort to collaborate across internal functions who don’t speak marketing, engaging them in the process as trusted advisors (with marketing doing the heavy lifting) will increase both understanding and buy-in.

Don't squander this opportunity.

Hammering a Nail with a Screwdriver

Awareness Building

Marketing, in many respects, is about building awareness. After all, if customers aren't aware of your offering, they won’t buy it.

Unfortunately, awareness building is perhaps one of the most misunderstood aspects of marketing, by both non-marketers and inexperienced marketers alike.

In your marketing career, you've probably received an ad-hoc request to run an ad, post a press release or write a brochure. Each of these has a place in the marketer’s toolkit, but far too often someone reaches for the tool before adequately assessing the situation. It’s like trying to hammer a nail with a screwdriver because that’s what you have – it might work, but the odds are against it.

Successful marketing communications requires discipline. While there are occasions when you need to run, say, a spot ad as part of an existing initiative, you’ll be better off if you've done the heavy lifting of developing your marketing strategy and plan. Every single communication should be thought through and evaluated against the selected target markets and customer sets and the value proposition, whether it is an individual Tweet or a comprehensive thought leadership campaign. As a marketing executive you can’t, of course, micro-manage every detail, but that’s where the awareness-building plan, with associated tasks and responsibilities comes into play. Everyone should know his or her role, expectations, accountabilities and how he or she will be evaluated.

Start with the value proposition

A value proposition is a clear statement of the promise of value (expressed as a benefit or business result) you will deliver in answer to a customer need or problem. It answers the question “why should a customer buy from us?” Writing a great value proposition is neither easy nor quick, but here are some steps that will help.

1. Clearly and precisely identify the target segment you wish to communicate to. You may have multiple segments which, of course, means you’ll need multiple value propositions.
2. Prioritize the customer’s needs or problems identified in your insights work. 
3. Then list the primary benefit your offering provides for the expressed problem. For businesses, these often focus revenue generation or cost reduction; consumers might see more benefits in terms of status, ease-of-use or service and support. A useful exercise, once you've developed the initial benefits list is to look at businesses as consumers and vice versa. 
4. Compare this to competitive offerings and list the key points of differentiation.

With this information, write out the value proposition. Here is a “starter” I've found helpful:

For [buyers in priority segments] who need [statement of customer's problem], we provide [statement of the solution / key customer benefits].

Unlike [primary competitors], our offering has / does [statement of major points of differentiation]. 

Then test the heck out of it, both internally (especially with product developers and sales personnel) and with a sampling of target buyers.

With a differentiated value proposition, your marcomms team has a tool to create a powerful awareness-building strategy through the available communications channels: traditional advertising, digital advertising, website, direct, social media, events, word-of-mouth and point-of-sale. Assuming they know their stuff, they'll do an outstanding job.

Next: Creating Meaningful Differentiation: How Much Do You Know About Your Competition?

Insource or Outsource

First Things First discussed the first of five key things the CMO must do well*, getting the marketing mandate right. Allies, Agnostics and Antagonists focused on the second, building meaningful relationships with functional and business leaders. Meaningful Metrics addresses agreeing on how to measure success. 

The fourth focuses on collaborating with external partners.

Once you've got measurable objectives in place, you need to determine how to accomplish these objectives. You’ll need to carefully evaluate the capabilities of your staff against those objectives and then determine whether to retrain, hire or seek outside assistance.

Luckily for you, marketing may be the most outsourced function in business. There are a plethora of advertising, brand, marketing communication, marketing strategy, public relations, demand generation, digital marketing, marketing research, print and social media agencies, all of whom provide specialized skills that few but the largest of marketing organizations can afford to keep on staff.

How you manage these firms can make or break your success.

First, determine exactly the type of help you need. For this, you need to be very, very clear on what needs to be done. There are subtle but important differences in the types of firms and the types of personnel they hire. Many of them, like your organization, look to expand their offerings to meet the needs of their clients. Some of these expansions make sense, but only if they deliver real results and, importantly, provide real experts. I, for example, am immediately skeptical of the branding firm that launches a PR or social media offering, which require different skill sets than their core business.

Therein lies the key. You’re not hiring an agency; you’re hiring people and a culture. 

Says Maureen McGuire, CMO of Bloomberg, “there may not be a major difference between what the different agencies do, but the team that is working on your business will be different. The chemistry that you build with that team and their ability to get fired up about what they’re trying to do and bring in new ideas is what counts.”*

*“What Do You Want From Me? How High-Performing CMOs Exceed Expectations,” SpencerStuart, 2010 

Next: You're Not an Island

What Do CMOs Actually Do?

The stereotypical view of the CMO has been the Chief Advertising Officer, reinforced by the popular AMC series Mad Men (I admit to being addicted to the show…).

But the CMO’s remit from the CEO and management team is much broader than creating winning advertising campaigns, argues Joe Tripodi, chief marketing and commercial officer of The Coca-Cola Company. “They want the CMO to be the chief growth officer of the company. They want the CMO to drive cultural change, and they want the CMO to build capability with people.”*

Nigel Dessau, currently CMO of Stratus Technology and ex-CMO of both AMD and StorageTek, says “I spent 40% of my time marketing, 30% on corporate issues and 30% on the road, mostly with customers. It is surprising how little you get to do your nominal job as head of marketing.”

“There is a very unique strength that most leading CMOs have: helping to lead a group of professionals from marketing as sales support to strategic marketing,” says Suzanne Lowe, author of The Integration Imperative, a book written for professional services marketers. “Professional services marketing is a very young profession; construction management, for example, is RFP driven. All professional services marketers need to shift from being order-takers / responders to move to focusing on identifying the critical factors of competitive success for their firms. And they need to help their firms make this shift.”
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Next: Congrats! You're a Marketing Executive - Now What???

*"What do you want from me? How high-performing CMOs exceed expectations," Spencer Stuart, November 2010,

Forget Everything that Got You Here

You've just landed that CMO or executive marketing job you've wanted for years.

Congratulations! Bask in the glory.

For about a minute.

Now focus on this: 45 months* - or if you're in healthcare, automotive, restaurant or communications / media, 28 to 32 months.

That’s the average life of a CMO (and if you're not the CMO, you need to start thinking about his or her replacement...)

And that’s the good news – the lifespan is up from 23 months in 2006! But less than four years is hardly a career, and what you do during three critical time periods will determine your success, and your tenure:

Selling trust

At a Meetup group sponsored by I Love Marketing (lots of good tips and videos), we listened to a local entrepreneur who has developed a 6-figure home cleaning business. She has built both a loyal clientele and workforce by delivering consistently superior results and is able to charge a premium - heck, who hasn't gone through multiple cleaning ladies (this tends to be a female dominated profession) and thus is willing to pay for reliable results.

How to write compelling copy

Read. A lot.

Write. Often.

Edit. Ruthlessly.

Have someone else read it and give you honest feedback.

Experience matters.

Microsoft's new logo won't make a difference

The intent is laudible. Preparing to launch updated versions of most of its products, "we felt it was a good time to express the newness in the Microsoft logo (see below) as well," said Jeff Hansen, Microsoft's general manager of brand strategy. 

Microsoft certainly needs to do something. With the exception of late a spike in 2007 and a dip in 2009, the stock price has hovered between $25 to $30 for a decade.

Robotic brand behaviors

By now most marketers (effective ones, anyway) have moved beyond a Mad Men "brand = logo (or advertising - read From Mad Man to Superwomen) view of the world, and are focused on behaviors.

And with good reason. Viewing marketing as communications (only) is like viewing sales as cold calling or finance as accounting - necessary, but no where near sufficient. A logo or ad may catch your attention, but the customer experience results in the sale, and repeat business. Great companies define and build the experiential aspects of the brand into everything they do, creating a competitive advantage that can't be replicated.

But there is a fine line between definition and prescription.

A quick way to destroy your brand: cut prices, buyback shares, don't innovate

The mattress business is clearly not very restful: Tempur-Pedic's share price has dropped from $87 in April to $22 on Friday, a 66% decline. A colleague suggested I take a look at buying the stock. So I did a bit of research:

Convincing strangers to become customers

Back in the Madison Avenue glory days, all you had seemingly had to do was create a catchy message, pick the right media, pump up your advertising investment and, presto, your sales increased, reaping profits far in excess of the cost. In extreme cases, the actual physical product was irrelevant (remember Pet Rocks?).

Of course, it really wasn't all that easy then.