Marketing Roadmaps

Marketing

Roadmaps Round-up

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Adrants on the promotion campaign for the John Twelve Hawks’ book The Traveler.  Program includes a character blog, and as I said in my comments on Adrants, I’ve long believed that fans of books/tv/film will embrace well written character blogs. This is slightly different, as it is promo for a new book, not a build-on to an existing franchise, but it will be very interesting to watch this play out. From my quick glance, the program looks very well done, and there is certainly no subterfuge.

Amy Gahran over at Contentious has a great idea for a unique gift: the gift of conversation.

From Creating Passionate Users, Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak  Main takeaway: give the right features and make them usable as well as useful. Don’t provide a feature just because you can. Make sure it is something that your user actually wants.

Finally, from Jim Logan, some thoughts about CRM — CRM is an attitude and a set of processes, not a piece of software   Main takeaway: Focus on doing active customer relationship management, using whatever software tools you want, versus on a piece of software as savior.

Stuff and a question

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The stuff is just that — some interesting stuff I have been saving to post on, and haven’t had time to blog much lately. I should probably do a link blog, to make it easier to publish these links. Maybe later this summer when I have a minute to breathe.   

From Shel Holtz, two posts about RSS: a plain English guide to RSS and RS huh?

A guest post on Pro-Blogger by Toby Bloomberg on how blogs must earn their keep. (And an aside, it was great to meet Toby and a bunch of other folk at the marketing wonk after yesterday’s AMA blog seminar in Boston)

The question is about SEO techniques. I am revamping two, possibly three client websites (cross fingers), to make them SELL not just TELL, and I am curious about some SEO "things."  I am NOT an SEO expert and my clients know that. But I have had a lot of online marketing experience, which does qualify me to some degree to know what’s what. So here’s my question:

I believe that a well written website that sells not tells should do well in search engines. Yes, you should make the effort to understand the right keywords to incorporate in the copy, and there is no harm in submitting to the engines and the like, but that done: If your website sells your products AND you have a robust marketing program that drives qualified prospects to your site, what happens with the engines is additive, not the baseline of your marketing success. Agree? Disagree? What am I missing?  Bob Bly had a related question on his blog not long ago, but I don’t know that we reached closure 🙂 .

Summertime blues

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It is hot… damn hot … here in Massachusetts.  I cannot wait for the hardwood pollen season to end so I can go out of my house again for more than 10 minutes at a time.

Random rant on: We all know it is possible to simultaneously love and hate a tech gadget. Today it is my iPod that I despise. Why? Because through an initial operator error (mine) followed by what I will call bad software design, the laptop (empty library) wiped out about 20 hours of music on my iPod. Including four CDs which I just can’t find, and rather than tear my house apart, I just re-ordered. Which means of course I will find them the day after the Amazon order arrives… All compounded by the fact that I have first generation iPod with the crappy battery, and all Apple offered in the class action settlement was $50, which could not be used at iTunes. Hmm.  Anyway, suffice it to say that my iPod no longer automatically synchronizes.

So should I just scrap it, use the $50 bucks toward a new player for my music and just use the old one for podcasts? Advice most welcome.

Two quick items, and more later:

Check out Bob Bly’s blog– great question about whether the Internet has killed writing and reduced literacy.

And as always, don’t miss the Revenue Roundtable. Jill Konrath is lead poster this week.

UPDATE: Well, okay, Apple is on my s*** list this week, but here’s the latest. First, I have 2 CDs that for some reason my CD drive can’t read, but my husband’s can. Bizarre-o, but you know that’s where I am with this these days. So I go to the Apple iTunes store just to see if they have these 2 disks — maybe it will be easier to just buy the damn things again than deal with all this crap. So, I need to update my info in the Apple records, and (caps intentional) THEY REJECT MY VALID AREA CODE FOR MY CELL PHONE NUMBER BECAUSE IT DOESN’T MATCH MY HOME PHONE NUMBER. So I type in the same area code as my home phone, which is wrong, and they accept it. Whoa Nelly. This is not good practice, people. Somebody needs to fix an algorithm….

Roadmaps Roundup – June 9

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Sorry for the lack of posts in the last week. As some of my readers know, I am in the early stages of building a consulting practice. This week I have been beyond busy, between client deliverables and new client prospecting. Anyway, some interesting stuff for this week’s Roadmaps’ Roundup.

First, be sure to check out the Revenue Roundtable — Brian Carroll is lead poster this week and has some good stuff on lead gen and thought leadership.

Frederik over at CorporateBloggingBlog has a GREAT analysis of corporate blogging policies. After reading his analysis, I am more than ever convinced that smart companies will figure out how to give media/sensitivity training for their employees who blog, whether or not the blog is company sponsored. It is far easier to help people understand how to deal with media attention than it is to deal with the repercussions of an employee who got it wrong, irrespective of company policy.  I’m really thinking about this… more to come….

Tris Hussey links to tips for the great 10-minute podcast. This is key for corporate marketers. One hour shows won’t make a lot of sense in the corporate space; how to maximize this new form in short bursts will.

Excellent post from BusinessLogs on full posts in RSS feeds. Mike Rundle makes some excellent points about how people will, and should, use RSS feeds as gateways into blogs. I scan Bloglines every day to read the 300 or so blogs I monitor. If a post really interests me, I almost always clock over to the blog, even if there is a full feed. Either I want to leave a comment or trackback to the post, or I am curious if comments have been left… No matter what, if I had to use favorites/bookmarks to accomplish same, I would be far less informed.  And btw I scanned the full post in Bloglines, but read it fully on the blog.

Super post from Mike Manuel on "Joe Blogger" and the importance of understanding that it is as (more?) valuable to reach the blogger with 5 (or even 50) readers who REALLY believe in the source as it is to reach the "Big Blogger" who may have lots of readers but no more (or even less)  buying influence than Joe Blogger. This is critical: marketers need to remember: it is about reaching buyers, not reaching everybody.

Communication between Sales & Marketing

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Today’s post is cross-posted from the Revenue Roundtable.

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Kevin’s post yesterday was spot on about Marketing with a capital "M" as the core of the business. At the root, the Marketing Plan is the Business Plan. The marketing team is simply a functional team responsible for carrying out actions that deliver to the business plan. And as Kevin points out, there are other functions also responsible for their part of the delivery:  sales, finance, operations, etc.

Quite frankly, I think the main reason we lose sight of the Marketing Plan being the Business Plan is fear that this gives too much organizational power to the marketing function.

But whatever the reason, it happens. Each of the separate but equal functions — sales, finance, marketing, operations, customer service — organize around their areas of responsibility and expertise into silos.  The measures of success of each function — lead volumes,  sales quotas, DSOs, call volumes etc etc.  – become their primary goals.  In the trenches, the teams lose sight of the macro orgainzational goals – Revenue and Profitability. And they lose sight of the fact that they are all on the same overall team, the company.

And worst of all, they stop talking TO each other, except in the executive suite, where organizational politics tends to hold sway, reducing the likelihood of actual meaningful exchanges of information.

So, if what we have here is a failure to communicate…. then what we need to do is start talking again. Easier said than done. It requires a deep organizational commitment and strong leadership to break down the barriers, eliminate politics and empire building, and reset everyone back to the shared business goals.

It is well beyond the scope of this post to provide a prescription for how to fix a broken organization. Every situation, every team  is different. One size does not fit all.

What I can do, however, is provide a simple suggestion on how to break down the barriers between the sales and marketing teams and get them more in sync with each other. It won’t fill in the sales and marketing chasm, but it will build a better bridge 🙂

Here goes.

The second most often heard complaint from sales reps (after #1, not enough leads) is that marketing never listens to all their good ideas for ads, direct mail campaigns etc. etc.

Marketing’s biggest complaint? That people are always telling them all their great ideas that would be so much better than what the marketing team has done/has planned. You know: everyone is an advertising expert 🙂

Net result: the marketing team tunes out everything from the sales reps, when instead it should be listening, filtering out the non-useful information, and using the data from the field to improve marketing programs. Remember the old cliche about advertising: I know 50 percent of my advertising works, I just don’t know which 50 percent. A similar rule applies to the feedback from sales teams: a good 50 percent is complaints and extraneous information. But buried in the bull is great information about what is actually happening in the field. We need to mine that information to improve marketing programs.

Here’s my recommendation: implement regular focus groups with the sales reps. You don’t have to do  expensive  "scientific" focus groups with third-party facilitators. A directed conversation facilitated by the marketing team can be just as (and sometimes more) productive, as it fosters conversation among the teams as well as delivering data. But.. the session has to follow fairly strict rules so it doesn’t degenerate into a  "bitch session."

You also have to go down to the rep level. I have found that sales managers don’t give the kind of unfiltered feedback about what is happening in the field that we need.

Here is a model that I have successfully used in the past:

– Once per quarter, within the first few weeks so as to not impinge on serious selling time, assemble a small group of sales reps. Rotate the groups quarter to quarter so you can get feedback from the largest number of reps possible. About 8 sales reps per session is a good number. Get buy-in and public commitment from the senior sales manager (VP, Director, whichever title is appropriate in your firm.) This ensures that the reps will participate and eliminates objections from line sales managers 🙂

– The session is one hour, with four directed questions, 15 minutes for each question.  The sales reps should clearly understand that the marketing team is NOT looking for their recommendations on the marketing plan, but rather feedback on specific questions which will be used to develop new marketing programs. This won’t prevent the reps from telling marketing what they should do, but it is clear warning that this is not the purpose of the session.

– The questions should be <strong>actionable </strong>. DO NOT ask about something that you will not be able to change, regardless of the sales and field feedback.

– Marketing managers are the facilitators. When marketing programs are attacked (and they will be), they can’t defend or get defensive. They have to soak up the feedback and deal with the negative offline from the focus group session. It is okay to be factual — if someone complains about something that has been or will shortly be changed, it is perfectly okay to share the factual information. Otherwise, the marketing guys need to stick with the program, and the four defined questions, and not get sidetracked into defending their record

– Sales managers and executives should NOT be present. Period. The results of the session can and should be shared, but the presence of the bosses will change the session. People will be worried about impressing the honchos, not giving unvarnished feedback. When the results are presented, the feedback must not be attributed.

– The results of the session, including any actions that will be taken as a result, should be shared with the sales participants as soon as possible. Once the sales reps believe that their feedback has made a difference in the marketing plan, the chasm will start to close.  They will start to buy-in, rather than complain. And the marketing team will be more open to the sales feedback. They will be better able to listen for the useful. The marketing programs will be better for it. And, over time, the relationship between your sales and marketing teams should improve.

If any of our readers decide to try this tactic, I would be happy to chat more about the model, just drop me a note. And I would most definitely love to hear your results.