They’ve restructured their approach to their music and the market. But someone still talked them into doing this great Rube Goldberg contraption as an alternative video to their new release.

I think they are interesting artists. Hope it goes well for them.

Here’s BoingBoing’s take on the video.

Here’s the video.

Good data is like jet fuel. The plane is beautiful and lovingly engineered, and it’s the part that the users actually see. But that gorgeously branded vehicle isn’t going anywhere without some liquid nourishment under the hood.

Kudos to by Ben Bradley at Macon Raine for describing a common phenomenon: focusing on everything but the data. Data quality is about (1) figuring out who we want to talk with (segmentation), then (2) databasing all the important things we know about this customer, so we can reach them with interesting information they might want, and (3) maintaining this data consistently forever.

Here’s what I’d add to Ben’s recommendations about CRM data quality.

• A task you give to interns can get done well, if it’s managed. Position a task to them as menial and unimportant, and why would you think they’d perform it with diligence and integrity? Whether you’re delegating data quality to interns, temps, vendors, or tech savvy staffers, show respect toward the work you’re asking them to do. It’s only unglamorous if you say it is.
• Data integrity isn’t obvious to the uninitiated. Plan to invest quality time with the people who are going to fix and maintain it. Explain what the data is, how the CRM/database technology works, and how the data cleanup will affect your customers and company when the data is used. Give them the nickel tour of relational databases and CRM and data hygiene principles. Consider writing up a list of things that need to be done to the data and how you will test it to see if those things have been done. Chaotic data won’t get better unless the people tasked with organizing it have a frame of reference for what success looks like.
• Don’t pay people to do things that technology can do better. Give your data quality intern(s) some automated tools (or ask them to go find some for you) to do things like remove duplicate records and add/correct ZIP+4.
• Data quality will never be a pay-side activity for sales people. Good sales people, in my observation, don’t deal very well with data quality and are too focused on pay-side activities to become better at it. A worthy experiment: give them a person (on staff or outsourced) who’s good with data and say, “Call or email this person when you learn something new that should be updated in your account/contact data.” If the sales person sees value in what you’re using CRM to accomplish, perhaps that’s incentive enough for them to use the resource.

CRM data doesn’t get better until it meets people who understand and love it.

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Or what I do to keep in touch and build a relationship — lead nurture — that predicts lead value and conversion to sales opportunity?

Well, it’s both.

Most companies fail to define lead Nature in any but the most basic terms, rendering their efforts at connection stilted at best. Without an ability to carry on an intelligent conversation with your prospects through the various media of your outreach, it doesn’t matter how often you call on them. Your buyers will avoid, reject, and resent your intrusion if you talk at them like you don’t know (or listen to) them.

Many of us also do a perfunctory job (at best) in reaching out to these leads — lead nurture. And with nurture, compelling value helps but even simple consistency (just showing up) makes a notable difference.

This means more homework for marketing projects and plans upfront. And more detailed follow through.

In a B2B company of not-unlimited means, it is easy to spend a lot of money on marketing without seeing value for the spend. Here are 4 spends that are limited, scalable, and accountable. Each can drive overall company growth, short term revenue, or both.

Target Customer analysis > G2. What characteristics, beliefs, business problems, firmographics do our best customers have in common? How predictive are these traits that another company could be a good customer?

Demand generation. Who else might be similar to our target customer(s)? Where might we find & meet them? What offers and approaches will draw their interest?

Relationship nurturing. How do we better get to know the people in our target customer universe — including our existing customers:?

Strategic communication. Who are our stakeholders (including current and potential customers, investors, and employees)? What do our stakeholders want and need to know? How can we become the source of that information?

They won’t remember our ads. They don’t want to learn what we want them to believe about our products, services, company, quality… they want us to tell them how our stuff solves their problem.

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That’s why it’s complex.

It’s tempting, especially for salespeople, to depend on just a single contact, champion, or coach inside the client company. Giving in to this temptation? Watch for l-o-n-n-n-g sales cycles, clients who won’t make decisions, endless RFPs, and surprise announcements that you won’t be getting the business.

What do you need when your business depends on successfully influencing communities?

In addition to great sales people and great sales infrastructure, marketing processes that are…

• Patient. Sales isn’t supposed to be patient — there’s a qualified deal on the table. Marketing has to find potential and study it, monitor it, listen for cues, compare what’s happening in this deal with others. Its processes (and the technology infrastructure behind them) need to enforce and support patience.
• Iterative. Does your team do something more than once? On purpose? That’s the mentality necessary to learn. If you’re trying to influence a complex ecosystem (multiple people, teams, business units), then launch a program or tactic assuming that you’re going to learn something new, which will necessitate additional change to the program. Which brings us to…
• Listening. Only the customer really knows what influence them. Not always can (or will) they tell you. Marketing processes in a complex sale enforce and support the effort to listen for customer cues.

If your marketing processes (and by extension your technology infrastructure) don’t support test-listen-measure-repeat, then let’s not kid ourselves — you won’t do it. You don’t have time.

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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.

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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

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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.

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 already hard. Why make it harder?

– 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.