The Innovative Marketer

Getting Back into the Game

For almost exactly two years, I've been working as a marketing consultant, providing advice, strategy and planning help to technology companies, primarily in the Bay Area, but also in Boston, Austin and Toronto.   

When I started as a marketing consultant, I didn't know what to expect.  I knew what I did NOT want to become -- an agency, with all of their carrying costs of undertrained designers and SEO experts, all of whom needed to work on projects to justify their existence.  I have seen otherwise moral and rational agency owners pretend to clients that they had expertise in areas they had no business promoting.

So I thought I'd try my hand at becoming the kind of consultant I'd want to work with when I was a marketing leader. 

During my consulting work, I learned that technology is the least important aspect of a successful marketing function.  My opening thesis as a consultant was that as long as companies had a solid process in place, they could make a demand generation project successful.  

But I was wrong.

Without the proper people in place with the proper mindset, any initiative to create substantive change within your organization is doomed to defeat.   As my consultancy matured over the years, I learned the most important thing was to spend time with individuals inside the firm -- heads of sales, VPs of Marketing, CEOs, chief financial officers, to make sure that expectations were reasonable, timelines were attainable, and that credibility was established and maintained between marketing and the rest of the firm.  I also learned how to move sales and marketing into more collaborative forms of organizing their work together. 

I learned that "sales enablement" is a pejorative term.   Sales people don't need to be "enabled."  They are highly skilled, professionals, and will do their job regardless of whether marketing "enables" them.   The term I use now for marketing helping sales do their jobs better is "sales advancement."

I've loved these years of teaching, both with my wonderful clients and prospects, and also the many people I've interacted with since Shawn and I started DemandCon (which will continue -- you should sign up now for this year's event in San Francisco) and in my interactions with the Marketing Automation Institute (take the Fundamentals class.  I helped develop the course). 

I believe that demand generation is a discipline that needs to be taught and mastered in order to help drive economic success in this country.    And universities and colleges don't teach it yet, so you have to get your education and training from other sources.

I enjoyed creating DemandCon this year, going from no money, no brand, no marketing and no attendees to a strong show in May and buyout offers following the event.  I loved hearing from attendees about how they took the ideas we taught at the show and brought them back to their companies.  It was fun hearing how people got promotions once they brought ideas about demand gen back to their firms.

But I'm a practitioner at heart.   There are so many great opportunities out there to join a great firm, build the team, establish thought leadership, raise the banner and advance the cause of the company.   And I've been a consultant and "thought leader" long enough for now.  It's time to get back into the game and start literally practicing what I've been preaching over the past two years.

So look for a new perspective from me in 2012, as I re-enter the world of corporate marketing and share perspectives as a practitioner, a leader within a small, growing  marketing department and our adventures in building out a world-class organization.

Thanks so much for following my adventures over the years.   Happy New Year to you and I look forward to sharing insights on marketing innovation in 2012.

All the best,

Steve

The ABCs of Lead Nurturing

I’ve been speaking at a number of conferences recently where marketers and sales people are quite interested in adopting a demand generation discipline within their organization.  Frequently, a marketing manager or director will ask me the steps necessary to start developing a lead nurturing program .

The answer is simple as A,B,C.

Here’s a framework I’ve used with dozens of companies in the past to help start the marketing program planning:

A is for Audience

Here is where you define who you are looking to talk to in your campaign.  Confusingly, even though you’re going to be talking with many people at once, you have to define a specific “who” in order to rationalize the creative material you develop.   The solution is touse personas, or what OgilvyOne used to call CustomerPrints.   Personas allow you to define a specific customer with all the traits – attitudes, needs, behaviors and attributes of a set of customers.  Ardath Albee, author of eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, writes extensively about how to develop customer personas on her blog.

B is for Behavior

Once you’ve defined the audience you want to communicate with, next map out what you want them to do as a result of your nurturing program.  Think in terms of verbs – should they download a longer form paper, listen to a podcast, watch a customer testimonial, call a sales representative for more information, visit you at a trade show?   By determining what call to action you want your persona to follow, it will clearly direct the next step in the process.

C is for Content

Here’s the creative part.  Now that you know who you want to communicate with and what you want them to do, you create compelling visuals and copy that will resonate with your prospective customer.  The advantage to having done the previous two steps is it allows you to have a specific conversation with the copywriter and designer putting together your material.  Ask yourself “does this layout resonate with the persona we described?”  There are a lot of great blogs on writing compelling copy and one of my favorites is Copyblogger. 

D is for Delivery Channel

You know who you’re talking to, what you want them to do and what you want to communicate with them.  You also need to plan for a delivery channel.   Will you be nurturing via email (the most common method)?  Will the email come from the marketing department or a sales rep who’s assigned to the lead?  Will you be using LinkedIn groups or Facebook pages?    Generally, lead nurturing is done via a long-form medium, which means it uses different delivery channels than, say, Twitter, which is great for customer engagement, but not entirely appropriate for an automated nurturing program.

E is for Evaluation

Finally, start your program with the end in mind.  What are you going to measure?  The ease of collection data in the digital realm makes data easier than ever to grab, but actionable intelligence much harder to glean, as you have to sift through much more information in order to make decisions. Make sure that all of your metrics are designed to answer a question, like “how many?” or “what is compelling?” or “when do they…?”  And, determine in advance what actions you may take as a result of that information.

By using this framework every time you begin planning a lead nurturing program and communicating it out to your team, you’ll find it easier to communicate with the right person at the right time with the right message – which is the goal of a well designed lead nurturing campaign.

Note:  This is a revised and updated version of an article I originally wrote for the Savvy B2B marketing blog.

Marketing Automation: Insource or Outsource?

Over the past three weeks, I've had a couple of in-depth conversations with business leaders about whether it's better to get a jump start on your marketing automation initiatives by outsourcing to an agency or to develop the organizational capacity in house. 

It's a fantastic first question to ask as you begin your demand generation journey because it's one of the first forks in the road that lead you towards different outcomes later on.

For the purposes of this discussion, I differentiate marketing automation as a set of technologies that enable different pieces of your demand generation strategy.  Regardless of whether you outsource or bring it in-house, it's critical that you own the demand gen strategy for your own company and not leave it to an external vendor to define and maintain your marketing vision.

When to outsource your marketing automation function

1. When it's not core to your business

2. When speed of deployment is a critical issue

3. When you need to prove success to your management team or Board before they commit to a long term strategy

4. When you can't find the right people to hire or train internally

5. When budget/cash flow is not a major issue

6. When you have the ability to manage the vendor and hold them accountable for results

7. When technology vendor selection is not key to your long term success

What type of partner do you need?

You also need to determine what type of vendor or consultant you need to hire to help you.  Most vendors have a core competency -- creative, IT integration or business process transformation.  Here are some questions to ask:

1. Does your vendor need expertise with a particular product?

2. Are you looking for someone with local presence and support?

3. Do you need training services?

4. Do you need someone who can help you plan your requirements before you buy technology?

5. Can you do a small pilot project first before you commit to large, ongoing costs?

6. Are they getting paid by anyone else associated with your project?

Be careful about signing up with a vendor who promises that they will run all marketing servces on your behalf, then gradually transfer the knowledge over to your team.  First of all, this is so rare that most services companies don't do that kind of education and training.  Secondly, their business model likely depends on a retainer or ongoing projects, so they are not as incented to hand over their organizational expertise to you. If your plan is to outsource first, then bring it in house, make sure you have a plan and proposal up front from your services vendor before you lock in to a contract.

And, if you aren't prohibited from doing so, a good first step would be to hire people from your vendor's project team to work for you.

When to build your organizational capacity in house

1. When marketing automation is essential to your business, such as when marketing owns sales quota or marketing staff is compensated based on revenue production

2. When you have specialized requirements that outside agencies don't have the capacity to support

3. When the organization has committed to success in the long term and understand that marketing automation is part of a larger change management initiative

4. When you have the abilitity to manage a team of experts

5. When you need tighter control of costs

6. If you are providing marketing services to an outside customer or client

 

How to Deal with a Medical Crisis

The following is not a post about marketing, but since a lot of you have picked up on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook that something is going on in my family now, I share this post with you.

Two weeks ago, my young son suddenly developed a serious brain condition that affected his speech and made him confused about where he was and what he was doing.  After rushing him to the emergency room that night, we were thrust into the medical world literally head first, enduring CT scans and MRIs, spinal taps and endless blood tests.  What followed were days in the pediatric ICU, wondering what caused it, what treatment he could receive, and most of all, if whatever Sam experienced was over.

During that week, I got a firsthand look at the running of a major medical department at a world-famous hospital in the Bay Area.   While these lessons aren’t necessarily marketing lessons (though there are some familiar marketing themes tucked in here), I wanted to share a few thoughts on how to cope if you are ever in the same situation:

 

Be your Own Advocate

Nobody knows what you need more than you do.  If you, or your child, is a patient in a hospital, get vocal.  The temptation is just to accept what the medical professionals say –- after all, you are playing on their field.  You don’t understand their language. You don’t know what all their equipment does.  You are stressed.  You need to summon the fortitude to ask questions like “why is this necessary?”  and “What could happen if we don’t do this?” If all else fails, contact the hospital’s ombudsman to help you get some answers.  Be sure to take notes on every conversation you have, including the time, the person’s name and what they told you.

Find Conversations About You and Listen 

Much of what I learned about my son’s condition, I learned from doctors and nurses during shift change. Why then?  It’s the time when they have to explain to their replacement what is going on with the patient, what changes have occurred and what the working diagnosis is.  As a parent, I had to continually ask for this information.  As an eavesdropper, I could hear them explain it to one another, correct them if they were inaccurate in handing off some data, and generally trying to make myself a useful part of the team.

Trust, but Verify

Don’t accept what someone says on you blind faith.  Even if they are wearing a white lab coat and sporting a shiny stethoscope, you can’t count on their interests being completely aligned with yours.  Most doctors take into account what’s best for the patient as a whole person, but there are others who look at medical issues as problems to be solved, and forget that there’s an individual involved.  Trust that the professional caring for you or your child has your best interests at heart, but still ask questions until you are comfortable with the answers.

Find the Person in Charge

I was terrible at this. The first night we came in through the ER, I was only focused on my son, but quickly I discovered that in a teaching hospital, there is a hierarchy of command, not unlike the military.  By the fourth day, after we saw dozens of MDs, I began asking for the one person in charge of my son’s medical care.  The staff seemed surprised that a parent would ask this -– apparently, it’s not a common question.   After I told them I wasn’t going to be allowing any more tests until I spoke to the person in charge, a doctor materialized (whom we had never met).

Follow Up

In a hospital, there’s always another case waiting for attention.  While we were there, we saw some very sick children, many of them quite young.  I knew that the medical staff were paying attention to whatever was urgent, whatever was life threatening, and if that case happened to come after my son’s, there was a chance that follow up on some medication or procedure wouldn’t come quickly, or at all.  Kindly reminding everyone involved in your case can help you get the kind of care you need.  And after you leave the hospital, make sure to call and email the doctors involved to remind them of your case and continue to stay in their minds.

Show Gratitude

Being in a hospital for any length of time, you’ll encounter hundreds of people.  Many of the staff will demonstrate brilliant flashes of kindness to you, from the maintenance person who holds an elevator for you while you are carrying cups of coffee, to the nurse who chases down a senior doctor to answer your question, even though he’s not responding to her pages.  Be sure to say “thank you” and realize that the amplifying effect of these kind gestures while you are in need is a true gift.

Sam is home now, back to school, and apparently doing much better.  We saw a total over 26 doctors over the past three weeks, and many more have been consulted.  While we don’t know what caused it, how it should best be treated, and if the problem is resolved for good, we are staying on top of his care and continue to be his best advocates.  Thanks for your thoughts and well wishes.