In a world of limited time, finite means, and pressure for results, what not to do?

When marketing is under-resourced, it tends to stop listening to the customer (if it ever did), because listening requires a cessation of action. What happens next? Recycling whatever you said and did in the last campaign. Talking to all customers as if they’re all the same.

Four marketing temptations that are common in a down economy (and ways to avoid them):

Not to do: Try anything once.
Try instead: When results are off (or direct marketing is new to the organization) it can be tempting to churn through new tactics, media, messaging, target industries. Revisit your plan, fine, but spend the energy to first analyze what’s there today. It’s easier, faster, and potentially less risky to incrementally improve an existing program than to chuck everything and start over.

Not to do: Get something out there NOW.
Try instead: Urgency and timeliness are important in marketing. Make the most of them by talking to each of your customers (and prospects) as if their current goals and worries are important to you. Start with the customers you know best and who are most valuable to you. Think about whom you’re trying to reach and what’s important in their world. Just making noise isn’t enough.

Not to do: The Unfunded Mandate.
Try instead: Ruthlessly cut what doesn’t have a budgeted spend, allocated time/project plan, and a revenue stream it’s directly intended to influence. Say no to everything else, regardless of who’s asking. Create a backburner list for nice ideas that need some more time to bake.

Not to do: Abandon everything.
Try instead: Don’t simply stop doing marketing. Establish an ROI objective linked to how your program or tactic will help a salesperson and/or a prospect. Test with a fraction of your sales force and prospects before investing big.

For the concept of the not-to-do list, thanks to @gerhard20 for the post 15 Things Salespeople And Sales Managers Should Put On Their Not-To-Do List.

• One of my art song translations will be used 2/14/10 at "Love in the Parlors: A Valentine in Concert" in NYC http://www.merchantshouse.org/events #
• Really enjoyed Frederick Wiseman's new documentary film LA DANSE- The Paris Opera Ballet. See it: http://www.zipporah.com/calendar/press/19 #
• thx for #ff @EricBlumthal #
• thx for listing me! @kristinconnell @MikeHypercube @ConceptHub #
• '26 Short Screenplays for Independent Filmmakers' by M. Robert Turnage http://bit.ly/aGTcJX #
• Great post: Eight Skills for Tomorrow's Marketers http://marketingexecutives.biz/Eight-Skills-for-Tomorrows-Marketers #

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It’s book review time again. Perhaps you’ve heard that sales people have a rant about marketing people (and others) who don’t understand what sales people do. Today’s book is a nice little vaccine against Complete Sales Ignorance.

The Elevator Summary: Most books about selling are of little use in understanding the psychological world of selling. Sandler is the real deal.

Standout Moments: All of them.

Not so much: Can you learn how to sell from a book? No.

Who should read it: Anyone in sales. Anyone in marketing. Anyone who manages the performance of sales or marketing.

Bottom Line: One of the best, most practical books about buyer behavior at the moment of truth. And a tough, practical book about sales and negotiating. Read this book.

More about the book: The Sandler Rules: 49 Timeless Selling Principles and How to Apply Them

• Great TechCrunch post on sales strategies in startups http://tinyurl.com/yf332hd @klepperson #
• RT @EricBlumthal overcoming resistance with the right questions http://twurl.cc/244a #b2b #sales #leadership #

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The real beauty of Kevin’s article When will CMO heads roll? isn’t the observation that corporate marketing budgets are broken and that change is amazingly slow in coming.

That’s an easy target.

What I like is his description of who is changing.

He describes an actual target market that a marketer can begin to get to know and flush out through sales-related communications as well as corporate positioning.

Why?

It isn’t “people in [Department] with [Job title] at companies with revenue between $[X] and $[Y] million, whose [CMO] is [40] or younger, headquartered in [US].” That is how 90% of business people think of their target markets. In B2B especially, it’s really not true.

Your customer is someone who has a reason to buy from you. That’s not intrinsic to size, location or any other easy demographic or firmographic marker.

Check out Kevin’s article and see what I mean.

Which of these is true for your company? How are you going to fix it?

1. Your customers are focused on their own issues — and don’t see you as relevant to those concerns. Are you talking to the wrong people or companies? Are you trying to sell too broadly? Do you simply need to better explain the relevance of your work to customers’ problems?
2. Your company talks about itself, forcing customers to navigate your bureaucracy, jargon, products. How can you put aside your internal bureaucracy and help customers solve their own problems? Can you organize around customers and their problems?
3. Your company talks about solutions without correctly defining your customers’ problems. Ask existing customers, target customers, and your sales and marketing people what the customers’ problems are. Where are the common threads? Where are the disconnects?
4. When your company talks, it sounds like a bunch of other companies. What’s the difference?
5. Your company talks in language they don’t trust. Too tidy. Too pat. Too good to be true. Find out how your customers talk about their problems. And don’t overpromise what you can do about the problem. Respect your audience’s intelligence.
6. Your company doesn’t admit what it doesn’t do. Draw a line: Here’s what we do well — that is, where a customer gets the most economic value from us. Here’s everything we don’t do so well — can we send customers elsewhere for those things?

Getting customer attention is insanely hard right now.

Three things we now expect every January on the internet:

– New year predictions.
– New year resolutions.
– Reviews of past years’ abandoned resolutions and failed predictions.

Why?

Humans crave the power to know and control the future. We also are creatures of habit & don’t change gracefully — not even to adapt for the future we want.

Gentle reader, I will spare you the standard January predictions, resolutions, and litanies of defunct predictions and resolutions. I’ll only say that both professionally and personally, all major changes in my life during the past 12 months would NOT have been in last January’s predictions or resolutions. They’ve been great changes — new clients, new house, new family member, business growth. But I didn’t sit down last January and map out that they were all going to happen.

Things will always happen tomorrow that didn’t happen yesterday. Macroeconomic shifts, natural disasters, decisions taken by clients and competitors, you name it. It is ours to prepare for alternative scenarios and black swan events — not simply to institutionalize what works today.

Obsessing about risk management means to constantly develop operating processes, tech tools, business partnerships, marketing campaigns, financial resources, etc, that let me adapt when things change. It means studying how others have successfully managed through tough changes. It means looking at my situation and saying, “What’s unsustainable about this? What’s likely to change? What are the what-ifs we should be ready for?”

It doesn’t help to obsess about past failures — these typically cannot be controlled. I’ve already learned from them.

Examples: ways to obsess about risk management

– In finance, conserve cash. With cash in hand, no one else (banks, investors, accounts receivable, factors…) controls your ability to seize an opportunity or survive a traumatic change.

– In sales & marketing, stay close to customers. If a given tactic doesn’t get a response, your customers can tell you why. If something works, customers can show you how to extend it. Simply knowing what happened doesn’t tell you why it worked (or didn’t).

The ability to adapt equals power to work with whatever future we meet. It is the basis of military success — fire and motion (thanks, Joel Spolsky). It is the basis of sales and marketing success. It is the basis of business strategy.

Whatever else happens, invest in flexibility. Then keep moving. All we know about this year is that it’s going to be different from last year.

Happy new year.

As regular readers of my blog know, I have an uneasy relationship with traditional brand advertising. Especially in the B2B space.

I do feel moved to clarify this point regarding corporate brand marketing: “People can’t buy your stuff if they don’t know you exist.”

Now, especially in the B2B world, people CAN buy a product or service from you – and not know you exist. Especially (but not only) if you’re selling commodities.

– They’re buying through a broker or aggregator or auction or distributor.

– They’re buying through a blind or competitive procurement process.

In both of those cases, an influencer had to know who you are and decide to bring you in. Purchases did not materialize through spontaneous generation. Someone still made them happen

Now, here’s where sales and marketing disciplines are inextricably linked, often uncomfortably so in many companies.

In any B2B sale I can think of, and also many consumer purchases, awareness is not enough.

A significant goal of marketing in the B2B world is credibility. That comes through many proofs — word of mouth referrals, customer testimonials and references, personal introductions, coverage in some kind of third party analysis (from research houses to blogs), awards, media coverage, peer reviewed journals, technology reviews…

Whether buyers, influencers, or both need to trust your credibility, this must be established before money will change hands. And typically before serious discussions will be entertained.

Credibility implies some openness, respect, trust. It is a source of motivation to proceed with a deal.

What credibility is not? Awareness. (It’s so much more than that!) Awareness is not a meaningful yardstick for measuring any kind of B2B marketing ROI.

How do you know your marketing is building credibility? By measuring the degree to which your marketing gives you influence over the actions your counterparties are taking. Is it easy to measure? No. But it’s what matters.

Enter tension between marketing and sales. In the B2B complex sale, marketing + sales must work hand in glove to deliver the kind of influence that leads to customer action. It’s a highly integrated partnership. It’s hard to peel out what marketing did and what sales did and give them credit as separate functional entities for their specific influential little successes during the course of a sales cycle.

We can steal many good ideas from six sigma, agile, and other manufacturing processes. Sales and marketing people should do more of this. But human influence is much, much more complex and unpredictable than a manufacturing process. What we do can’t be fine-tuned in the same way as a mechanical build operation. Which is already pretty complex and tough to tune.

What’s predictable, though, is this. If the marketing team is focused on writing pretty brochures and running pretty ads in traditional media, it’s going to be a strained partnership. If the sales team is waiting for fully qualified leads to fall from the sky, ready for contract negotiations, it’s going to be a strained partnership. (Hopefully that’s not your company…)