Management Archives - Jeff Weinberger

The Path to Growth: Five Stages of Position-Product-People Alignment

Posted on June 5, 2017March 29, 2018

For nearly any business, growth happens when you know your market, and have your product and your people aligned to the needs of that market. For young companies, such as the technology startups with which I work, this alignment can make the difference between a future IPO and shutting down the business.

Exceptional growth requires expert navigation

As companies start and grow, they begin to discover not only their own expertise, but more importantly, their market, its niches and segments, as well as its quirks, needs and wants. I think of this as navigating the discovery of a new land, full of opportunity and fraught with danger. Finding the path to growth is challenging, but the closer you get to your particular path, the more rewarding it becomes.

The path to exceptional growth is the precise alignment of your product (and capabilities), your position (the needs and wants of the market) and your people (their execution of your processes.

Most businesses go through five stages of alignment:

Typical Revenue Range	Position-Product-People Alignment
>$50 million	Acceleration
$10 million–$50 million	Navigation
$5 million–$10 million	Map-Making
$1 million–$5 million	Discovery
<$1 million	Suspicion

I’ve outlined this for a typical technology startup, but this can apply to any business or product line.

Suspicion

When a company is just starting out, the founding idea comes from some knowledge that a handful of potential customers may need something like the product being contemplated and a founder’s belief she can address that need differently from how it is being solved now.

The market is unknown territory. Whether there are more than a few potential customers is unknown. Any knowledge of a path to growth is nothing more than a suspicion. The product is brand new, so it is still trying to find the needs with which to align.

Discovery

As the company starts to sell products and find customers, it has also found a wider range of ways its product meets the needs of a wider range of customers. There may be little consistency from one customer to the next, but they all find the company has something that meets some set of needs.

This stage of discovery is an important step for every company. The company learns some of what is possible and can start to consider which of the many types of customers will suit it best.

At this stage, there is still very little alignment among position, product and people, as the company is trying to do everything it can to meet the needs of any customer who shows up. The most common cause of failure at this stage is a product that is not growing to meet these diverse needs, meaning the company can’t deliver on its promises.

Map-Making

The company has now become more adept at finding customers, and finding ways to discover and meet their needs. While there may be little consistency as to these needs from customer to customer, some commonalities are beginning to appear.

These areas of commonality are the segments and niches in the company’s market. Knowledge of these shows the company what will work best for its own strategy and objectives, and will eventually help it better understand how to compete with direct and indirect competitors.

This is where alignment becomes critical. As the company learns where it can be most successful, understanding the needs of that segment and how the company can meet them differently from what has come before becomes critical to continued growth and advancing to the next stage.

The most common causes of failure at this stage are either not seeing the emerging segments making it hard to focus, or not continuing to build product that meets the needs of the coalescing segments, again causing the company to miss keeping its promises.

Navigation

The company has seen success in one or more segments and must now choose to focus on one at a time. Exceptional growth requires thinking smaller. Let me repeat, as this is not always intuitive:

Exceptional growth requires thinking smaller.

Focusing on one position in the market — one set of needs, met in a differentiated way, in one segment — allows the company to build a product, train its people and develop processes to focus on demonstrated success — and start to repeat that success. This repeatability is the key to scale.

The most common cause of failure at this stage is not aligning product and people with the chosen position — the needs of the customers in the company’s market segment. This is lack of focus, one of the critical elements of exceptional growth.

Acceleration

With product and people aligned to position (market needs), the company is seeing an increasing number of customers, as well as a decrease in the effort it takes to find a customer. The repeatability inherent in focusing on a chosen position allows the company to scale its operations and delivery in a very precise way.

This same repeatability allows the company to define segment after segment and pursue them in the same way that it pursued the initial segment, creating another layer of scale and accelerating growth.

The most common cause of not being able to achieve this scale is not getting the people and processes in the company aligned to delivering the needs of the chosen segment(s), causing the company to stumble in execution.

Understanding your market and how you can meet the needs of the customers in that market in a different and differentiated way is the foundation of creating exceptional growth for your budding business. Once you get your position right, precisely align your product and your people to that position, and you can find your unique path to exceptional growth.

Decision Making

Artificial Intelligence – The Next Marketing Frontier (and Danger)

Posted on October 4, 2016April 4, 2018

Artificial Intelligence seems to be everywhere all of a sudden, and it’s making its way into the technology marketers use every day. We’ve been talking to (with?) our smartphones for a while now, and there’s pretty much no mobile device that isn’t just begging to hear your voice. With Apple adding Siri to the Mac, that now applies to pretty much any device. Amazon even has an eerily lighted cylindrical device that can play Jeopardy! with you―and presumably understand your stuttering, uncertain responses in the form of a question.

The Direction of Artificial Intelligence Operational Systems

It’s only in the past year or two that we’ve seen so-called artificial intelligence technologies make their way into operational systems and software used in business. And now we’re seeing some form of intelligent capability make its way into marketing. Here are a few examples:

Ad Targeting: Machine learning is working for companies such as Baidu to determine when any given user is most likely to click on what kind of ad, then automatically serving the right kind of ads for that user at that time. This attempts to maximize click-throughs.
Recommendation Engines: We’re all familiar with the jokes about Amazon’s (and other vendors’) “people who bought this item also bought” feature which often make less-than-ideal recommendations. Applying machine learning to large amounts of data on consumer behavior, however, can improve this dramatically. Under Armour is using IBM’s Watson to analyze its own customer purchase data with third-party data on fitness and nutrition to serve up far more relevant product recommendations.
Preventing Credit Fraud: Banks have been using massive amounts of data to try to determine when a particular credit card transaction has a good chance of being fraudulent. Now companies such as USAA are using natural language processing algorithms to look at the text within transactions to determine potential fraud even without a previous pattern having developed.

These examples are taken from a pretty interesting list of applications of artificial intelligence in marketing.

The key question for me is: How will this change marketing? I’ll offer some thoughts on where this is going, but first indulge me a short background explanation.

There are two main lines of thought in the computer science world about how intelligent systems (from software to robots and beyond) should act and interact with humans. One says we should be developing systems that are independently intelligent. Those systems would learn from the initial set of experiences humans provide but then would function on their own, without human guidance and making their own decisions. If this scares you a bit ―and it should―you can read an incredibly insightful speculation on this in Asimov’s classic, I, Robot.

The other line of thought says intelligent systems should be built to extend and enhance human intelligence. Sometimes this is called the “Star Trek” school of thought since that is how the computer systems on that show generally operated (and the independent androids were almost always evil―apologies to Mr. Data). The goal here is to help humans advance their own thinking.

A good example of the latter in the marketing world (and a function I really hope to see one day soon!) is the ability to ask your marketing automation systems questions such as “What are the top three paths people who buy our products take through our website?” and have your system know it needs to crunch the behavioral data to develop paths and determine outcomes. Even better, the system would know why. In this case, the system is not making decisions on website structure or how to present what information to whom, but it is telling you, the human decision maker, what you need to know to make those decisions.

Most of the examples of intelligence, including machine learning and natural language processing, that are in place today fall into the latter category: they exist to provide some form of information plus analysis to a human decision maker. There are a few examples of systems that are given jobs they do themselves (such as the ad server example above), but even those are assigned a specific job and decision-making framework by the humans who control them.

What Comes Next?

I think the next few years will bring a dramatic increase in the intelligent capabilities of all kinds that will be brought into business systems, including marketing systems. Nearly all these will fall into the data or language analysis category at first. They will do things such as answer customer-service requests or help marketers make sense of large sets of unrelated data.

But some will start to make some of the decisions marketers make every day. For example, IBM’s Watson technology analyzed millions of recipes and now can develop a (presumably tasty) recipe given a set of ingredients. That’s why they let it compete on Jeopardy! but not on Chopped! Imagine if Watson’s artificial intelligence analyzed the marketing mix of every company in your segment and added in the consumer behavior data. I’m willing to bet it would make marketing mix and timing decisions as well as any of us could―maybe better.

In the retail business, it’s not hard to envision the day when Apple’s intelligent ear pieces (version one comes out later this month in the form of AirPods) can remember that three days ago you mentioned you needed to buy new socks, and then remind you (literally putting a “bug” in your ear) as you walk by a sock-selling retailer that is doing location-based advertising with Apple. Today this feels intrusive, but as our artificial intelligence assistants become more intelligent, it will seem less so. It’s more like having your friend notice the socks in the window and asking, “Didn’t you mention you need socks?”

Will Marketing Change?

No. Marketing, as we sometimes need to remind ourselves, is a discipline, not a set of actions. We’ll still be doing it. But our jobs will change dramatically.

The predictions for future jobs are dire. This article predicts Robots (or some form of artificial intelligence systems) will take over 50% of all jobs within 30 years (the career span of someone 10 years out of school!). And if you Google “Jobs AI is Taking Over,” there is no end of similarly dire predictions. Many of those jobs are white-collar jobs.

Some of those will be marketing jobs. As systems get better at analyzing data and behavior, the jobs devoted to that will disappear. As systems get better at processing and responding to natural-language requests, customer-service jobs will start to go. And yes, as systems get better at inductive reasoning, jobs that focus on messaging and positioning (inducing target customer desires) will also go.

The flip side of all these dire predictions is that more intelligent systems will help the marketing decision makers make better, more informed, less biased and faster decisions. Those of us who focus on creative roles and on decision-making roles will get much, much better at our jobs, as our systems help us do better, faster.

Now, if Siri could only tell me where I saw that really cool gadget I wanted to buy. Or even reliably get me directions home. Then I’d be convinced we’re on our way to more intelligent systems.

Are you using intelligent systems in your marketing? Are they helping? I’d love to hear your stories.

Collaboration

Please Stop Collaborating with Me!

Posted on May 13, 2014

(this is a repost of a post written by me for Nimble.)

Collaboration is all the rage in the business world these days — you can’t go more than a few minutes in any business conversation, journal, site, blog or anywhere else without the word coming up. And there’s no doubt that improved collaboration (often enabled by technology) has led to leaps and bounds in productivity.

But are you — like me — starting to feel like we’re overdoing it? I know there are times when I just want to say, “Leave me alone and let me get some work done!”

I’m just old enough to remember the days when everyone in the company had an office. I mean a room with a door that could fully close. While very few office doors were closed much of the time (there was a lot of debate about open-door policies and the like), you could close the door when you needed to concentrate. Or have an important phone call. Or — in the case of certain nameless colleagues — take a nap. In fact, in my very first job after college, I had just such an office.

Then the age of the cubicle arrived. In the 1980s, companies such as Intel were admired for their devotion to the cubicle culture — meaning the collaboration that came with the broad adoption of cubicles. At Intel everyone, even the CEO, had a cubicle.

There was conversation. We talked with each another far more than when I had an office. It became useful, productive, even fun. Prairie-dogging became a game.

Then we discovered the dark side. We couldn’t have the challenging conversations with customers, partners or even our bosses without everyone knowing about it. There were no more moments of concentration; there was collaboration, but there was also constant interruption. Recent studies have shown that constant interruption and multi-tasking are far less productive than concentration and single-tasking.

But are we ready to go back to closed-door offices? For most companies, no. Many companies are going even further and eliminating cubicles in favor of open-plan offices — just a collection of desks in a room (think the secretarial pool from any random 1950s movie).

Tele-Smart consultant Josiane Feigon recently published an article about an un-named client who gave inside salespeople closed-door offices. From her article, it’s easy to tell she did not agree with this move. She seems to feel that having salespeople in closed-door offices defeated the collaboration that she thinks is at the core of their job, and, as is common in other companies, they should have kept the salespeople in cubicles or an open-plan office.

I, however, agree with this client wholeheartedly. In fact, I think they might not have gone far enough. Here’s why:

Inside sales — at least the core piece of the job, which is making calls to prospects — is not collaborative at all. The employee’s (inside sales rep’s) focus is entirely outside the company, and that employee needs the ability to focus their attention outside (at the prospect) rather than dealing with the inside distractions of noise interruptions and over-hearing other outbound calls.

My friend and inside-sales expert Anneke Seley, CEO of RealityWorks Group, points out that there is a critical component of the inside sales rep’s job that is collaborative: training and preparation. These parts of the job benefit from working with managers and colleagues, collaborating on strategy and working to improve skills.

So these parts of the job should be done in an environment that promotes collaboration and interactions (intentional and accidental), and this can be done in a group setting such as a conference room or open area.

But the outbound calling should not be done in “public.” The highest productivity from that part of the job is achieved when the environment isolates the inside sales rep.

In our zeal to achieve ever-increasing collaboration, maybe we’ve forgotten why we want collaboration in the first place: to increase productivity and effectiveness.

Looking at collaboration through the lens of where the focus of the work is pointed (internal, external, solo, team, etc.) can suggest a new way to evaluate whether a collaborative work environment is going to help or harm our productivity. And then maybe we can find ways to collaborate when it helps and leave each other alone when it doesn’t.

And yes, I said “collaboration” (or “collaborative”) 16 times in this post. We might just be overdoing it.

conversation

3 Reasons Recurring Revenue and Renewals are Critical [Podcast]

Posted on July 30, 2013

I was honored to be interviewed by Linda Popky of Leverage2Market Associates and one of the leaders in marketing innovation in the technology business. We discussed a range of topics, including:

Why recurring revenue and renewals are so important to so many companies
Why many companies (particularly in the technology business) don’t invest enough in recurring revenue
How marketing and selling to renewing and repeat customers is different from new business
What companies can do right now to increase recurring revenue and renewals, and reduce churn

You can find the podcast here (just under 30 minutes). I hope you find it useful – please let me know in the comments.

Photo Credit: Colleen AF Venable via Compfight cc

Collaboration

Making Remote Work Work: Nine Ways to Succeed and Five Myths Dismissed

Posted on April 2, 2013April 7, 2018

If you’ve been paying attention to the news out of Silicon Valley recently, it would be hard to miss the uproar about Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s decree that Yahoo! would no longer allow its people to work from home.

I spent several years leading marketing and internal communications for the remote work program at Cisco Systems. During that time, our policies evolved and grew into a sophisticated program designed to create competitive advantage for Cisco in both its access to skilled workforce and in serving its customers.

I don’t want to jump into the debate about Yahoo!, nor do I want to discuss how organizations and employees benefit from remote work. My colleague Faith LeGendre has covered that very well.

I want to take a closer look at how to make remote work (which includes working from home, working in a remote location, or even just having a geographically diverse team) actually work well and benefit both the company and the employee.

First, let me dismiss a few myths:

Working from home is not just for mothers with young children.
Working remotely is not just about wanting schedule flexibility for personal needs.
Working remotely to achieve a flexible schedule does not reduce productivity.
When remote work programs fail, it’s generally because of poor technology planning or a lack of good management practices.
Collaboration and informal interaction do not require being in the same location.

Making a remote work program work for the benefit of everyone requires hard work and a shift in thinking on the part of both the employee and the company. The goal of a remote work program should be to make employees just productive from anywhere as they would be in an office.

For the company and the remote worker’s manager, these practices will help make you and your people successful and productive no matter where they are:

Shift your thinking from presence focused to results focused.

One of managers’ most common complaints about people who work remotely is that they can’t see whether they are working. I suggest that your inoffice workers are probably also pretty adept at making you think they are working even when they are not. But it just doesn’t matter.

Whether your people are in your office or somewhere else, remember that you hired them to produce results. It may require a bit more rigor on your part, but make sure both you and they understand what those results are and how you expect them to be achieved.

Be honest: if your people are producing great results, does it matter whether they did all the work between 9 and 5? Or is it OK with you if they did some of the work at 3 AM?

This also means you need to set expectations and have an explicit agreement on when the remote worker will be reachable for emergencies and other time critical matters. Make sure you know what you actually need and what is reasonable to expect.

Be reasonable and allow yourself a learning curve.

Managing remote workers is not easy. You will find that shifting your thinking, measuring results in a different way, and trusting your workers more completely than you likely have before is challenging and requires a learning curve.

Don’t expect more from your remote workers than from your inoffice workers (though you will probably get more) and watch yourself for inequities in your treatment of the two. This will get easier with time, and it will be much easier if your company’s HR team provides support and training.

Create formal agreements and stick to them.

Your remote workers should know what you expect from them, and you should know how they are meeting those expectations.

When you either hire a remote worker or change an inoffice worker into a remote worker, create a formal written agreement. Outline everything from objectives, expected results, response times, and availability to reporting and collaborating with colleagues across the company.

Get the technology right.

Don’t skimp. The technology available in today’s market for making remote workers effective is both very good and very affordable. Make sure you have the technology that allows your remote workers to get the job done as efficiently as your inoffice workers.

For the remote worker make sure you work effectively and follow these ideas to help your management realize as much benefit as you do from your working remotely:

It’s not about your convenience; it’s about producing results.

As with so many communications you have with your management, explaining why you need this “privilege” just doesn’t cut it. Explain how it will benefit your manager and the company. Show how you will make it work. Sell your manager on trusting you to make it work.

Take it slowly.

Don’t walk into your manager’s office and announce your plan to work remotely full-time starting Monday. Start with one or two days per week. Create milestones that show your part-time remote work plan works. Then go to three days per week. Then four.

When you are choosing which days to start with, intentionally choose days that will show that you can work effectively. For example, choose a day when a weekly team meeting occurs, then demonstrate your outstanding participation in that meeting while sitting in your living room.

Demonstrate results.

If there is one single key to success in remote work, this is it: create external objective evidence of your work. Your management will not see every bit of work you do remotely. But they can always see the outcome of your work.

For example, let’s say your job is to run email marketing campaigns. You and they both know lots of planning and collaboration go into creating those campaigns. But they may or may not see that. What they will see is that the campaign launched and produced results.

Learn to collaborate online.

Both structured and impromptu collaboration can easily happen from anywhere. But for most of us, it’s not natural to strike up informal conversations electronically.

I can’t put too fine a point on this: learn how. Getting good at making connections and developing relationships with people you can’t (and may never) see is critical to your success.

Overcoming resistance is about proving success.

This is generic but critical to making it work. Some managers will resist the idea of having someone work remotely. You can’t change the culture overnight, but you can create opportunities to prove success. Create trial remote work times. Develop result focused plans for making it succeed.

When the trial period ends, make sure you have lots of evidence of success to show your manager the benefits and start planning for a larger trial. Make your success available to others also: the more people who show and prove success, the faster the culture of resistance will change.

The list of benefits of remote work for both employees and employers is seemingly endless, so there’s no reason not to get started. Remember, if your people can’t work remotely for you, they might just work remotely for your competition.

Decision Making

Elephants and Data: The Missing Link to Making Sales & Marketing 2.0 Work

Posted on October 24, 2012April 7, 2018

This week I had the privilege of attending the Sales and Marketing 2.0 Conference in San Francisco (thank you to the conference team for the invitation!).

While this edition focused on social selling and marketing (as expected), it also focused heavily on what leaders need to manage a social selling or marketing team.

But this is not a summary of the conference. If you would like to see the very useful and interesting learnings from these two days, my friend Matt Heinz has an excellent post you should read.

This is my view of the most important lesson learned this week, and what I think is the missing link to making all of these new ideas in sales and marketing work. First the data.

Data

For the past five years or more, I have been hearing conference presenters, pundits and all sorts of others talk about the new way to market and sell in a social world. While some of it is just hype (isn’t it always?), when you sort through all of the information out there, you reach a few simple conclusions:

Technology has and will continue to disrupt how products and services are marketed and sold
Social technology has shifted the balance of power to the buyer, so that sellers now have to work not to sell, but to help buyers buy
Most corporate organizations and the systems by which they measure their people have not adapted to this new reality at all, meaning we are all essentially doing what we used to do, just with new technology (yep, I wrote that five years ago!)

The focus of the conference for the past two days offers some hope for addressing this last point. Much of the focus was on managing in what they call a “sales and marketing 2.0” or “social” world.

Speakers showed us how they are helping their people do certain things differently – or do entirely different things. They showed how they are figuring out what those things should be. And – since we know what gets measured gets managed – they showed how they are measuring success in the social selling and social marketing process, and how they are rewarding people for that success.

These management practices are all based in what we have come to call big data. For example, you have to merge and interpret data from your company’s traditional systems (e.g. CRM), your other internal data (e.g. email communications, chat and other interactions), customer data, social network data and other public data to gain a deeper understanding of how a Facebook campaign or a sales rep’s blog helped generate revenue and specific deals. And yes, this can be measured. But no, it’s not easy.

We saw examples of how every aspect of management from governance to measurement to evaluation, to hiring to leadership and coaching (yes, coaching) can be improved when driven by the effective use of data.

Elephants

Here’s what I think was the elephant in the room: In order for individuals to succeed at anything at all in a corporate organization, they have to know what success looks like.

Your sales leadership can be the best at understanding and directing a social selling organization. but does your newly hired rep know what to do when she is on the phone (excuse me, web conference) with a hot prospect? Do they know how to use the social tools at their disposal to make that a more successful call?

Your marketing leadership can put in place all of the social tools and programs, and even hire people to manage the various social channels. But when your demand gen manager executes a new campaign, do they know how and when to incorporate those channels?

Do your people know it when they see it?

What leadership needs is a way to institutionalize the knowledge, learning and assumptions needed to become a social sales and marketing organization. We need not only a way to not just communicate to our people what this is all about, but also a way to make sure that when our people do their work, they know – intuitively – how to do it in this new way.

Do you give your people the knowledge and skills to be able to do their jobs in whatever new way your organization is adopting? Does it work?

Add your story to the comments below. And I’ll see you at the next Sales and Marketing 2.0 Conference.

conversation

Why “Sell how your customer wants to buy” doesn’t really work that way

Posted on April 2, 2012

It’s a Sales 2.0 mantra:

Sell the way your customers want to buy

and it’s one of the oft-repeated phrases at this week’s Sales 2.0 Conference.

It’s also a perfect idea. If you want to be successful in selling figure out the process your customers use to buy the kind of thing you want to sell them, match everything you do to that process, and your whole process will be as frictionless as an air-hockey puck sliding across the table right into the goal.

Making that happen in the messy, friction-filled world of everyday business is far more challenging. What this perfect mantra ends up meaning in most organizations that attempt to put it into practice is that we work to find what we want to think is a typical way our target customers would buy, and we design a process around that.

Then, in so many of our individual sales processes, reps are running to managers for exception approvals, and the process is only followed at best approximately and at worst in concept only. This happens because the typical buying process to which we design is really an average of our target buyers which is the reality for no individual company, so every buyer requires some kind of exception or adjustment.

So what do we do about this?

Sometimes lost in the ever-growing focus on repeatable and scalable process based on technology is the fact that sales is a relationship business. To be clear, I don’t mean the old stereotype of the slick sales rep who can schmooze anyone into a deal, but rather the truth that in order to achieve that kind of exceptional success we must truly understand both the customer’s processes and the people, including their political dynamics. Then we have the ability to revolve friction as it arises and move deals to close more quickly.

But again, that’s a perfectly ideal thought and not a reality of how to do business. So what do we do in the real world?

Keep the process-focused methods we have. They are necessary and valuable. And you can’t make strong relationships happen without them. But let’s also design processes around how relationships between our companies – and maybe more importantly the people in them – develop.

Do we know just how that happens? Yes we do! There are a special few people I’ve met in my business career who seem to have no clue how to develop relationships with others, but the vast majority of us do, and we generally do it quite well. We do it in so many areas of our lives everyday (I love comparing long-term customer relationships to a marriage!), and most of those relationships are in business. Use that knowledge (intuition, people skills or whatever you want to call it), get it out of your head (and your heart) and into your selling practices.

So sit down with your sales, sales ops and marketing teams and work out how your target customers want to build relationships. Then institutionalize it in your sales and marketing processes.

Then make it work in your support and service processes also so all of your new-found customers don’t leave you next year.

And call us if you need help making this happen.

Then add your thoughts in the comments: how do you build relationship building into you sales process?

creativity

Change of Control

Posted on August 8, 2009

It’s often the simplest things that make all the difference.

This article by Gary Hamel describes the seemingly incredible effects of allowing local and front-line employees to make decisions on how best to serve the customers with whom they interacted every day, rather than listening to a standard coming from the central corporate office, which had the effect of not quite serving any customer particularly well.

It has a very powerful story which illustrates three important points:

One: It’s an excellent lesson in experimentation, focusing on what the customer really needs and wants and, what I think was Professor Hamel’s point, how to run a better business by changing the way you treat your people.

Two:It reinforces the fact that your brand is not what you define it to be, but rather it exists in the mind of those who know you and are your customers. In this case, looking at the definition of “reliability” from the perspective of the customer completely changed the practices that helped support the reputation.

Here’s what intrigued me:

Three: It’s the second underlying theme in the story that makes it so compelling: The changes, the innovation, the tremendous increase in customer service and profitability all happened because someone (according to this, a few people at a time) made the decision to give up centralized control and trust employees to use their judgement and do what is best for the business on their own volition – and most importantly to use their own intelligence and motivation to improve the business at every opportunity.

This was a shift for this particular company, and might well be for yours, in the relationship between the company (and its management) and its employees.

What would happen if we made the same shift in our relationship with the people in our market (customers and everyone else)?

What might happen if we stopped telling our market what to think about our companies and how they should relate to us?

As marketers, we are trained to do market research, find market positions with large opportunity, and spend time, money and resources making sure everyone think of us what we want them to.

One side effect of this is that we may not serve any of our customers particularly well (to reference a common example, I’d prefer a car that is safe, forward-thinking and “hot” but brand-reputation at least, I get to pick one).

This story is one from which we can learn.

Please read it.

Then think about what you are doing that is stopping your people from having the freedom to build a new customer relationship.And what you need to do to make that job easier for them. (can you provide templates to print opening hours instead of dictating them?)

Then go one step further: how can you enable your customers to build the relationship they want with you and get the service from you that suits them best?

I am fairly certain that even simple steps will dramatically improve your customer relationships and put you miles ahead of your competition in your relationship with the rest of the market.

Take a step now.

Discuss it here. I’d love to hear what you’ve tried and how it worked.

Brand

Stop Circling the Wagons

Posted on March 22, 2009

This past week I had the privilege of attending The Economist’s 2009 Marketing Forum. As you might expect, the topics this year were focused on managing through challenging economic times, how to prepare for what we all hope will be better times in the near future and how we might know when better times are coming.

The audience was smaller than in past years, which was not at all surprising, but still represented the marketing leadership of a diverse set of companies and organizations – enough so that it was not hard to see how different sectors and industries are faring, and how the thinking differs – or doesn’t – across these businesses. (you can read more on the twitter stream, some commentary on it from day one and day two and read another perspective on the conference)

I heard discussion of the expected topics, such as measurement, marketing mix and spending and investment allocation, plus branding, promotion, channels and the long list of things marketers think about. But after a day and one-half listening to and talking with this group of marketing leaders, there were two things that were notably missing.

I’m pretty sure that if you’re bothering to read this, you don’t need to be convinced that an economic downturn, regardless of how severe or prolonged, is the time when it is imperative that great companies (read: the ones that want to survive) innovate – not just creating a few new, related products, but re-think the way they relate to their customers and the rest of their market, they way they develop and roll-out product (I am intentionally avoiding the word “launch” here) and how they manage the marketing investment for their companies.

I won’t suggest that there were no interesting ideas offered. There were a few. But out of 12 panels and presentations, not one was focused on innovation in marketing or how companies can create the kind of significant differentiation that will allow them to succeed in bad times and dominate when the market turns up again.

I would hate to suggest that, among this group, not one person was thinking about how to do this for their company (or clients for the branding firms in attendance), but there was little to no talk of this, either on stage or in the hallway between sessions. The thing that struck me also, is how much of the conversation still assumes that marketers own and define their brand themselves (hint: your market owns your brand) and how much the style of thinking is still command-and-control-driven in most marketing organizations.

So what was missing? Let me start with these perspectives:

The CMO as the portfolio manager of a range of marketing investments (some of this was hinted at by Ward Hanson of SIEPR)
The CMO as the steward (not controller, or owner) of the brand in the minds of the members of the market
The CMO as the facilitator of the conversation around the company and the brand
The CMO as the steward of the relationship with the market(s)
The CMO as the driver of a sustainable business model (no, I don’t mean green products)

This is the opportunity that faces us in this challenging market. William Pearce of Del Monte Foods suggested that one of the key responsibilities of the CMO is to be the “driver of growth” – and with that comes the challenge of how to put your company in position to lead the market (and gain market share) in challenging times and to accelerate out of this downturn, leave your competition in the dust and become dominant in your market.

Your market is thinking differently about its relationship with you – and your competitors. Are you willing to do what it takes to enter into a new relationship, start to think differently about how your company operates and markets, and become the organization that everyone else wishes they were?

I hope so – and I’d like to hear how you are getting started.

Brand

Just Ask

Posted on February 27, 2009

At this morning’s Social Media Breakfast (great discussion with Anneke Seley, author of Sales 2.0 on using social media in sales), I was talking with Sue of KITList and Clare about how to improve the conversation and engagement of the thousands and thousands of KITList members. The three of us wrestled with updating the blog, creating an e-mail discussion list, maybe a social media service presence (Facebook, Twitter?), but we weren’t really sure what would engage the large and very diverse group that is the KITList membership. Then came the “a-ha” moment:

Clare said “Why don’t you ask your members?”

Which is, of course, applying the basic social media principle to figuring out social media.

Marketers are always working hard to understand customers, prospects and future prospects better. We think we’re pretty good at asking people in our market what they think, want and need. We also think we’re pretty good at translating often disparate answers into a coherent theme that then, we hope, guides our strategy.

Where this morning’s conversation started was in the “market research” mode of asking a few people. Sue asked me and Clare, and told us she had asked a few others, but still had no good answers. So a few hours later, she wrote a blog post (and sent an e-mail) to the members and asked everyone.

A few hours later, I saw the news that Facebook, after the recent debacle, has now decided that changes to their terms of service will be open to discussion by all members and subject to vote of the membership (Can’t you hear the lawyers cringing?). A social media icon now adopts real social media practices in a way that much of the technology industry is proverbially famous for not doing for so many years. This means no more misunderstandings (we hope) and terms of service that the community of Facebook members actually wants to abide by (I’ll refrain from a rant on the use of self-interest as a motivator being better than the threat of lawsuit). Facebook is actually asking everyone, and the result is almost certain to be a service that’s more appealing to its members.

Not everyone will answer. But I can’t think of a better example of how to learn what your whole market thinks, and not just the select few you’ve chosen for research. This is not quite crowdsourcing, but it’s close, and it uses some of the same ideas about collecting opinions from many, many individuals.

So when you want to know what your customers, prospects and market really want and need (and I hope you always want to know), do you let a select few speak for everyone? or do you really ask – everyone?

Jeff Weinberger

Your Marketing Mentor

Category: Management