The Marketing Minute

In organizations just like yours, there are a variety of personnel, and each of them –– for better or worse –– is your brand evangelist. And each employee has the same potential to be a star for your brand. I’m Mark Stephen Ware.

The new movie, “A Star Is Born,” staring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, is not the first time this story has been put to film. It’s not the second time. It’s not even the third time. It’s the fourth time because it’s a great story. The players change, but the story is essentially the same and audiences eat it up. That’s how brand building should work too. Everyone has the chance to be “born a star” for your brand, and that depends on how well they care for the brand and deliver services to your clients. Even with employee turn over or “churn”, the potential to rise to stardom is the same: from sales and sales enablement teams to finance and HR teams, from operations to reception, everyone can be a star for your company. The key is to plan on it, bake into your employee onboarding processes and make it part of your culture’s top 3 “gotta haves”, while continually modeled by your leaders. And that will make a hit with your customers causing them to buy repeat tickets to your firm’s star “performance”.

I’m Mark Stephen Ware.

Some people really struggle with change. That struggle, in part, can be due to too many options and a lack of data to make an informed decision.

"Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right,” said the renowned management guru Peter Drucker

Apple, Chick-Fil-A, FedEx and Southwest Airlines are examples of brands that have evolved, but managed to stay true to their calling and ultimately grew record revenue. Their long-term success is an example we should all follow, but what was it that enabled them to be so successful? How they managed change.

That’s the challenge in managing brand. Remember when Levi's decided to go into the high-end men's suites space? Or when Hooters launched its own airline? Both of these experiments met with flat success and soon collapsed. Levi and Hooters seemingly forgot about what made them successful in the first place: that unique double-helix brand DNA strand that no one else had.

Companies like Southwest and FedEx grew their brand’s by staying close to their core values and the framework that made the brand successful in the beginning. For Apple that meant changing the world one person at a time and enabling them to be more productive with technology but not for the sake of technology. For Chick-Fil-A it meant evolving its menu but never losing sight of its core commitment to fast-food restaurant cleanliness, nice bathrooms and tremendous customer care and customer service.

For long-term success, do innovate, do progress, do evolve, but don’t forget about the values, the framework –– that special DNA of your brand –– that has allowed your company to enjoy its success. Show off that DNA, cite it, embrace it, esteem it. Make sure all newbies know about it and that the veteran staff never forget it. Peter Drucker might say that's doing the right thing to enable your brand for long-term success.

Sometimes it’s just time to sunset the brand. And in those cases, it’s the best call to make. And other times, it may be best to just update the brand and drive it into the future. These are the times when brands need to be rejuvenated, updated, and aligned due to new strategic directions of the company, or customer perceptions about the firm. Recent examples would include Apple Computer becoming Apple, or Dunkin Donuts becoming Dunkin. The classic case of a great move was when Federal Express became FedEx, by popular demand as well as United Parcel Service becoming UPS. Other brands take aggressive action and do so out of necessity such as when Arthur Andersen became Accenture. By simplifying and focusing the brand (logo and/or name), two great things can occur: one, the market perceives a change is coming that will benefit them. Perhaps more choices, broader menus, better options. The second great thing is simply that the fresh PR and buzz will get people thinking and talking more about the brand. And that’s always a good thing.

The #1 best way for sales enablement and marketing leaders to score points with the senior team is to speak the CEO’s love language. A recent Deloitte study reported in the Wall Street Journal encouraged marketers and sales enablement leaders to establish and embrace business metric in order to gain a more solid footing with senior leadership. This idea of using traditional sales enablement programs’ analytics and those of marketing campaigns, for example, just won’t cut it any more. The best advice to these leaders is to learn to speak the CEO’s love language and that means talking about how your activities are directly impacting revenue growth (not just gains), how you are helping to improve employee team morale and how you are helping to lock-in long-term client loyalty.

When it comes to talking sales enablement or marketing with the CEO, it’s a mixed bag. Some CEOs are super savvy when it comes to lead gen, bid production, social platforms, PR, media buy and publishing. They get it. Other CEOs understand parts and pieces; they all have varying degrees of interest, and of skepticism. So, the sales and marketing leadership has to always be ready to speak the language of the CEO. CEO’s typically will want to focus on three things: revenue growth, improving employee morale and enhancing long-term customer loyalty. That means it is vital that sales enablement and marketing leaders adopt the vocabulary of the CEO, and that begins with understanding the CEO’s top priorities, and then looking at the meaningful activities that will showcase alignment –– and results. That way, when the CEO asks for an update, the response will always be guaranteed to hit the CEO’s sweet spot and priorities. I’d say it is always best to ensure your activities are aligned with the CEO’s top priorities and then have a “star story” (beginning with results) that can be easily and obviously be traced back to sales and marketing’s impact on those priorities. That’s a win-win-win sure to make the CEO grin.

One of the most overlooked areas of Sales Enablement and Brand Management is revenue leakage. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Stop the leakage and save your brand from getting damaged. As business leaders, we instinctively look at revenue results, costs, margins and the drivers behind each. We may look at employee churn and even CSAT or VOC scores, but other than perhaps the CFO, who’s really looking at revenue leakage? Sales Enablement can put into practice a great process for the sales teams and create a strong supporting infrastructure to go with it. But unless someone is regularly scoring client churn, associated costs and rationale, revenue will continue to leak. Wouldn’t it be better if the business consistently kept its clients long term and stopped the leakage? Begin by examining why clients are leaving and then assign a senior owner to stop the leakage in partnership with the leadership team. Your brand, sales team and CFO will thank you.

All organizations will be challenged by the unexpected. In today’s social-hungry media culture, it won’t stay a secret for long. Better to have a pre-planned action plan and communication response plan and stick to it. Last year, Forbes listed the Biggest PR Crises of 2017 –– from Adidas and Pepsi to FoxNews and United Airlines. Now is the time to identify ten to twenty potential scenarios that are possible, however unlikely, to affect your organization and develop a crisis playbook. Without a crisis playbook already in place, chances are your organization will panic, misstep and emotionally respond (or not at all), and that can impact the brand’s good faith, leadership team’s credibility, company valuation, client perceptions, staffing and team morale, to name a few. Make it a goal to have in place your organization’s crisis playbook before the end of the year and then, when something happens, stick to the script.

Many marketers rightly focus on analytics. But failure to immediately move the analytics needle isn’t in itself an admission of marketing’s failure. It just takes time. I don’t know about you, but my experience with marketing tells me that very little happens over night. Or over a week. Or over a month in some cases. Even the best GTM strategy, product offering and compelling narrative doesn’t guarantee immediate short-term results. When setting expectations around analytics (a common KPI component), it’s always a good idea to start with something like the Three Wheres: where we were, where we are and where we’re headed.

There is tremendous value in market research. But that value is premised on the idea that the audience is correctly identified and approached. There are many types of market research –– about competitors, the ideal prospect, current customers and of course industry trends. And it’s super easy and fast to push out a, for example, SurveyMonkey questionnaire. But I’ve found the best data comes from brief live 1:1 interviews. If the goal is to understand more complex scenarios — for example, why clients are leaving, you have to go deeper and go live 1:1 either via phone or in person. Questioning should use a good mixture of both qualitative and qualitative and incorporate a rationale component to each question. It’s just not as useful to have the answer “Yes” or “No”; responses with supporting rationale help explain the response and help marketers to leverage it in a meaningful way. When planning your next market research project, get the illusive “why” with each response.

Sometimes marketing is a compromise. That’s okay— marketing needs good feedback from the team and trusted third-parties, but the responsibility for marketing is with the marketing team to ensure messaging is clear, simple and appropriately compelling to motivate the target audience and drive sales.

It’s easy for some parts of the organization to dismiss marketing as the “graphics people” who spiff up PowerPoints, post things on social and organize events. Marketing also partners with sales for targeting strategic accounts, fully-impactful collateral and associated analytics. Don’t let anyone tell you marketing is just a cost center. Marketing is the best sales enablement and sales driving part of the organization outside of sales itself. Done well, marketing produces great collateral, elevates the brand to new heights, produces award-winning events, white papers and generates highly sought-out vetted and warm sales leads.

Marketing should not be considered a cost center; it is really a company’s best revenue enabler. It’s true that marketing must make specific and measurable impacts on the company’s ability to generate sales. However, many marketers are so covered up in production work, that they barely have time to actually pause and consider the bigger picture: revenue enablement. There are literally dozens of ways marketing can and should help enable more new revenue; here are a few examples to consider:
• Marketing can take ownership of the sales funnel and ensure tracking of all lead sources.
• Marketing can team up with HR to drive an enhanced new-hire onboarding experience. Happy crew, happy customers.
• Marketing can partner with Ops and the AM team to ensure “early warning radar” type data is made more visible regarding client experiences with the brand.

There are many ways marketing can help enable revenue. Marketing can easily become the company’s Swiss-Army Knife for revenue enablement.

A central part of any marketing function is creative — in brochures, web and more. But creative is best when it helps achieve the primary business objective and not just a great design. I’ve known a number of truly talented creative people — artists and designers –– each with tremendous skill to accomplish what would otherwise be the impossible for anyone else. Yet, even with such ability, creative efforts must be aligned to the business objective and the brand’s persona. At times, this can be a challenge between the business team and creative team. But the solution is not to toss out the creative, nor dial back the business team expectations. Instead, it’s a balance of where creative insights intersect with, and help to enable, achievement of business priorities, and where business priorities help to maximize the impact of creative insights. They really do work together best when taken as two parts of the same task and not as competitors or defenders of their own turf.

With so many platform options for marketing, it can be difficult to choose –– nearly everyone has a favorite for this or for that. But if we zoom out and look at the big marketing picture, ultimately, the right platform for CRM, hosting/publishing content or ABM is the one that best allows you, your team and your budget to regularly get the best content in front of your target audience. Period. There should no other factors to consider. If your target audience is being impacted, engaged and responsive, you’ve got a winning approach with whatever platform combination you’re using. If the sales team is thrilled with the leads you’re generating, you’ve got a winning approach. If the CFO and CEO are excited about the new revenue you are helping to create, you’ve got a winning approach. The key is to track those marketing KPIs that clearly contribute to three things: revenue growth, improved employee morale and long-term client loyalty.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, has been, and continues to be a HOT TOPIC for marketers and people who don’t work in marketing. But is SEO really worthy of so much attention? Maybe not. One of the most well-known opponents of “chasing” SEO is Guy Kawasaki. Guy is rightly a tech-silicon-valley celebrity and expert in social media and all things digital. He’s also the first Apple Evangelist and worked for Steve Jobs back in Apple’s early days. Like Guy, my thoughts on SEO are less about the typical focus on keywords and metadata. Instead, I believe with Google employing over 1,000 PHDs and scientists around the world working 24/7/365 to ensure the “house always wins”, I would put all my chips on a strategy that is heavy on:
• compelling content that is
• regularly published and that
• exceeds the readers’ expectations

Marketing owns the brand, but there are other parts of the organization that influence branding. That’s Sales Enablement and the Sales Support team.

Perhaps the single most important piece of collateral is the proposal, or RFP response. The template may come from the marketing team, but it is the sales support team that customizes each bid offering. It either wins or misses. But its impact can be directly and quickly felt in revenue. Part of the Sales Enablement program, Sales Support covers a lot of ground and is essentially a complimentary team partnering with marketing. Sales Support touches copy, graphics, visuals, proofing and delivery of proposals. Keep that in mind when someone is quick to dismiss Sales Support. Sales Enablement and the sales support team are the marketing team’s cousins –– and own the other side of Branding.

Saying that Marketing is a cost center is so ‘old school’. And yet, that may be how traditional leaders think of Marketing. Instead, be the evangelist and tell them that Marketing is an omni-functional enabler to any organization’s culture and morale. With the very best go-to-market strategy and vision, a product, service or perhaps entire company is doomed if the employees — “cast and crew” –– are not onboard and support the go-to-market strategy. So, leave the old school behind and embrace marketing as a way to improve culture and morale. Doing so is the key to delivering a great client experience, building brand and growing revenue.

Sometimes marketers feel all alone because they think no one else really gets marketing. In fact, if they are honest, many leaders really don’t get marketing. These leaders just don’t understand it because it’s media, it’s content, video, digital platforms and many other things the typical non-marketing leader may not have had much if any experience with in their career. So, it’s up to the CMO and the marketing team to speak the non-marketer’s love language. That means keeping your marketing-speak to a minimum and instead relating what marketing is doing in terms of growing revenue, improving employee morale and enhancing long-term client loyalty. Chances are, spinning your marketing updates in this manner will score more kudos and “well done” responses by the leadership team –– those same leaders will then actually understand how you are helping them to grow the business.

It’s vital that sales and marketing partner on all go-to-market activities. Essentially two sides of the same coin, marketing cannot exist in a vacuum and sales cannot pitch and close deals without support. Silos do little good in the organization that has major interdependencies like sales and marketing. A few key ideas on creating a more synergistic relationship between sales and marketing would include: (1) joint weekly pipeline reviews of new business opportunities, (2) jointly examining the post-mortem data on lost clients and (3) ongoing monitoring of lead sourcing that typically predate proposals and contracts. These are just three examples of how sales and marketing can better team up to grow revenue, improve employee morale and enhance long-term client loyalty. The more these two teams and their leaders collaborate, the better the likelihood they will together grow the company’s revenue, improve employee morale and retain clients long term. No silos needed.

I love to know what the market is thinking about the brand. Understanding how the brand is experienced, helps marketers determine the vetting of value, the likelihood of referrals and the retention of revenue. As brand stewards, all marketers should be concerned about how the brand is delivered and experienced on an ongoing basis. That’s part of the three-part marketing approach that focuses on products, processes and people. And that’s key to growing revenue, improving employee morale and enhancing client loyalty.

THE CXO LOVE LANGUAGE – We can’t read minds and we shouldn’t try to, but there are a few well know or certainly presumable objectives that will bring smiles to the C-suite. Typically, those smiles will occur if the company grows its revenue, improves the team’s morale, or enhances long-term client loyalty. Why? Well, all companies need to continually grow revenue. The second one, team morale, is a bit more subtle. You see, even with the best go-to-market strategy in the world, execution will fail if the team is not behind it; if morale is low, the strategy will fail, so morale matters quite a bit. And client loyalty, that’s key to ensuring the company has revenue as long as possible. That will also help sales focus on bringing in new revenue and both will help improve team morale. Marketing can play a vital role in each of these areas.

You’ve probably heard me talk about the only three KPIs any business function needs, including marketing: 1. contribute to revenue growth in a meaningful way, 2. enhance employee morale and 3. improve long-term customer loyalty. To influence these three KPIs, just like everyone else, marketers have the same three things to work with: people, products and processes. This three-part marketing approach can be quite effective in helping to drive KPIs. As leaders and marketers, we should be looking for ways to motivate our people, develop and take to market innovative products and continually optimizing our processes. If we do, the goal of impacting revenue growth, employee morale and customer loyalty just got a lot easier.

Marketing and Marketers are always vulnerable. No matter what we do, it’s ultimately going to be seen by our peers, employees, clients, and likely the competition. In other words, marketing is unique in all business functions in that it is always at risk. Finance may create spreadsheets and reports that go to the CFO, but these reports are not necessarily sent to all clients, referrals and strategic partners. Sales will pitches a client in the privacy of the conference room and no one knows how it went other than the salesperson and the client. Marketers on the other hand have all their work pushed out for both internal and public display, which may invite compliments or complaints; kudos or trashing. So, marketers need to stay focused on ensuring the maximum impact of their efforts and they can better do that by concentrating their efforts on growing revenue, improving employee morale and enhancing long-term client loyalty. And keep the thick-skin handy; sometimes you will need it.

As Marketers we have so much going on –– websites, collateral development, copywriting, editing, proofing, events, webinars, social media and more. But with all that activity, what’s the goal? I’ve learned over the years to keep a detailed eye on two things: 1. What is the #1 thing that must be accomplished this week. By having a singular goal, likeliness of completion is higher, even with distractions. By having too many goals, we risk not getting any of them completed. And 2. How is what we are doing going to influence the company’s revenue growth, team morale or long-term client loyalty. Even with having the team each focus on their #1 goal for the week, if the overall marketing effort isn’t directly impacting revenue, team morale or client loyalty, there’s something wrong and it’s time to pause and take a second look.