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The Key Sales and Marketing Word for 2016

September 21, 2015 //
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Want to know what the most important word will be for sales and marketing professionals in 2016?

Engagement.

Well, it’s out there now.

I used to think the key word was ‘resonate’, but that doesn’t go far enough. When what you say resonates with someone, it’s like they’re a string you’ve plucked. You’re on their frequency, to mix a simile and a metaphor. But the string doesn’t vibrate for ever, it fades away, or loses interest and it becomes immovable, in both senses of the word.

No, to succeed we all need to engage our audience. If we work in sales, we have to get our customers engaged so that they will do something with us. If we work in marketing or sales enablement, we also have to engage our sales people, those internal customers who never read an email we send them, or a document we prepare for them. We have to find ways of making them listen and realise that this is what they need, what they have been asking for, what is going to make them more money because they can satisfy more of their customers and prospects.

Sales engagement – and partner engagement for that matter – is a crucially important slice of the pie, but it’s often the slice that gets left to go cold. And no-one likes cold pizza, at least not like they do sizzling warm pizza that engages the senses.

So if engagement is the key word in 2016, what is the key process for us for the rest of this year?

It’s this: the journey to establish and effectively communicate what we have – or what we will need to have – that will truly engage our customer.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

Baggage Handlers

September 16, 2015 //
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I think I’d like to try being a baggage handler. It looks like a fun job, active and physical, if perhaps a little monotonous.

Baggage handlers are a problem for the airlines. Actually, they’re a problem for the airports, but it’s the airlines that feel the problem. Baggage handlers handle baggage onto and off the planes in the full glare of passengers watching from the departure lounges. They are a wonder of economy of physical effort, moving tens of thousands of pounds of luggage every day.

Unfortunately, they also pay scant regard for the contents of bags, and from a customer-oriented point of view this is a problem. I recently spent an idle 20 minutes watching guys loading bags onto a conveyor belt into the plane’s hold. One chap pulls the luggage off the luggage truck, from the top bag down so that each stack falls closer to him, then pivots from the baggage truck 180 degrees behind in and throws each bag onto the belt. Then the chap standing in the door of the hold takes each bag of the belt and launches them left and right over runners in the hold.

The bags take a hell of a beating, to borrow from a well known Norwegian soccer commentator. And that’s just the parts of the process we see plane-side. We don’t see the bags getting onto the trucks outbound and off the trucks inbound. If you don’t have the sturdiest of baggage materials, you risk losing anything that’s remotely brittle or fragile, and that creates a bad impression with the paying punter, at least this one.

I think I’d be a gentler handler if I got the chance. But perhaps I’d be too careful, too slow, too poorly productive, and be relieved of my duties.

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Categories Customers, Marketing

The Single Point of Failure

September 14, 2015 //
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We had a power failure the other day, across parts of where I live in the west of Ireland, perhaps affecting – I’m wildly guessing here – 50 to 60,000 people.

In the old days, an electricity power cut as we called it would be a major inconvenience, since all your appliances would be out, and your lights too, which, if it were winter, would mean cold houses and candles.

These days, especially during the working day, a power cut is a disaster. No electricity means – you’ve guessed it – no Internet. In a place with poor mobile signal, it also means you’re effectively off the grid. I couldn’t even vent my frustration adequately on Twitter, since I was reliant on my signal booster box – powered by electricity – to use my mobile phone.

All of which reminded me of how vulnerable we still are to the single point of failure that is our infrastructure and its systems. When a major travel accident results in thousands of travellers being inconvenienced, who compensates them for that? Similarly, when the power goes, who compensates thousands of paying consumers for the loss of productivity, or the loss of money invested in frozen food which thaws during a prolonged outage?

In the Cold War in the UK, we used to say that the Russians would wait for 2 inches of snow before they invaded; the country would be at a standstill. Our traffic infrastructure was – and still is to a degree – our single point of failure.

It still feels like that these days when the rubber bands and string of our major power infrastructures fail.

All of which leads me onto parallels with work. None of us in my opinion should be a single point of failure at work.

I’ve heard it said that you should try to make yourself indispensable, but that leads some people to become islands of information and jealously protect processes that only they know. I used to work with one such guy in a marketing agency and he was called the Mac Mason. My view is that the best staff are the ones who strive to make themselves dispensable, through leadership and innovation. And if your employers are dumb enough or political enough to make this a reason to get rid of you, then you’re better off out of there, they don’t deserve you.

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales, Technology

Dismantling the 15 Steps of B2B Marketing

September 9, 2015 //
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If you’re a regular recent reader of this blog, you’ll know that I’ve concluded a series of posts on what I term the 15 steps of B2B marketing, a process that can be applied to pretty much any project, plan or period.

Having built up the 15 steps, I now want to break them up a little.

You may feel that your company, project or plan does not warrant such an exhaustive list of steps. You may also feel that it’s possible to get pretty immediate feedback on your tests and that you might even be able to get stuff out there sooner and iterate your offering while you’re already in the market. A sort of ready-fire-aim approach, if you like.

Indeed, lately, many marketers are starting to borrow from software development and start-up methodologies and talk about ‘agile marketing’, or ‘lean marketing’. Taking a lean approach is a bit like taking a slice of your marketing plan and seeing what it tastes like for customers. This early feedback arms you to improve the next few slices in a series of small improvements, rather than one big cascading marketing push at the end of what might be some untested assumptions and homework.

Lean marketing is not a fad, it’s more a response to the reality that the mechanism of the web makes it much easier for you to very quickly get a steer on whether what you’re doing resonates with those whom you want to relieve of some money. For more on this read here.

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

The Fifteenth B2B Marketing Step

September 7, 2015 //
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In our penultimate B2B marketing step, we iterated our plan as we went, testing the results and tweaking our approach accordingly. And so we come to the final B2B marketing step in any marketing project or plan, the fifteenth step in what I call the 15-step B2B marketing process.

This step will come as no surprise to those who follow this blog and remember the series on stages in the buying process or selling process.

Yes, the fifteenth stage in the B2B marketing process is to ‘rinse and repeat’. The fifteenth step is the first step. It’s back to the beginning, following the tried and trusted best practices that led to the successes of the previous plan or business period.

You have fresh battles to wage, new opportunities to milk, new challenges to address. They’ll all benefit from the same methodical approach I’ve outlined.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the fifteen steps, climbing to the peak that was the eighth stage of crafting strategy and getting down the other side to your destination and your objectives. Feel free to share the 15 steps with others, or with anyone who would benefit from them.

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

The Fourteenth B2B Marketing Step

September 4, 2015 //
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OK, you’ve completed all but 2 of your 15 B2B marketing steps to success. You’ve started executing your B2B marketing project or plan, so you’re pretty much there, right?

Wrong!

You need to test early and test often. Review the activities as you execute them and where possible measure as soon as you can. When a reasonable time has elapsed for each activity to flow through your business, measure the return on the activity and enter the actual results in the last few columns of your activity plan, so that you can see how you stack up against your target results. Then, over time, you can fine-tune your future targets with the benefit of hindsight and increasing experience.

Beware – not many companies close the loop. They do a plan for a project or period, execute, maybe measure the results, but they don’t then learn from the misses and incorporate the learnings into the next plan. Make sure you’re not one of the companies that misses, repeatedly.

Review, measure, learn, adjust and execute again. Until you’re done executing.

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

Two Years of Blogging

September 2, 2015 //
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Two years ago today I published my first blog post on ‘Paul Dilger’s blog – Musings on stuff I come into contact with.’ I committed to do 3 posts a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, going out between 7:30 and 8:30 am London/Dublin time, regular as clockwork. It didn’t seem worth the commitment to do one when I felt like it, since that would degenerate into one a month, and pretty soon none a month.

Two years later, and some 300-plus posts later, it’s still going strong, regular as clockwork. I like to think that I’m still true to the values from the early days: mostly sales and marketing stuff, posts that take a maximum of 2-3 minutes to read – rather than 10 seconds or half your morning – and posts that I hope interest and enable people.

It serves as the chief dollop of fresh content for my business web site, but it doesn’t feel like work. I really enjoy writing the posts, and I know the discipline of creating them is good for me.

I hope you enjoy dipping into them as well. Here’s to the next post :-).

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

The Thirteenth B2B Marketing Step

August 31, 2015 //
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The number thirteen. Unlucky for some. But not for you. You’ve done the hard work on your B2B marketing, crafting your strategy, developing a plan for making it happen, working the detail, and getting it approved by your team mates and the powers that be.

Thirteen is a good thing for you.

The thirteenth B2B Marketing Step is execute, executing on your plan for your project or quarter or year. Go do that thing, make it happen! Turn your plan into reality and get it done.

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

The Twelfth B2B Marketing Step

August 28, 2015 //
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In our previous B2B marketing step, we costed out all of our activities to make sure that each activity and the sum of the activities give us a reasonable targeted return on our investment towards achieving our goals. Our plan is ready to go now, or is it?

Not quite. Now we have to socialise the plan among our colleagues, partners and superiors, get feedback, adjust the plan where necessary and get approval to proceed. This is our twelfth B2B marketing step.

Any draft plan will benefit from different view points. Specific subject matter experts and the people we report to can be a valuable sounding board for the plan and help give it more direction and shape.

Make sure you build in time for these iterations before you start to execute the plan. Sometimes the review and approval process can be quick and painless, but it’s usually more drawn out, since you’re eating into the time of other people whose priorities might be different to yours, even if they’re aligned in overall business terms.

Be prepared to make concessions and adjustments to your plan. It’s inevitable; you won’t get it right first time. Be sure to pick your battles and let go what’s less important, while being ready to defend what is important with evidence and numbers.

Once your plan is approved for execution, you’re good to go.

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

The Eleventh B2B Marketing Step

August 26, 2015 //
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In the tenth B2B marketing step we mapped out the specific activities underpinning our marketing strategy to hit our goals. We now have a list of specific measurable things we’re going to do.

We now need to cost them and budget for them. This is the eleventh step.

Many of our activities will have sunk or fixed costs against them. For example, sending an email marketing campaign is a function of the time of the salaried marketing staff to set up, test and send the email, and the cost of the email marketing software, both of which we have already committed to. Each of these costs can be counted as one amount that can be spread over a bunch of activities.

Then there are activities where we need to spend money, such as advertising, events, buying data and the like.

You need to estimate as accurately as you can – without it taking too long and becoming self-defeating – the cost of each activity. Then you can balance it against the return you’re targeting. This will help you see which activities you can’t afford or won’t do because you don’t see the return, and those that look better value than others. A balance of activities will help you spread your risk. Some will crash and burn, some will do OK, and the odd one might go gangbusters.

Totalling up all costs and estimated returns will give you a feel for what kind of return you anticipate from either your project or your marketing team as a whole, including any third parties whom you’re paying for their specialist expertise.

All of this helps you fine-tune your activity list – or seek extra funds – to the point where you’re happy to submit your plan for review.

 

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy
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