The Invisible Marketing Blog » results

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.

Top 3 gaps between marketing leaders

Christie Turner — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 18:12:34 +0000

In a discussion of brand and marketing on David Friedman’s blog, Kevin Liebl observed the appearance of a generation gap in marketing executives.

Amid seismic shifts in technology and the macro economy, it’s my view that at least 3 other gaps are emerging between marketing leaders.

Accountability gap. Possibly the most important gap among marketers. Marketers increasingly get to test, tinker, and directly associate their work with customer acquisition, revenue, and profitability. Now, I’ve had more than one ad agency veteran tell me it’s not OK for an ad, event, or website to be judged on direct revenue it generates. This thinking is common among marketers. But those who are proficient with metrics, analysis, and accountability for ROI are increasingly prized.

Technology gap. New technologies enable a right-now measurement discipline which was formerly the domain of direct response advertising. Not just social media, but mobile marketing, search engine marketing, internet analytics, marketing automation. Tactical savvy in these technologies can be game changing. A haves and have-nots gap is increasing between those who learn the new tools of the trade and those who don’t.

Mindset gap. Old mindset: do I think I can control the message in a one-way brainwashing effort toward my audience? New mindset: can I engage markets and individuals in 2-way conversations that I influence but cannot control? This also includes the relationship between marketing and sales, not just marketing and the customer. The new mindset doesn’t win in every market, but it’s becoming more important to be flexible in thinking about the role of the marketing messenger.

Marketing has always been about revenue generation. More & more, marketers get to drive activities that actually can be proven to generate revenue. It’s a good place to be.

For the swipe file: impressive B2B tech ad in social media

Christie Turner — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:59:49 +0000

SAP may be an old-line vendor in the technology space, but along the way to the top of the stack they figured out how to talk to their customers.

This SAP ad on Youtube does NOT talk about bits and bytes. It talks about what the tech can do for the biz AND for the buyer personally. And it diagrams juuust enough tech that a biz buyer can feel smart about it.

If you’ve ever been part of an enterprise SAP implementation, of course, you have a potentially rather jaded perspective on the ad and its promises. But that’s a different conversation. This is a very classy example of how to open the conversation for complex, multimillion dollar enterprise sales of complicated, high risk technology packages.

And look. Over 10,000 hits. The hits keep coming after 3-4 months online. I’d love to know what this ad is doing for the top of their sales funnel. Maybe it’s just cool and nifty brand fluff because every big company CIO already knows SAP and has an opinion about it. But my hunch is that this video is opening conversations somewhere for SAP.

What’s sabotaging your B2B marketing campaigns?

Christie Turner — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:08:56 +0000

It’s probably data quality — labor intensive, behind the scenes stuff.

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.

Add these distractions to Marketing’s not-to-do list

Christie Turner — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:47:17 +0000

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.

How to think like a customer: step #3

Christie Turner — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:02:29 +0000

This is the part where we admit that your customers can’t predict their own behavior.

What people tell you they like or think or want to do is different from what they’re actually going to do.

Especially if your business objective involves parting customers from their money for any reason.

The answer?

Test.

Create a situation where a couple of customers buy and use what you’re selling.

See what they do with it.

Experiment, tweak, and retest on a few other customers. Ask customers to explain why they’re doing what they’re doing (especially if their actions don’t favor you). Don’t take their first answer at face value.

See if the idea finds a workable niche.

This is the spirit of software beta testing, product demos, customer advisory committees, putting movies into limited release or straight to DVD, direct response marketing, and many other tactics.

How to think like a customer: step #2

Christie Turner — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:55:49 +0000

Now that we’ve admitted that we aren’t customers, we can progress to step 2: actually talking to a customer.

Ironically, the closest many marketing people come to the sales cycle is the 2-way glass in the focus group facility.

Which is nice. But you’ll learn the most, and fastest, about your customers (in the B2B complex sale) by riding along with your sales people.

Chatting with customers at events is also helpful. But the customer in the wild is the customer who’s trying to buy something. That’s who you want to hear from.

How to think like a customer: step #1

Christie Turner — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:32:59 +0000

Step #1: Stop assuming that your perspective is an effective surrogate for the perspectives of real customers.

That’s right. The first step toward customer centricity is to admit you’re not a customer.

This is still true if you : (1) used to be a customer, (2) sell every day to customers, (3) take customer service/tech support calls all day from your customers, (4) stand in front of customers every day handling service delivery.

Why is your view tainted?

1. Economic incentives. Your current employer pays your salary, determines your bonus plan, sets day-to-day priorities. Very few companies pay you to put your customers’ interests ahead of the company’s interests. Seeking a win-win with your customers is not the same.

2. Recency. To function in your current company, you can’t think like a customer. You have to think like an employee. You can remember how it used to be, but to survive now you must act within the jargon and organization structure and management goals and financial incentives of the company that’s paying your mortgage. Your former perspective when at other companies is blurred by the recency effect: what I need to care about now.

Even the most highly skilled, Method-trained actor is only guessing. A real hit man, alcoholic, abused wife, terrorist, or executive decision maker isn’t going to act like anyone else thinks. Economic incentives and day to day realities shape their thinking like nothing else.

This means I must speak with my customers in order to gauge how a product design or new pricing strategy or anything else customer-facing is really going to fly.

6 Reasons People Can’t Tell What You Do Even After Reading Your Website

Christie Turner — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:52:37 +0000

Widget makers have it easy. Plaster photos on the website. We.Are.Selling.This.Thing. It.Looks.Like.This. (Do you want it painted in Autumn Glory, Technicolor Stainless, or Urban Soot?)

For those of us who sell things whose souls cannot be captured in a photograph, it’s not quite so literal.

Here are six reasons why your erstwhile customer can’t figure out what on earth you DO, actually. Even after visiting your website.

6. Representative Imagery. Someone let the agency get hip and artsy at the expense of the brand again. So much so that nobody can tell what any of that hip artsy stuff on the website actually means. Creating a whole visual and literary language in which the customer must be educated before they can actually learn something about how your company solves their problem… not cool.

5. Industry Buzzwords. True meaning is completely obscured in a thicket of industry benchmarks, certifications, technical jargon, association relationships, awards, TLAs… The site may be connected to many third party ideas and standards. But what does the company actually do or think to help its customers?

4. Vague Benefits. We do everything. For anyone. Just call us to find out what that actually is.

3. Steaming Piles of Features and Promotions. Do you need a _? How ’bout a _? Do you need a service contract with that? Would you rather buy _ and _ together, at a 1.208598% discount on second Tuesdays? A five year contract will get you an additional 0.00029% discount for the first 34 months!

2. Product Bureaucracy. The website has to explain our entire internal bureaucracy to you before anything else happens. Obviously our bureaucracy is the most salient benefit of working with us. Why else would we lovingly provide you with 16 different numbers to call in each of the 28 countries in which we do business? Heaven forfend that our service teams in any country should ever look like they could talk with you as a global team. I mean, how weird is that?

1. The Very Nature of Intangible Products. If I’m buying a widget, I may actually have an affinity with the look or functionality of the thing itself. If I am a business person, and if I’m buying software or services, what I am really buying is an outcome. I don’t want accounting software. I want my accounting done well enough that the government doesn’t investigate or fine me over SOX compliance. I don’t want consulting, I want more productivity or more revenue or both. I want to keep my job and not be embarrassed by your performance. (Etc.) All the other hoopla is you trying to convince me that your intangibles will provide that outcome.

Who are we talking with, anyway?

Christie Turner — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:42:05 +0000

I like to base my calculation of conversions on % of my total list [target universe] who converted. Now, % of clickthrough is the usual denominator. But I think that sets the bar too low. I want to keep the focus on relevance to the total known target universe.

Why?

In my world, there are no points for visibility without relevance.

I prefer microtargeting: saying very very relevant things only to the people who care about them.

If the total universe is unresponsive, I’m blathering at too many people without enough relevance. (Setting aside email spam filters, “not working at this company any more”, and similar mechanics.)

This isn’t how consumer marketers think, and I’m not really sure how they could.

If I’m building executive relationships in a finite market space with comparatively few buyers and influencers (vs mass consumer marketing), then every contact is important.

And if relationships are the goal, and if every prospect is important, then my conversations and messages should have really high relevance to the people they engage.

That’s the holy grail, anyway.

How does this save me money?

Christie Turner — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:20:16 +0000

As Seth Godin recently observed, Value = benefit/price.

Even if the customer’s question is “How does this save me money?” that doesn’t mean the answer is “I’m cheaper than my competitor” or “Because I’ll discount my price.”

Look closely. Both answers appeals to a benchmark entirely outside the customer’s business situation. Neither answer addresses the customer’s question.

Value is TCO (total cost of ownership). It’s eliminating waste, creating revenue, finding productivity.

Value is a lot of emotional, irrational things, too.

Practical value is also found in a long term relationship between two entities. If I cut the price, maybe I’m helping a good customer with a strong balance sheet who’s having a rough year, keeping us both in business until the business cycle recovers. Maybe I give up a few sample widgets during the customer’s design phase so that I can get engineered into a very large production run. Maybe I’m getting a client started within this year’s budget with the understanding that next year they budget for (and buy) my full solution. These all position my value vs my competitors, too.

If I simply cut the price of the whizbang itself, I am saying that the whizbang isn’t worth very much. But the real problem is that I don’t know my customer well enough to actually save them money.

Observe: a revenue generating twitter-email-offline campaign. (includes creative samples…)

Christie Turner — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:49:26 +0000

And now, a shout out to the marketers at Sprinkles. This is one for the swipe file.

B2B comrades, this strikes me as interesting. Maybe there’s an equivalent in our world.

- – - – - -

My husband is on every email list known to humanity. One of them sent him an email (reproduced at the end of this post) last week. Note the very prominent mention of “follow us on Twitter and Facebook” above the fold.

The sender, Sprinkles, opened their Twitter account on Thursday, 4/30. As of 8pm (Central) on Friday, 5/1, they had 1,077 followers. Quite respectable for a regional specialty retailer, especially in less than 48 hours.

At approximately noon (Central time) on Friday, 5/1, the Sprinkles Twitterer posted this sly, subtle promotion:

The first 100 people to whisper “Sprinkles Addict” when ordering at each Sprinkles location will receive 2 free cupcakes of their choice!

And a cupcake blog (did you know there were such things?) picked it up.

My husband stopped in their store that afternoon (because of the promotion, and because it’s on his way home). He picked up 4 cupcakes, of which 2 were free. (Red velvet and strawberry, if you must know. They must have been out of chocolate.) They had a line out the door (not unusual). No one else seemed to know about the promotion, but this is hard to know for sure.

And he Facebooked about it.

OK, what Sprinkles did is highly transactional. They only needed to close very tiny purchases to make this campaign pay. It’s also more fun than buying cupcakes than enterprise software, or sales training, or a GIS system.

Conclusion: Buyer affinity looks different here than in my clients’ companies.

Or does it?

I call your attention to the following characteristics of the promotion:

1. An invitation from a known entity (existing relationship) into a new venue for communication.
2. Relevant. (partly because of the existing relationship)
3. Simple, relevant, credible, and actionable offers. Time-bound, too.
4. Element of mystery, secrecy, and in-group appeal. (“Please whisper, and it’s free.”)

I also note the cross-medium nature of the promotion. They didn’t just Twitter. They emailed *and* twittered *and* Facebooked. They had the emails already from past in-person interactions (at least that’s how they got my husband’s email). They’re building an integrated relationship across multiple media. Customers have chosen to opt in to it.

Our friends on the consumer side of the marketing house are dealing with the same elements of human nature we are, B2B comrades. I observe that most B2B marketers are mostly focused on sussing out this quarter’s leads. That’s not what Sprinkles is doing, not even with these direct response tactics. Something bigger is going on here.

Sure, B2B buyers are far more motivated by risk avoidance and failure mitigation than by a love of chocolate. And this is also true: the emotional architecture of high-stakes transactions has a lot in common with that which Sprinkles has tapped here: Trust, relevance, timing, actionable offers, creating many simple ways a buyer can come toward me before it’s time to take their money…

If you find a way to translate this into your marketing approach, please comment!

More on this topic: see Marketing Sherpa blog’s interview with Sergio Balegno

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To know us is to love us – right?

Christie Turner — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 03:04:33 +0000

Awareness is a common goal of marketing.

The assumption, of course, is to know me is to buy from me. Image advertising. Being funny, memorable, businesslike, serious, whatever we think will help the customer remember us.

You know the textbook example of great awareness/brand marketing? Movie marketing for Snakes on a Plane. It went viral months before opening day. It had incredible word of mouth. Heck, half the movie was designed by the target audience. Prelaunch estimates projected box office earnings in excess of $100M.

The problem, of course, is that awareness did not translate into sales. Actual U.S. box office? $34M. If you account for both production budget and marketing expenses, the franchise broke even at best. A spectacularly successful failure.

That leap of faith between awareness and sales doesn’t play well for marketing teams in tough times, either. How does marketing show me the money?

First, here are my assumptions:
- Your company doesn’t already have a century-old storied brand.
- You don’t have money or time to build one.
- You are under the gun to drive sales this fiscal year.
- You understand your customers well enough to talk to them in a manner they will consider directly and actionably relevant, or if you don’t you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and figure it you.

If those are your parameters, then the marketing answer, in my view, is two things.

Thing One: Strategic coordination between operations, marketing, and sales.
Someone is driving the conversation internally and externally so that your company is able to make promises it can keep and live up to the promises it does make. This isn’t about perfection or even operational excellence. It’s about understanding the reality of your operations, having some clue of your customers’ mindset and needs, and being able to put your company in a relevant position between the two. If your marketing message makes either your operational delivery team or your customer facing sales people cringe (let alone complain openly), do some more work before you take it to market.

Thing Two: Direct marketing.
Direct marketing teaches us to question anything that (1) can’t be measured, and (2) doesn’t lead to revenue.

Run campaigns which intend to get a carefully identified set of persons to take specific actions to move through their buying processes. Measure what actually happens. Then tweak your approach based on prospects’ behavior and feedback from sales people.

Awareness building tactics that help you gain credibility with your target buyers and influencers can help. But you should be able to draw a line from those awareness tactics to a step in your demand generation process or in your sales cycle, and identify some evidence of lift. Even if it’s anecdotal.

The meat of your marketing budget should go into getting buyers and influencers to take concrete, measurable steps toward you, which lead to other measurable steps, which lead eventually to a sale.

If you can give it away, what have you proven?

Christie Turner — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 03:41:49 +0000

You prove nothing about the value of your product or service by giving it away for free.

Giveaways will not automatically discover or build a paying audience for your work, because significant behavioral barriers exist between passively receiving something for nothing and doing the work of buying. Being willing to use something doesn’t mean I value it enough to cross the purchase gap.

That said, familiarizing buyers with your work can be a powerful influence on their buying processes.

If you’re giving away your business’ work product, then approach it as sampling, not as freebie giveaways. The largest risk you face with sampling tactics is getting your prospect (or the current customer you’re upselling) to cross the gap from willing user to committed buyer. Where you should spend most of your prelaunch energy and resources is in testing and honing how you will influence them to cross this gap.

(For the present discussion’s purposes, I view discounting as the rough equivalent of sampling, though there are fine points of difference between the two.)

The point of being in business, of course, is to do something that creates economic value and get paid for it. To convert “sample” audiences to paying B2B customers,

Understand the difference between your users and your buyers. Budget, authority to spend it (or gatekeeper influence on those who do), and economic need must all be present for your target to become a buyer. Users often aren’t buyers.
Figure out what makes your work product sticky to buyers. That’s their economic incentive to convert from free to not-free (paying) customers. Stickiness gives you the power to charge a sustainable price and thereby stay in business.
Figure out how to position the conversion from free to not-free in a way that creates least friction and resistance for your buyers. If your buyers clearly understand how to convert, aren’t surprised by the request for conversion, and can convert easily, your take rate will improve.
Develop several theories for each of these phases of the conversion process. Test them. Fine-tune what works.

CPG (consumer packaged goods) companies like Clorox and Procter & Gamble are masters at sampling strategies that result in purchase behaviors. Don’t assume that the act of mailing out samples to a bunch of ZIP codes automatically results in success for them. Everything about those campaigns is tested. Sampling is too expensive not to approach with some science and proof of ROI before blasting ‘em out.

By contrast, consider entertainment businesses where work for free is common – musicians, artists, indie filmmakers, book authors. These often give away product aggressively for years in hopes of being embraced by an audience or gatekeeper, by way of auditions, sample recordings, MP3s, juried shows, gallery postcards, youtube video clips, free review copies, and other sampling tactics. These businesses are highly commoditized at the bottom of the ladder, where sampling is prevalent. Since the economic value or customer stickiness of the product is determined by social influences which cannot be predicted, all that can be done is the Spaghetti Method of marketing — throw it out at some prospects and see what sticks.

To the extent that social influence drives a B2B sale — and it can! — sampling will not help you. Even exposure to a vastly superior product or service will not by itself uproot a multi year relationship of trust and convenience with an entrenched vendor.

Many B2B technology and service businesses use sampling successfully to break through buyer resistance. The power of sampling as a tactic is similar to that of the money-back guarantee: risk reduction for the buyer (whether perceived or real). If I try a sample of your work and like it, then I’m far less prone to buyer’s remorse if I buy a lot more from you later.

Pilot programs, beta releases, manufacturer’s samples, special “year one” pricing, quid pro quo (if you will be among the first to try the service, I’ll give it to you at a big discount in exchange for endorsement or referrals), contractual escape clauses, and many similar tactics are used to break into a new account, sell more to an existing client, launch a new product or service, and so on.

Here’s a common pitfall: constantly improving your product is insufficient by itself. Design it to be used increasingly, and to be needed or wanted increasingly by those who connect with it.

Examples?

- Your product or service requires continuous or repeated use in order to continue delivering benefits to the buyer. SaaS applications and subscription-based information products often come with free or discounted trials or pilot programs.

- Your product or service cannot readily be evaluated without experiencing it, yet will be desired after the experience. This is a problem for many service businesses; any way to bottle up the customer experience and provide it as a sample can be helpful when working with skeptical buyers. That’s also the logic behind beta releases, demos, and working models for technology companies selling into an “I’ll believe it will do that when I see it” mindset.

- Your product can be delivered once, live, (perhaps by a high-cost professional), and then repurchased, reordered, or upgraded many times. The cost of the demonstration is often passed along directly to the buyer. Think enterprise software.

- Each of your releases or service lines is completely different from the one before it. Especially true if you’re targeting a new functional area, role, or title within existing clients. Why should your current buyers pass you on to others within their company?

The bottom line? If you’re going to give it away, have a strategy to mitigate the revenue impairment risk to your own business. Giveaways and sampling tactics mean you transfer risk from your customer to yourself.