Your Marketing Director's Desk Is A Prison

Call #1: If you're a CEO, President or Managing Partner, call your Director of Marketing's office line three times in the next week.

If she or he picks up the phone, ask the following: What are you doing right now?

Truth is, it makes no difference. If they are at their desk all three times (or even two out of three times), ask yourself why you have a Director of Marketing.  Is it to be your "on call" marketing doer?  If so, then you either need to rethink the person you have in that role or what you expect of that role.  Or both.

As Marketing gets more and more technical, I've seen the role of marketer become more and more of a "desk jockey" position – creating blog posts, finessing SEO, scrubbing webinar lists, and etc.  Important work, no doubt, but is this what you want from a Marketing Director? Let me answer the question for you: No.  Sometimes, yes, but not all the time.

There is much debate about the moment when marketing becomes business development and business development becomes sales.  As well as where the hand-off needs to be for efforts and campaigns.  And there should be that debate.  It's important. So important that I suggest you have a 90 minute strategy meeting on this single point alone.

> On the soccer field, I've seen many coaches tell their defense never to cross the center line.  And for the attackers not to cross it the other way.  In both cases, this seems foolishly limiting to the flow of the game and, often, means there is a gap in both defense and attack.  

However, marketing needs to at least hand off the baton in motion (think relay race) and this requires getting away from their desk and working with both internal and (gasp!) external customers and groups.

Call #2: If you're the CEO, President or Managing Partner, call your Director of Marketing's office line, and ask another question: Which trade groups or associations do you belong to?  (Or use good grammar if you prefer.)

If the answer is "None" or all the groups have the word "Advertising," "Marketing" or "Social Media" in it, then you either need to rethink the person you have in that role or what you expect of that role.  Or both.

If your Marketing lead is a Manager and not a Director, simply search & replace those words in this post.

If your Marketing lead is a Coordinator or Specialist, then you are off the hook.  As far as this post goes, anyway.  You are either just starting up or have bigger issues.

Ain't Talkin', Just Walkin' – Inspiration Comes From Odd Places

Question: Where do you find inspiration for your business development efforts?  

Some people find their motivation from YouTube Videos with soaring music, spacious images and cliches.  And that's fine.

Others find motivation from inspirational case stories such as people who climb mountains with only one leg, recover from tragedy/beat illness, and succeed despite odds that make you embarrassed to complain when the barista puts skim and not soy milk in your latte. And that's fine, too.

Me, many years ago in NYC: "I hate shaving."My roommate: "If you had no hands, you'd be happy to be able to complain about hating shaving." (Even so, I grew a beard.)

For business development, for me, it's a combination of three things:

1) Curiosity.  I meet a new person and I really want to know what they do, how they help others, what sets them and/or their offerings apart, and how they go about letting others know about this stuff.

2) Data.  I kind of get off on listening to folks say "Great work sells itself" and then checking to see the growth of their client base and the number of people they've networked with in the past 90 days, as well as their other business development efforts.  (Hint: doing a good job/having quality products are table stakes, not your business development plan. I have tons of data to prove this.)


Also, I like seeing how opportunities arise - using spreadsheets and forms.  Often, business developers are so sure they know who refers them business and how opportunities appear.  Often their beliefs are anecdotal and the actual metrics do not fully support them, or identify unnoticed veins of opportunity.  This takes effort, but the strategy is about as simple as it gets: Things that work once tend to work again. Things that work twice tend to work over and over again.

When you walk in the gym and suddenly feel tired, how do you steel your heart for the work-out, and even push yourself to do one more rep, one more mile, 100 more calories, ten more pounds?

3) The music in my iPod.  Today, while on the treadmill (since it was too cold for rollerblading), Bob Dylan's "Ain't Talkin', Just Walkin'" came on.  I found this motivational.  Four simple words.  I also like the lines: "Heart burnin', still yearnin'" and "My mule is sick, my horse is blind."  Now the rest of the song isn't very inspiring from a BD perspective, but I do like the idea that Bob Dylan (or the fictional singer of this song) is simply moving forward and not spending time telling people about what he "plans" to do. 

So... from where do you find inspiration for your business development efforts? (Post below if you are so inclined.)  If you don't know, perhaps finding this source would help motivate you to put one foot in front of the other and move forward. 

/talkin'.

But I Licked it First! -or- How to Ensure Prospects Die on the Vine

So here's the situation: One of your sales reps, partners, whatevers meets someone at a networking event. He or she logs the contact in your CRM (which is great), but then the wheels come off. No one else at your organization can even touch that contact or that company. Oh, they can, but they won't.

Why not? Because if anything ever closes from that contact or that company, the person who logged the contact has progenitor, that is, proof he or she was the origin point and, in many situations, gets all the credit and commission – regardless of any effort past the first touch.

"But everyone should advance the lead for the good of the business," you say from your corner suite.

"All I will get is pain and grief if I even go near it," they mumble from their office a floor (or more) below.

--

Why "licked it first?"

You open a box of donuts. There is one Boston Creme donut in there, but Bob quickly leans down and licks it. While many others wants that donut, no one will ever touch it. Why not? Because Bob licked it.

Eventually, the donut goes stale and it's tossed into the garbage.

Sadly, this describes the "origination" policies of many sales & marketing organizations. (And, in my world, every organization is a sales & marketing organization.)

How can you solve the donut problem? Drop a plastic knife into the box. Then people will cut off part of the donut and leave the rest for others.

--

An interesting 'fail.'

Sitting in a meeting (as a consultant), I learned that marketing had "stopped" delivering leads to a specific business developer. Funny, since the marketing team had no knowledge that they had been formerly successful for that individual. No credit was provided to marketing on the BD's reports. No mention that the efforts had led to "over the transom" calls. Not even a "Hey, thanks!" Nothing. Until, of course, the leads stopped arriving. And then, the marketing team was criticized for suddenly being a failure. (How heart warming!)

Now the marketing team knew their efforts were, possibly, indirectly helping that BD guy, since he was doing well on sales and they were promoting his services – but they did not know a specific direct path was working.

Why didn't the BD mention anything before? Because he did not want to lose the commission or have to fight for it. Also note: the marketing team at this organization receives no commission for being part of the success path. None. But the BD guy did not want to lose the leads to a "house" account, or even have to share the kudos, so he said nothing. Who won here? (Considering all the parties and making a mental tally...) No one! And everyone left the meeting annoyed at everyone else.

Who's fault is this? Leadership's for rewarding individual success and punishing teamwork.

So what can be done?

1) Time bombs. Set up a rule that any contact that has no activity for 30, 60, 90, or 180 days is fair game. (Think "fast fish" from Moby Dick ... which I believe I referenced in an earlier post.)

2) Teamwork. Sure, give credit for the original touch, but not 100% credit. What is the right number? The one that gets people to request help from the 'licker' (creating a pursuit team) vs. watching the contact die on the vine.

3) Bonus for growth, not specific sales. Sure, give the 'licker' a spiff for bringing the contact into the fold (after something closes or, at least, after there is a real proposal/contract on the table of course), but also give the other team members a bonus for hitting their larger goals.

4) Psychic rewards for playing nice. Publicly thank the other players, by name, and with some small or non-monetary reward. Too many leaders publicly call out the individual who originally licked the contact or brought the ball over the finish line without even recognizing the blockers or tacklers. Or, perhaps worse, pacifying them with "...and the many other people who helped here..." said right before the bonus check is handed over to the single individual.

A simple question.

Are you creating Bobs that lick the best donuts? ...or are you dropping a plastic knife in the box to promote teamwork?

ROMI and Women's Literature -or- Pretty Fly for a Marketing Guy

Years ago, at college (more years than I plan to say), I was signing up for English classes and I saw, for the first time in my young existence, an elective called Women's Literature. I wasn't sure if it was a literature class for women or a literature class featuring women writers. I wasn't being incendiary, I was trying to understand.

This evolved into a heated debate, with me cast as the villain (a role I am always content to play), about the rationale for this type of class.

• Do they need to lower the bar so enough women writers can hop over?

• Is this so that male chauvinist professors actually consider female writers in their curriculum? This argument doesn't make sense, since small-minded teachers can now let the Women's Lit professors cover those books.

• Are we focusing on literature written from a woman's perspective? And, if so, then why not read books by both genders with similar themes and/or are written in similar places and times? I would very much enjoy reading and discussing, say, Frankenstein and Moby Dick in the same class … and I was sure a literature professor could find hundreds of such pairings.

But this isn't a blog post about Women's Literature classes, so suffice to say that I just didn't understand why we needed a subset of literature called Women's. I still don't, but now have learned not to start this discussion.

Fast Forward to 2011.

In the past two weeks I have heard a great deal of discussion about ROMI (Return On Marketing Investment) and ROMI modeling. And I just don't get it. Why isn't it simply ROI?

• Is ROMI some sort of 'special' ROI to help lower the bar for Marketing efforts?

• Did we need some new buzzword to further confound management now that we can track more and more of our tactics? "I can show you, predictably, how engaged prospects are 15% more likely to become customers, how they will spend 20% more in their first year, the margin on this spend during that period, and exactly what it costs to engage them … but let's instead talk about ROMI."

• Does this make us feel good about ourselves as Marketers?

• Or is this a term used by Marketers that cannot yet figure out how to show value without their trusty mirrors and smoke machines?

Every time I hear ROMI, I think of sports statisticians who (rightly) create coefficients to predict a player's success rates from the farm leagues into the majors. "Sure, they're batting 380 in AAA, but the pitching isn't as strong there, so it's like batting 280 in the majors. Still strong, but let's not get that excited just yet."

I am unsure if ROMI shows a higher percentage figure than ROI or if ROMI-using Marketers have different calculations to find their ROMI score. If the scale is different, then it's not really ROI. If the scale is the same, then why do we need a special term?

An example where a special designation makes sense: Instead of calculating a publication's CPM (Cost Per Thousand), for example, I was taught to calculate CPTM (Targeted). While publication A reaches 200,000 readers, we really only care about 60,000 of those and, perhaps 1/2 care about 40,000 of those, so the CPTM calculation ... based on: $s/sum[60M + (0.5 x 40M)] ... shows the cost of the targeted portion of the readership. Publication B reaches fewer people, but the CPTM might reveal a better buy, even though the CPM is higher. This makes sense, since it actually discounts non-targeted reach.

But ROMI seems to be a buzzword that puts Marketing into a special (read: lesser) class of ROI. "Your ROI is pretty weak compared to the initiatives of other executives here at BigCo, but it's pretty good for a Marketing person. Keep trying, son, and someday you'll make it to the bigs."

In short: If it's ROI, please call it ROI. If it's not, then keep your mouth shut until you can use the "ROI" term without the asterisk.