Marketing in the Time of Cholera
Fundamentals For Thriving in a Toxic Economy
To Differentiate or Not To Differentiate
We are working on an introductory video for our website which will be used as a means to communicate what we do to people coming to our website. There is a debate about whether we should differentiate ourselves from our competition during this presentation. My belief is we should focus solely on our value prop and what we do for companies. No amount of time should be spent differentiating our solution, but instead we should focus all effort on having viewers walking away wanting to know more! We shall see if I win this battle. Ultimately I need to consider the input of my team but much will depend on how we structure the video.
Marketing Challenges
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=32022
I was reading this Marketing Sherpa article on the challenges marketing people have. It just seems many of these just go with the territory and you have to find a way to overcome them. Budget and resources issues are usually because of a lack of good solid analytics. If you have a good exec team and strong metrics they can see exactly what spend can drive. You can get incremental benefits but you don’t make the Titanic out of the wood you make a dingy. 
Some of the other top challenges you just need to push through. Get a tougher team.
Seven Qualities of a Start-Up Marketing Warrior
Seven Qualities of a Start-Up Marketing Warrior
To be an effective start-up marketing exec, an individual needs to be a warrior. Here are the seven key qualities that make up a start-up marketing warrior.
Empathetic
Empathy sounds like a pretty warm and fuzzy quality, especially for a warrior. Yet, at the core of any marketing campaign, program or activity is good, solid, crisp messaging. The only way to create great messaging is for a marketing exec to put themselves in the position of the person they are marketing to. To truly be empathetic. This just doesn’t mean understanding their title and the type of organization they are part of. They need to deeply understand the specific problems and pains that the target buyer is experiencing on a day-to-day basis. They then need to develop empathetic messaging that CONNECTS the product to solving the challenges the buyer faces daily. Without this connection they will NOT create a sense of urgency in the buyer and sales cycles will extend…. potentially indefinitely.
Analytical
A good marketing exec today is highly analytical and a “quant jock”. They should be able to segment any sales cycle into it’s given phases and then be able to measure each stage of that process. It is through analysis and analytics that a great marketing exec evaluates the effectiveness of monies spent and determines what’s working and what’s not. Being very comfortable with slicing and dicing numbers to evaluate marketing’s progress and reporting to the rest of the exec team is table-stakes in today’s complex world of hybrid-marketing. If a marketing exec can’t easily surf metrics, they are basically hobbled.
Fast
Markets are ALWAYS disappearing, in the sense that vendors are going to take care of the needs of given customers today or tomorrow. The faster you can execute and capture your market, the greater the financial reward for your organization. If you are defining a new market segment or niche, it’s key to establish yourself as the leader, as rapidly as possible. Once the leader is named, it is difficult to unseat them from this position. Either way, the faster a marketing organization can move, the better. Big company’s can rely on slow moving bureaucratic marketing activities around their brand, but a start-up has to be nimble and execute fast. It’s a main advantage and essential that marketing leadership emanates a sense-of-urgency and instills it throughout the organization.
Adaptive
You never know what’s going to work in marketing. SEO? SEM? Direct marketing? PR? Social? Analysts? Whatever. Many start-up marketing execs get caught in a rut and try to use the same methods that have worked for them in the past. Ultimately you have to try new things and see if they work. Is SEO going to work for you? Give it a shot? If it’s not working, tweak it a bit. If it is, see if you can improve it. If it’s not working, try something new. Adapting to the market by changing your methods and activities is essential. Now this might be obvious, but you constantly find marketing execs that keep pounding their heads against the wall with the same activities. If you have the earlier mentioned analytical skills, you can see where things are failing in your marketing/sales cycle. If the message is weak, tweak it. If your activities are failing, try something new. Adapting rapidly is essential. Good companies fail fast. Bad companies continue to fail until someone finally stops the pain.
Candid
To build trust with the exec team, your sales organization and the market itself, a marketing executive needs to be candid. This means being honest and straight-forward - being sincere and telling people what you think. If something is not working, be honest about it within your organization. Usually everyone already knows if things are working, not working or being sorted out. By being candid about what is going on in marketing you build trust throughout the organization. And it is only by exemplifying trustworthiness that you can make the entire organization candid and open which is essential for effective communication and fast adaptation to the market.
Courageous
Most execs are not courageous. Most people aren’t. It’s just the plain simple truth. They’ve learned from a lifetime of experiences to keep their heads down and sometimes just “going with the flow”. They can talk bold and swagger but when you get down to it most people don’t want to take risks. The challenge for a marketing exec is that you have got to get your organization and campaigns noticed. Creating the bland marketing campaign that no one notices is not going to help drive awareness, brand and leads. A marketing exec has to have courage and conviction to try new attention capturing activities. Sadly you can propose to do something bold with an email campaign and everyone will be saying things like “Oh no, that’s too wild! That will kill our brand”, when the truth is you probably won’t even be noticed. In a world of YouTube, shock radio, and reality TV, just about anything a marketing exec can do is just not going to be that wild. Be bold and take some risks with your marketing. Don’t worry if too many people take notice or some get offended…. Worry more that no one takes notice and everyone is bored. Courage is challenging because if you succeed, it’s a team effort. If something fails, you stand alone. But better to die on your feet than live on your knees.
Frugal
You have a limited budget as a start-up marketing exec. That’s all there is to it. Every dollar you spend somewhere could have been spent driving leads and revenue growth. Defend your money like it is your oxygen supply, for it is. That PR firm? What do you expect from them? That big spend on SEO? Will it drive results? That marketing agency seems creative but really what are they going to do to help your sales people hit their quota? A good marketing executive protects their budget and knows how to get the biggest bang for the buck. It doesn’t mean not to spend money, but it does mean ensuring you stay focused on the business at hand which is making money. Too many marketing execs waste money on high-minded activities that just don’t drive the bottom line. Being frugal is synonymous with being “on-top-of-it”.
Kaizen Model Is Ruthless
A famous chess quote goes “Chess is ruthless; you’ve got to be prepared to kill people”. The Japanese Kaizen model of continuous incremental improvement is also ruthless. You see manufacturing companies like Toyota using it very successfully. Companies like Google and Facebook also employ this constant marching forward process to crush opponents or potential competitors. While many people believe in the large release approach to software, this new constant improved SaaS approach is far more insidious and provides greater value to customers. A customer may not even notice how much functionality a product has gained in a year because it happened incrementally, yet, when one looks back one can be astounded by how far a product may have gone just by taking small steps. One might call this “death to competitors by a thousand feature enhancements”.
Avoid Phantoms
Someone recently came to me in a bit of panic because they identified a potential competitor. They even suggested I do an initial analysis of the company. With a quick look at Compete.com I saw the company has very little web traffic AND after pinging the sales force they indicated they had not heard of them. It just didn’t make sense to do an analysis, at this time.
Time is the scarcest commodity a marketing person has. Your job is never done and prioritization is so essential. Ultimately if you follow every suggestion people offer you’ll never move the job forward. I’ll keep an eye on that “competitor” but right now I put it in the category “phantom” until they materialize more substantially.
Beware of Marketing Firms
Although I have seen and currently use a good marketing firm, too often I am bewildered by how bad many marketing firms can be. Not bad in the since of the quality of their work, but their overall impact on a small client. I have seen many marketing firms, both small and large, with the single goal to bill more time against their clients. They get into an account and then the main goal is to expand revenue…… not necessarily provide more value. Sure, they say they are providing more value but the amount ratio of account mgt to actual value providing activities goes up. They start adding more hours here and there. The costs go up. It’s amazing and insidious. And then when a small company realize they will die if they keep the “tick” in, trying to remove it becomes the most expensive and negative experience you could expect from a service provider. They start double billing and charging for anything they can. I always picture some partner in the firm saying “you need to get more hours out of XYZ company”. As I said, I have had positive experiences and marketing firms can help a small company, but just recognize, their goals are not your goals.
Quotes
The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan!
Fast good is magnitudes better than slow great.
Time Kills All Deals
It can not be emphasized enough in a start-up the importance of a sense of urgency. One adage I think all sales people will agree with is that “time kills all deals”. The longer they sit out there, the more likely they will go away or something will come up. Too many times I have seen the large sales deal that goes away because of a reorganization or a company gets acquired or the prospect simply loses interest. Ultimately everything should be done to constantly minimize the sales cycle and take deals off the negotiation table.
Focus on the Pain
This is a great article on how to improve consultative selling.
http://www.customerthink.com/blog/why_your_consultative_sales_approach_isnt_working#comment-21605
Intrusion Marketing is Dying
As a marketing executive, you would have to be blind to not see that “intrusion” marketing is dying. The whole idea that you can thrust yourself into the consciousness of buyers via email or phone calls is outdated and slowly withering on the vine. I have watched connection rates to reach prospects get to as low as 4% when calling six times. That’s poor for any medium. And when you reach the prospect, the chances they are going to be receptive to your idea is slim. The higher level the person you are trying to reach, the more this will be the case. The future belongs to those who provide value in their marketing. Either through social means or linkedin groups or some other organization that a prospect should belong to, the marketeers who will be able to stay in touch with their market are those who will provide value in the greater “community” and will then be “allowed” to market to the target prospects. This ties directly into fundamental 2 of Marketing in the Time of Cholera – Provide Value Throughout the Entire Lifecycle.
