HOW TO TRAIN MARKETERS PROPERLY
So, one might think as a profession that we have won game, set and match - true? No, sadly those shifting sands are back on the scene. Just when marketers thought it was safe to look down, it's all change again. In the twenty-first century, issues that face marketers as they struggle to shape up to challenges include:
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Pan company marketing - for many of the roles we shall discuss it is increas- ingly necessary for marketers at all levels to engage all internal shareholders, to "buy-in" to activity, and recognise there is a marketing element in all departments' roles, • Measurement metrics - how marketers should track and measure perform- ance, • E-commerce - understanding the language of the IT team to develop Websites and e-CRM, • Knowledge management - what to, and how, to store information, who has access? • Integrated Supply Chain Management - the Web marketer, • Customer Relationship Management/Interface, • Multi-channel activity in the connected economy message and media selection. The reality is that marketing is becoming more holistic. Everyone in the com- pany has to think of themselves as a marketer and consider who their customer is and what they are delivering to them. This results in two essential ingredi- ents in the marketing skill set which were not apparent in the twentieth century: 1. Interpersonal skills - working with different departments and stakeholders. 2, Project management skills - keeping a firm grip on what is happening across brands and divisions. A good way to look at the marketing department of the future is to consider multi-tasked, project focused, functional teams of managers with specific product/service profit responsibility, but also a matrix of specialist skills which will involve relationship building with stakeholders from other departments and even other organisations. Based on this matrix structure, this book will explore elements of the skill sets and core competencies necessary to develop and train employees, in search of the holy grail of marketers:
Internet call back: Allows a customer to request a telephone call from a human agent, at a particular time on a particular number, by clicking on a button on the company's Internet site, This request is added to a queue of similar requests at the call centre. Internet chat: Allows a customer to request an immediate, interactive written exchange with someone in the call centre. Voice over the Net (VON): An audio conversation with a human call centre agent. Internet technology transmits the voice and the Internet pages down the same telephone lines.
Ultimately, effectiveness, whilst partly about building brands, must deliver profit - not TVRs, eyeballs, or any other measure. Advertising efficiency can be defined as the ratio between advertising payback and cost. Some people have said that the Web is no good at building brands. In isolation, as with any medium, it's undoubtedly limited in what it can do. But such a simplistic view overlooks the fact that any interaction with a brand has an impact on a consumer's attitude towards it.
A number of years ago, a large catalog retailer discovered the importance of retaining historical customer behavior data when they first started keeping more than a year ’s worth of history on their catalog mailings and the responses they generated from customers. What they discovered was a segment of customers that only ordered from the catalog at Christmas time. With knowledge of that segment, they had choices as to what to do. They could try to come up with a way to stimulate interest in placing orders the rest of the year. They could improve their overall response rate by not mailing to this seg ment the rest of the year. Without some further experimentation, it is not clear what the right answer is, but without historical data, they would never have known to ask the question. A good data warehouse provides access to the information gleaned from transactional data in a format that is much friendlier than the way it is stored in the operational systems where the data originated. Ideally, data in the warehouse has been gathered from many sources, cleaned, merged, tied to particu lar customers, and summarized in various useful ways. Reality often falls short of this ideal, but the corporate data warehouse is still the most important source of data for analytic customer relationship management.
Seth's Blog
Seth Godin's riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.
A few books for summer reading
29 Jul 2010 at 3:15pm
by Seth Godin
Paco Underhill on women and retail.
Nancy Lublin on learning from causes.
Noah Boyd with an FBI thriller beach read. Better than the last Reacher novel, imho.
And stunningly elegant (and lovely to hold) pottery inspired by some of my work from Lori Koop.
The power of sync
29 Jul 2010 at 5:18am
by Seth Godin
100 people doing something at the same time has far more power than 300 people doing it over time.
We unconsciously amplify the power of coordination when we consider the impact of actions. If there's a thousand people waiting outside of a store, we instantly believe we're seeing a phenomenon.
While the internet makes it easier than ever to spread ideas, it makes it far more compelling to coordinate actions.
If everyone in your weekly meeting drops a pencil at precisely 12:03, you'll notice.
Here comes the paperback Kindle... as promised
28 Jul 2010 at 9:13pm
by Seth Godin
The wifi Kindle, $139. Drop the first digit and you're on to something. And it only took them six weeks!
It's (always) too soon to know for sure
28 Jul 2010 at 5:55am
by Seth Godin
The cost of being first is higher than it's ever been...
It's entirely possible that you're racing.
Racing to the market with a new product or a news story or a decision or an innovation. The race keeps getting faster, doesn't it?
If you're racing, you better figure out what to do about the times that you don't know for sure...because more and more of your inputs are going to be tenuous, speculative and possibly wrong. Day traders have always understood this--all they do is trade on uncertainty. But you, too, if you're racing, are going to have to make decisions on less than perfect information.
Given that fact, what are you going to do about it? I think it's worth a few cycles of your time.
Is it smart to blog on a rumor?
Worth dropping everything and panicking because of a news alert?
Should you hire someone based on information you're not sure of?
What about changing your website (your pricing, your layout...) based on analytics that might not be absolutely correct? How long are you willing to wait?
Given that you will never know everything for sure (unless you're opting out of the race), some of the issues are:
What's the cost of waiting one more day? Are you waiting (or not waiting) because of the cost of being wrong, or because loud people are yelling at you? Is the risk of being wrong unreasonably amplified by part of the market or your team? What if you ignore them and focus on customers that matter? And have you thought about the costs of waiting too long? If you don't, you'll probably end up last.Have you noticed how often stock analysts quoted in the news are wrong? Wrong about new products, wrong about management decisions, wrong about the future of a company? In fact, they're almost always first and almost always wrong.
Rule of thumb: being first helps in the short run. Being a little more right than the masses ultimately pays off in the long run. Being last is the worst of all three.
A few people care a lot about scoops. Most of us, though, care about alert people making insightful decisions. Decide who you're trying to please, then ship.
The problem with unlimited
27 Jul 2010 at 5:12am
by Seth Godin
If you work out on a weight machine that has a limit--where you have to push the bar until it stops--you're far more likely to to hit that limit than if you had left it to your own initiative to figure out how far is far enough.
People enjoy going to the max (or in the case of Spinal Tap, a little farther than max, to 11). But if there is no max, no limit, it's much easier to satisfy yourself and declare that you've done enough.
If you want your best users to do more, one way to do it is to announce the most they can do. While this may dissuade a few people from pushing ever farther, it will in fact motivate a large number of people to up their game.
"The maximum number of times a week you can dine here is three."
"The maximum bonus paid is $100k."
"The maximum number of tweets per day is 30."
Getting unstuck: solving the perfect problem
26 Jul 2010 at 5:51am
by Seth Godin
The only problems you have left are the perfect ones. The imperfect ones, the ones with a clearly evident solution, well, if they were important, you've solved them already.
It's the perfect problems that keep us stuck.
Perfect because they have constraints, unbendable constraints, constraints that keep us trapped. I hate my job, I need this job, there's no way to quit, to get a promotion or to get a new boss, no way to move, my family is in town, etc.
We're human, that's what we do--we erect boundaries, constraints we can't ease, and we get trapped.
Or perhaps it's your product or service or brand. Our factory is only organized to make X, but the market doesn't want X as much, or there is regulation, or a new competitor is now offering X at half the price and the board won't do anything, etc.
There's no way to solve the perfect problem because every solution involves breaking an unbreakable constraint.
And there's your solution.
The way to solve the perfect problem is to make it imperfect. Don't just bend one of the constraints, eliminate it. Shut down the factory. Walk away from the job. Change your product completely. Ignore the board.
If the only alternative is slow and painful failure, the way to get unstuck is to blow up a constraint, deal with the pain and then run forward. Fast.
15% changes everything
25 Jul 2010 at 5:56am
by Seth Godin
When a newspaper loses 15% of its readers or 15% of its advertisers, it goes out of business. There are still people who want to read it, still people who want to advertise, but it's gone.
When a technology company increases its sales by 15%, profits will double. The sales line doesn't have to increase that much for profits to soar.
It's so tempting to head for green fields with a new thing, a new market, a new business. But in fact, 15% right here and right now might be exactly what you need.
Running away vs. running toward
24 Jul 2010 at 5:35am
by Seth Godin
Every brand, every organization and every individual is either running away from something or running toward something (or working hard to stand still).
Are you chasing or being chased? Are you leading or following? Are you fleeing or climbing?
But who will speak for the trees?
23 Jul 2010 at 5:37am
by Seth Godin
Defenders of the status quo at newspapers, book publishers and the magazine industry are in a panic. Some are even misguidedly asking for government regulation or a bailout.
All three industries are doomed (if doomed means that they will be unrecognizable in ten--probably three--years). And yet...
And yet there's no shortage of writing, or things to read. No shortage of news, either. And there doesn't appear to be one on the horizon. In fact, there's more news, more images and more writing available to more people more often than ever before in history.
No, just about all of the whining is about protecting paper, the stuff the ideas are printed on, not the ideas themselves.
It's paper that makes the economics of the newspaper industry work (or not work). It's paper that creates cost and slows things down and generates scarcity. And scarcity is what they sell.
It's paper that makes the book industry what it is. As soon as you remove paper from the equation, the costs change, the timing changes, the barriers to entry change, the risk changes. And defenders of the status quo don't like change.
Is there not enough paper in your life? Why are we wringing our hands about the demise of paper as the economic gating factor for ideas? In fact, some of the trees I know are delighted that we've found a better, faster, cheaper way to spread ideas.
If the demise of paper means that good people doing good work in important industries will have to find faster and better ways to do their jobs, I don't think that's a bad thing.
The art of seduction
22 Jul 2010 at 5:36am
by Seth Godin
Carole Mallory was Norman Mailer's mistress. Seducing him probably wasn't that difficult, though, as he was already on his sixth wife at the time.
Marketers seek to seduce. So do painters, authors and job seekers. The most important thing to understand about seduction is this: it only works when the other person cooperates, contributes and is at some level interested in being seduced.
In short: it's a lot easier to seduce someone whose worldview and attitude makes them open to it. If you want to be successful at whatever form of seduction you have in mind, seek out the right people.
Some people were seduced by the iPad. Many ignored it. It wasn't that the iPad changed from person to person, what changed was the audience's worldview and openness.
And yet...
And yet as marketers we seem to want to treat everyone the same, want to please everyone, want to come up with the magic words that open every heart.
Getting to scale: direct marketing vs. mass market thinking
21 Jul 2010 at 5:24am
by Seth Godin
A mass marketer needs to reach the masses, and to do it in many ways, simultaneously. The mass marketer needs retail outlets and fliers and a website and public relations and tv ads and more more more and then... bam... critical mass is reached and success occurs.
Best Buy is a mass marketer, but so are Microsoft and the Red Cross. Ubiquity, once achieved, brings them revenue, which advances the cycle and they reach scale.
The direct marketer, on the other hand, must get it right in the small. That pitch letter can be tested on 100 houses and if it gets a 2% response rate, then it can be mailed to 100,000 houses with confidence. That business-to-business sales pitch can be honed on one or two or three prospects, and then when it works, can be taught to dozens or hundreds of other salespeople.
The key distinction is when you know it's going to work. The mass marketer doesn't know until the end. The direct marketer knows in the beginning.
The mass marketer is betting on thousands of tiny cues, little clues, and unrecorded (but vital) conversations. The direct marketer is measuring conversion rates from the first day.
That's the reason we often default to acting like mass marketers. We're putting off the day of reckoning, betting on the miracle around the corner, spending our time and energy on the early steps without the downside of admitting failure to the boss.
Of course, just because it's our default doesn't mean it's right. Business to business marketing is almost always better if you treat it like direct marketing. Most websites that do conversion as well. Same with non-profit fundraising. As well as marketing goods and services to the bottom of the pyramid, people who live in villages where mass media and mass distribution are difficult and have little impact.
Get it right for ten people before you rush around scaling up to a thousand. It's far less romantic than spending money at the start, but it's the reliable, proven way to get to scale if you care enough to do the work.
The paradox of promises in the age of word of mouth
20 Jul 2010 at 5:29am
by Seth Godin
Word of mouth is generated by surprise and delight (or anger). This is a function of the difference between what you promise and what you deliver (see clever MBA chart to the right--->).
The thing is, if you promise very little, you don't get a chance to deliver because I'll ignore you. And if you promise too much, you don't get a chance to deliver, because I won't believe you...
Hence the paradox. The more you promise, the less likely you are to achieve delight and the less likely you are to earn the trust to get the gig in the first place. Salespeople often want you to allow them to overpromise, because it gets them through the RFP. Marketers, if they're smart, will push you (the CEO) to underpromise, since that's where the word of mouth is going to come from.
I have worked with someone who is very good at the promising part. She enjoys it. And when the promises don't work out, she's always ready with the perfect excuse. This is a great strategy if you have a regular job and the excuses are really terrific, but if you need internal or external clients, it gets old pretty fast. It certainly doesn't lead to the sort of word of mouth one is eager to encounter.
Surgeons have this problem all the time. They promise a complete, pain-free recovery and work hard to build up a positive expectation, particularly for elective surgery. And the entire time you're in bed, in pain, unable to pee, all you can do is hate on the doctor.
This is one reason why recovering from failure is such a great opportunity. If you or your organization fail and then you pull out all the stops to recover or make good, the expectation/delivery gap is huge. You don't win because you did a good job, you win because you so dramatically exceeded expectations.
The new dynamics of book publishing
19 Jul 2010 at 4:07pm
by Seth Godin
Click to listen
or Download mp3
In May, I did a talk for the Independent Book Publishers (site). The link above gives you a free and slightly abridged recording of the talk, probably of interest if you are focused on how industries are making (or not) the shift to the new rules of a digital age.
Self marketing might be the most important kind
19 Jul 2010 at 5:52am
by Seth Godin
What story do you tell yourself about yourself?
I know that marketers tell stories. We tell them to clients, prospects, bosses, suppliers, partners and voters. If the stories resonate and spread and seduce, then we succeed.
But what about the story you tell yourself?
Do you have an elevator pitch that reminds you that you're a struggling fraud, certain to be caught and destined to fail? Are you marketing a perspective and an attitude of generosity? When you talk to yourself, what do you say? Is anyone listening?
You've learned through experience that frequency works. That minds can be changed. That powerful stories have impact.
I guess, then, the challenge is to use those very same tools on yourself.
Is everything perfect?
18 Jul 2010 at 12:46pm
by Seth Godin
Greetings have traditionally been an acknowledgment of the other person. "I see you." "Hello." "Greetings."
Then, we moved on to, "how are you?" or even, "how's business?"
Recently, though, our performance-obsessed, live-forever society has morphed the greeting into something like, "please list everything going on in your life that isn't as perfect as it should be."
In a business setting, this causes bad prioritization decisions. The owner of the bar says to the manager, "how was the night?" and the response is, "the cash register came up $8 short." Suddenly, there's an urgent problem to be solved. How to replace the eight dollars and who do we fire?
If the question instead had been, "what's up?" (as in literally up) the answer might have been, "well, there's a big party at table 12, another going away party. They've been buying champagne all night. And Mary told me she set a new record for tips. And the new beer we added on tap is..."
Highlighting what's working helps you make that happen more often.
Perfect is overrated. Perfect doesn't scale, either.
I'm not proposing you endorse theft or ignore the bad news. But it's clear that one more going away party on table 12 is going to make up for that one piece of bad news, every time.
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