The Invisible Marketing Blog » leadership

And now for something completely different: Invisible Marketing makes microloans through Kiva

Christie Turner — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 16:59:42 +0000

Invisible Marketing is now promoting global entrepreneurship through Kiva. (“Loans that change lives.”)

Through Kiva, we’re making microloans to small businesses throughout the world, especially woman-owned businesses in Latin America. Check out our lender page to see who we support.

Our motivations and actions defy every attempt at prediction, as any honest economist will admit. But people in community act in very interesting ways. Some patterns emerge. Some themes are possible. Here are a few observations of the Kiva community so far.

People in community who help each other can derive mutual benefit. Kiva creates such a community, and personally I’m joining to study it.
People are willing to help people, even with no obvious, direct benefit to themselves.
Helping another person tends to most greatly benefit a giver in ways which are impossible to predict upfront (a foundational principle of networking).
People are more likely to help others when the recipient is (1) accessible, but mediated by a step or two of removal (familiarity breeds contempt), (2) someone with whom I can relate in some way, (3) easy to help (4) at low risk to the donor.
Giving can be empowering, like shopping is for many people. Shopping for bargain investments on Kiva is at least as much fun as shopping for a good deal on shoes or laptops or anything else you can buy online. It’s a marketplace of possibility, where every loan could pay you back and many could even generate interest.

Parting thoughts about Kiva:

Staking $25 on someone’s business pitch is an acceptable risk. And we can see who we’re helping. It’s not foolproof, but chances are good that our money will get to the entrepreneurs who pitched their loan opportunities to us through the Kiva site. And the rest is up to those leaders to grow their businesses and pay us back.

The possibility of return of capital is compelling for a philanthropic venture. We will recycle the capital for future loans. I look forward to seeing what our interns will do with the portfolio in future months and years.

I want my company to be a triple-bottom-line oriented company. Real sustainability is good for brands, because it’s good for people (on whom brands depend). Kiva just gave me an easy tool to make the company more global and sustainable in focus.

And with weird risk premiums and rotten returns in every venue for invested capital, perhaps we will benefit more from this experiment in social capitalism than we think. In ways we do not expect.

Think Twice: harnessing the power of counterintuition

Christie Turner — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 17:51:44 +0000

Trained in storytelling and analysis of human communication, I see in managerial circles a great desire for too-pat formulas to predict human behavior. A lot of business people’s assumptions don’t pass a simple BS test — do I actually know anyone who’s done what we think our buyer is going to do in response to X?

Buyers, end users, investors, leaders, influencers, crowds, politics are all more complicated (and amazing) than we imagine (or wish to allow). Conventional wisdom includes too little respect for individual variance and human nature.

Behavioral finance and behavioral economics contain many interesting attempts to analyze how human nature trumps our simplistic math, exposing some of the limitations of our supposedly predictive models. While it doesn’t come with a magic pill, it opens the way to better decisionmaking and more persuasive communication.

Think Twice: harnessing the power of counterintuition is my most recent read in this category. By Michael J. Mauboussin, an economist, Columbia University professor, and Legg Mason investment officer.

Good stuff. Check it out. (And thanks to Tom Keene’s Bloomberg on the Economy podcast for making the book known to me.)

The Elevator Summary: Handy, readable overview of the ways in which your brain is hardwired to make irrational decisions — and some tactics to spoof your own wiring (if you work at it).

Standout Moments: “In a probabilistic environment, you are better served by focusing on the process by which you make a decision than on the outcome.”

and… “How a person sees a problem — how it’s described to him, how he feels about it, and his individual knowledge — shapes how he reasons [and makes decisions] about it.”

and… “Market irrationality does not follow from individual irrationality…. In dealing with systems, the collective behavior matters more.”

and… “By studying the market, we can get a much better sense of how various decisions affect economic value than we can by listening to partially informed individuals.”

Not so much: Just because I know what I’m likely to do wrong doesn’t keep me from doing it anyway. The author readily admits this. The same is true of any business book.

Who should read it: People who need to influence a buying decision — marketing, sales, investment. People who need to make a buying decision.

Bottom Line: Interested in becoming a better decision maker and decision influencer? This book delivers a wealth of areas where you can become more aware — a first step toward change.

More about the book: Think Twice: harnessing the power of counterintuition

Marketers: under pressure for ROI? How to find accountability mentors.

Christie Turner — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 17:43:55 +0000

Process improvement is a sophisticated science (and art) in the real world where stuff gets moved (logistics), stored (materials management), built (JIT, Six Sigma, Lean, Agile), and so on.

Most marketing people don’t think about what they do in terms of process improvement.

These two disciplines should talk to each other.

If you’re a B2B marketer, especially in technology or other companies that make stuff, find some buddies on the ops side of your shop. (Or at other companies, if you like.) Take ‘em to lunch. They probably think what you do is glamorous and useless. And it may be. But don’t talk about that. Get them to talk about what they do. How they do it. Why they do things the way they do.

What’s useful about this isn’t so much product knowledge (though this couldn’t hurt you). It’s exposure to the operational mindset. To a part of your business that’s probably been accountable for its results a lot longer than yours has.

Why? If the marketing accountability craze hasn’t caught up with you yet, it will. Get a crash course in how to survive in that world from someone who’s already accustomed to the constant demand for visible results.

Here are some questions to get the conversation going:

How much of your week do you (or your team) spend measuring the results of what you do?
What measurement and analysis tools do you use?
What metrics do you follow? What do they tell you? How do you use them?
When a metric is off, what do you do? Do you ever let it ride and see if it gets better on its own? Why or why not?
What are you doing to try & improve your numbers? How well is it working?

The new world of marketing doesn’t spend money on vanity campaigns. It demands NPV and ROI calculations and a general trend of improved results.

If you’re lucky, the new world of marketing also doesn’t get asked as often why the logo is green or how to get extra tickets for the golf benefit.

5 reasons why sales & marketing processes aren’t a silver bullet

Christie Turner — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 18:11:27 +0000

I’m a process person. I like setting up things that can be repeated, sustained. I like processes that can automate all the drudgery out of getting something done.

However, as much as process thinking can help you ask the right questions in a company, having processes isn’t a silver bullet.

Here are some of the reasons why you won’t find a foolproof, set-it-and-forget-it solution to marketing automation, salesforce automation, revenue generation.

Things change. Processes have to be updated. Groups of people (corporate and otherwise) don’t tend to update things they’ve automated as fast as the world changes. Some portion of a complex process is nearly always inefficent or out of date.

Human diversity. As soon as I say, “It’s best practice for email subject lines to be short, with the most important words first,” someone else will show you an email campaign with a humongous long subject line that performed beautifully. Kara Balmer points out this phenomenon in an entertaining post about best practices in marketing automation.

Human irrationality. People are predictably irrational in many ways. But that irrationality isn’t easy to translate into marketing and sales processes.

Human complexity. Processes aren’t so great at adapting to complex emotional drivers, organizational politics, macroeconomic conditions, cultural differences…

People aren’t machines. How they interact with other people and make decisions… inherently unpredictable. Processes require predictability.

What to do about it?

Set “interrupt processes” like peer review, annual review (or some other timetable), sales feedback sessions, customer summits. Assume there will be process breakage in time, and build routines to help you go look for it.

Increase the pressure and see what breaks. Include a process review in the runup to anticipated big releases. Where are the stress points that will break if we try to scale up the load factor or speed? Or, if you’re that kind of organization, simply jump on some of those extra projects you want to get around to, and see what breaks. That’s one way to break through inertia to start figuring out how to fix those gaps.

Postmortems. Include process review in campaign postmortems, post event evaluations.

Hire an outsider. Get the viewpoint of an expert who isn’t invested in your daily routine or impending deadlines or internal assumptions. Find out what team members and other departments are thinking but not saying in meetings. Get hands on help to do something about it, so you can keep meeting those deadlines while finally getting someone focused on making things better.

Next steps? Pick up the phone. Call a counterpart in sales; ask where they think things could be better in the marketing-sales handoff. Call your finance team and find out what it would take to get a better view of revenue trends and your team’s impact on them. Call someone on your own team and ask them to bring you some solutions for that manual workaround you all know is there, but never make the time to deal with. If you’re not sure where to start, you could always call us.

B2B complex sale = influencing a community.

Christie Turner — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:18:47 +0000

To get anything done in a B2B complex sale, you’re not just Selling to The Senior Executive Wo/Man.

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.

I bet you don’t know your customer this well.

Christie Turner — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:01:40 +0000

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.

This year it’s different.

Christie Turner — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:11:15 +0000

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.

What Technology Can’t Do

Christie Turner — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:28:18 +0000

Okay, typically I stay in my little marketing geek world and don’t try to tell tales on the technologists.

However, I must tell you what some of us were discussing, glass of wine in hand, recently. On the subject of enterprise software.

In our little social group, many of us have witnessed the desire to hit a button labeled “Software” (or “CRM” or “This Year’s Upgrade” or “ERP Migration” or “Send It All To India” or whatever) in exchange for Please Stop Bothering Me With This *@$(&–.

It’s tempting. Wouldn’t it be great if software vendors could actually make that happen?

However, the root cause of the *@$(&– isn’t lack of software. It’s broken processes. And, often, broken communication and misaligned incentives behind those processes.

No technology can solve a broken business process, it can only make the breakage more spectacular to witness.

Solving process problems is where you get into change management, which is fundamentally about human nature. Because even a broken process is more comfortable to most workers than the pain of change.

The technology world is greatly in need of leaders who can build enough grassroots influence to make change happen.

Doing things right the first time vs. learning as we go

Christie Turner — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:14:56 +0000

In the real world, there’s always tension between the do-it-right-the-first-time mentality and the figure-it-out-as-we-go mentality. It’s fun to watch this unfold. Couples ordering dinner. Teams developing a project plan. Boards hashing out priorities.

Any time we’re doing something for the first time, we learn as we go. In industries and companies undergoing fast change that’s a necessity. And whose business isn’t experiencing a little upheaval these days?

Some people learn better through experimentation, “failing fast,” going for the no. And some disciplines really require that mentality. (I would argue that generating demand for a product or service is such a discipline.)

Doing things right the first time is a mentality from the waterfall days of software development. And there’s some merit to the rigors of waterfall thinking. How will we know what problem we’re solving unless we do some analysis first? If it absolutely, positively has to work, why should we trust that it will all be figured out as we go?

In all functional areas, especially marketing, companies need both mentalities: planning and doing. But both mentalities must be checked by the testers. Why presume your ideas will work in a real world environment without prior proofs?

What’s fun in business is figuring out what has to be figured out upfront, and what has to be figured out through iteration. And how to test the assumptions.

A paradox found in grassroots feedback loops

Christie Turner — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:57:35 +0000

Some readers may feel that the next two statements contradict each other.

1. Let people say what they’re going to say to you.

2. Don’t just cede the conversation to whoever walks by.

I would argue that grassroots feedback loops (including most social media conversations) entail doing both.

Leading involves listening, following, knowing when it is not your turn to talk, acknowledging that someone who disagrees with you can also be right.

But it doesn’t all have to come out, unmoderated, in your public forum.

Leadership also involves modeling – and enforcing – a higher level of discourse. Not just agreeing with everybody.

It’s not easy. If it were easy, more people (and organizations) would act like leaders.

Monetizing relationships…

Christie Turner — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 03:14:35 +0000

One of the paradoxes of marketing and sales is “monetizing relationships.”

We typically hate to be sold. The harder the sell, the more we hate it. However, we typically like to buy. Any person who has had an experience of spending their own money knows this. Many of us have been blessed to be able to buy something from someone we found ourselves liking.

This is no accident.

On the other side of that transaction, the sales person has to build trust, rapport, peer-to-peer credibility, some level of personal connection. An emotional connection. A relationship, if you like. That goes triple for the B2B complex sale, where a company is buying big-ticket, high-risk items from another company. (I believe that it’s also true in many other types of sales where the stakes are much lower.)

We who are selling stuff need buyers who will confide in us with some candor about their problems. Unless they trust us to understand and help them solve those problems, nothing is going to get bought. At least not from us.

Why would a buyer trust me [a marketer, sales person, company PR representative, executive leader, etc]? Because he or she believes at some level I am willing and able to act in their interests as well as, and possibly even counter to my own (at least in the short term). There’s some human vulnerability going on. They tell me what’s really going on, and I tell them what I really can and can’t do to address their situation. Because we have a relationship.

Now, in addition to all of this, the sales person is also on the hook to monetize that relationship.

How can I maintain your trust (which implies vulnerability) and still do things that move you toward buying something from my company (which implies control)?

If you’ve ever wondered why so many startups fail, it’s because selling is a lot harder than it looks. Most startups are not run by people who can sell. And sales (including repeat business from happy customers) are what keep companies in business.

If you ever wondered why great sales people make a lot of money, it’s because the ability to monetize a relationship is worth a lot of money.

Marketing voodoo…the fluff formerly known as collateral…and why we made the logo blue.

Christie Turner — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 03:01:29 +0000

A friend and colleague was recently describing common failings noticed at marketing departments, especially in startups, with a number of companies where he has consulted (not as a marketer).

His first observation:
What marketing VPs do often looks like voodoo to him. And a lot of it looks like a me-too game. “If I pull up our website, and a competitor’s website, they sound like the same company. And I can’t tell what either company actually does.”

His second observation:
When he asks honest questions about the how and why of marketing tactics that are going out the door, he often gets a huffy response.

Now, even a patient professional (in any discipline) can tire of being second guessed within their zone of expertise. But I think my friend is correct in viewing his observations as signs of trouble in a marketing effort. Here’s why.

– Even if your strategy has all the validity in the world, if the rest of the company doesn’t understand the marketing message, you’re in trouble.

The rest of the company doesn’t necessarily have to understand why the CIO picked Microsoft or why the COO closed the plant in Guangdong. (Though it’s better if I understand how these visible decisions serve the same larger strategy that my daily chores do.) However, the marketing message is closely tied to the entire company’s strategic purpose. We shouldn’t all parrot the same canned phrases to describe why customers buy from us. But if we really have no shared ideas about what our customers expect to get from us in exchange for their money and trust…that’s going to breed problems in delivery. Marketing messages are greatly handicapped if they are concocted in a vacuum. They are much more powerful when rooted in past operational results, and in companywide shared beliefs (okay, how about overlapping beliefs?) about customer needs.

– Differentiation isn’t what I say it is in my meticulously crafted positioning statements. It is what my customers say it is.

Quite frankly, good line managers and strong sales people usually know more about the customer than their marketing executives do. They also know more about what the company does and how the sausage gets made. Carefully observe the reaction of your delivery organization and sales people to a big redesign of your website (or other marketing materials). I would argue that any silence, hesitation, question, or concern they express is a red flag.

If they want to know why the logo is blue, well, you may not need the most sophisticated of answers to that. If they think the logo is ugly, it’s worth hearing why. If they don’t understand the tactics, you can be gracious about others’ lack of expertise in your profession. And not everyone has to love the tactics. (Only some customers, some sales folks, and the CFO do.)

But if good people in other parts of the company don’t see a connection between what you’re telling your customers and what those people think the company is about, then drill down and understand that one.

Even if the campaign tactics and strategic approach are defensible, getting questioned about them creates a chance to lead. We’re never done building that shared (OK, overlapping) vision of what the customer needs and what we’re all supposed to be doing about it.

Respectfully disagreeing with Seth Godin on equity

Christie Turner — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 02:58:59 +0000

Seth Godin just gave some really out of the box advice on how to structure equity in a new company.

It’s actually great advice, but I disagree with his claim that his method offers a better way to value the company.

Here’s why: just as Seth points out that we don’t know what the company’s going to be worth in 18 months, we probably don’t know what it’s going to do, how it’s going to make money, what market forces we’re going to have to address, nor how we’ll address them during the next 18 months.

We have a plan. If we’re really smart and sophisticated, we have a Plan B and a Plan C and so on.

But it’s even harder to say “here’s what this task list will be worth in 18 months” than it is to say “here’s what this company is going to be worth in 18 months.” Both are equally dependent on the same unknown variables in an uncertain future.

What’s really valuable about Seth’s advice is the brass-tacks conversations you have to have about expectations and the implementation roadmap if you take his advice. It’s a lot easier to dream together than to figure out how to work together. Better to figure that out now, not months from now.

Spending lots of upfront time hashing out the roadmap should make the equity conversation a lot simpler. We should come away from that conversation with a clearer sense of shared vision, what everyone’s got to do toward it, and to what extent we trust each other to do what we say.

But I don’t think that actually structuring the equity in the manner Seth suggests has any more value than 50/50, 49/51, the % of startup capital each put in, the % of decision responsibility you expect to share, whatever motivates and satisfies your partners and stakeholders.

Is it clear to everyone else?

Christie Turner — Wed, 27 Oct 2004 03:52:21 +0000

Often overlooked by business owners, internal communication is much more than announcing birthdays, deals, charitable campaigns, quarterly financial results.

Many leaders focus on near-term execution and problem-solving. This is a function of survival, and there’s nothing wrong with surviving.

In volatile times, though, you have to tell everyone what you want next, not just what you want now. This is as true for the Fortune 50 as it is for a 5-person startup. This is just as true in times of growth as times of downsizing or trouble. Even good change is still change.

An infamous round of teambuilding sessions, off-site meetings, and training exercises can be laid at the feet of internal communication.

Maybe your company needs that. But probably not. People need regular, informal, personal communication.

There’s also a place for forums in which tough (or innocent) questions are posed to and by top leadership.

Common gaps in internal communication include:

- What issues are personally significant to the employees, and are they aware of the company’s stance and activities regarding them? Examples: employee benefits, safety (especially in dangerous industries), job security, outsourcing plans and policies, productivity enhancement.

- In plain English, what changes are happening in the organization? goals? expectations? environment? And why? And how will those changes affect the rank and file?

- What is important to the top brass? How does that big picture relate to the rank and file? Examples: where the company has to get better in order to survive or meet goals, what goals are being chosen and why

Many companies use confidential employee surveys to help find specific gaps in their internal communications and how these gaps can be fixed. The larger the company, the more likely you are to need a feedback loop like this.

Peter Drucker told us in the 1960s that the expert is responsible for making information clear to the layman. What that means to leaders is that your team, partners, vendors, investors, and civic constituents aren’t responsible for reading your mind or guessing your intentions. Repetition is as important in leadership and negotiation than in marketing and sales. And for the same reasons. Thought leadership of any kind involves repeating yourself many, many times more than you think you’ll need to.

What matters is that what’s clear to you becomes clear to everyone else. Share with your team the way you see the world. It can only help.