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:
|
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.
Frightened, clueless or uninformed?
8 Feb 2010 at 5:57am
by Seth Godin
In the face of significant change and opportunity, people are often one of the three. If you're going to be of assistance, it helps to know which one.
Uninformed people need information and insight in order to figure out what to do next. They are approaching the problem with optimism and calm, but they need to be taught. Uninformed is not a pejorative term, it's a temporary state.
Clueless people don't know what to do and they don't know that they don't know what to do. They don't know the right questions to ask. Giving them instructions is insufficient. First, they need to be sold on what the platform even looks like.
And frightened people will resist any help you can give them, and they will blame you for the stress the change is causing. Scared people like to shoot the messenger. Duck.
The worst kind of frightened person is one with power. Someone in a mob of other frightened people, someone with a gun, someone who is the CEO. When confronted with a scared CEO, time to run. Before someone can change, they have to learn, and before they learn, they have to cease being scared.
One reason so many big ideas come from small organizations is that there is far less fear of change at the top. One mistake board members and shareholders make is that they reward the scared but hyper-confident CEO, instead of calling him on the carpet as he rages at change.
When I first encountered surfing, I was scared of it. It looks cool, but an old guy like me can get hurt. A patient instructor allayed my fears until I was willing to get started. When you first start out, the things you think are important are actually irrelevant, and it's the stuff you don't know is important that gets you thrown into the ocean. Finally, and only then, was I smart enough to actually learn.
I'm bad at surfing now, but at least I know why.
Comfort the frightened, coach the clueless and teach the uninformed.
The least I could do
7 Feb 2010 at 6:35am
by Seth Godin
One way to think about running a successful business is to figure out what the least you can do is, and do that. That's actually what they spent most of my time at business school teaching me.
No sense putting more on that pizza, sending more staff to that event, answering the phone in fewer rings... what's the point? No sense being kind, looking people in the eye, being open or welcoming or grateful. Doing the least acceptable amount is the way to maximize short term profit.
Of course, there's a different strategy, a crazy alternative that seems to work: do the most you can do instead of the least.
Radically overdeliver.
Turns out that this is a cheap and effective marketing technique.
iPad app of my dreams: the digital talking pad
6 Feb 2010 at 11:10am
by Seth Godin
Here's the spec. If you build it and it's great, I'll use it and I'll blog it.
A while ago, I posted about the talking pad and a modern version of it.
I think there's a killer app version of this for the iPad, and I hope someone will build it. The talking pad is an interactive presentation tool for smart people.
Overview
It's a very simple concept: a collection of pages (slides, images, type, let's call them pages) that are easy to navigate in a non-linear way. Along with the standard zoom features, I'd like to be able to write on any of them in real time using my finger. I can also call up, on demand, a calculator or a blank drawing pad.
Creation
I can create the talking pad files on my Mac or on the iPad using a builder app, and sync both ways. The builder is really simple, just the ability to organize pages I create in other apps, with simple navigation, scale and type tools.
Navigation
Instead of it being linear (like Powerpoint or Keynote), the pages are arranged in a grid or checkerboard. From any page, then, I can go back, forward, up or down, and the four diagonals as well. So depending on the conversation I'm having with my audience, my 'next' page can be any of 8.
In addition, the app supports an external monitor. When I'm hooked up to the projector or screen, I see twenty or thirty of my pages in thumbnails on my ipad screen, and I can click any of them to instantly bring that page up on the projector.
In essence, I want to be able to play a presentation the same way some people play jazz piano.
As a prompt, each corner and side of the page can have little keyword reminders, so I can easily remember, for example, that pressing the bottom left corner of the page about dogs will display the page about tigers.
So now, someone asks a question and I can just jump to the slide that answers that question. If I want to circle something or zoom in, I just put my finger on the screen and do that.
Bonuses:
1. the ability to have one of the pages be a web browser with address already loaded, so if I want, without leaving the talking pad app, I can jump to this.
2. the ability to embed links within the pages, so I can actually have a page that points to other pages (this is currently built into keynote and powerpoint, but people don't use it because those programs are so linear). In essence, a page becomes a piano keyboard with each key pointing to another page.
Reporting
The app can keep track of which pages I used the most, and for how long. This is useful in a corporate setting. Imagine that the sales manager dreams up a talking pad file and offers it to 100 salespeople. Every day, when they re-sync, we can see how often the pad was used and which slides got used the most often.
The Killer App
A killer app is a program that all by itself is good enough to justify the price of the hardware. The killer app for the PC was Excel. The killer app for the iPod was iTunes. This is reason enough to pay $500, I think.
PS I've received so much interest in this I've started a wiki on this topic so you can find fellow travelers.
The relentless search for "tell me what to do"
6 Feb 2010 at 5:26am
by Seth Godin
If you've ever hired or managed or taught, you know the feeling.
People are just begging to be told what to do. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think the biggest one is: "If you tell me what to do, the responsibility for the outcome is yours, not mine. I'm safe."
When asked, resist.
Linchpin videos (first in a series)
5 Feb 2010 at 4:47pm
by Seth Godin
We're traveling around, finding interesting people and asking them to riff for a minute or two about what makes someone indispensable. Kicking off the weekly series is Gary Vee. Click the picture to view it. We'll do four for February and see how it goes.
Linchpin: GaryVee from Seth Godin on Vimeo.
Shiny objects
5 Feb 2010 at 5:38am
by Seth Godin
If you're a hunter, are you wasting your gift chasing shiny but ultimately worthless objects?
And if you're a farmer, are you wasting your resources by planting and nurturing a crop that's fashionable but without real value?
It might be fun to win a Grammy or dominate your category in terms of market share, but what's it worth if it doesn't support the actual goal?
Marketing is more powerful than ever. We have more leverage than ever before. Which makes picking your milestones and your goals more critical than it has ever been.
What's expected vs. what's amazing
4 Feb 2010 at 5:22am
by Seth Godin
I visited a favorite restaurant last week, a place that, alas, I hadn't been to in months. The waiter remembered that I don't like cilantro. Unasked, she brought it up. Incredible. This was uncalled for, unnecessary and totally delightful.
Scott Adams writes about the cyborg tool that is coming momentarily, a device that will remember names, find connections, bring all sorts of external data to us the moment we meet someone. "Oh, Bob, sure, that's the guy who's friends with Tracy... and Tim just tweeted about him a few minutes ago."
The first time someone does this to you in conversation (no matter how subtly), you're going to be blown away and flabbergasted. The tenth time, it'll be ordinary, and the 20th, boring.
Hotels used to get a lot of mileage out of remembering what you liked, but it was merely a database trick, not emotional labor on the part of the staff.
Today, if you go to an important meeting and the other people haven't bothered to Google you and your company, it's practically an offense. We're about to spend an hour together and you couldn't be bothered to look me up? It's expected, no longer amazing.
On the other hand, consider Dolores, a clerk with kidney problems at a 7 Eleven, who broke all sorts of coffee sales records because she remembered the name of every customer who came in every morning. Unexpected and amazing.
You can raise the bar or you can wait for others to raise it, but it's getting raised regardless.
[Irrelevant aside: Linchpin made the New York Times bestseller list yesterday. The list is hand tweaked, unreliable and often wrong, but it's still a great thing to have happen the first week a book is out. Thank you to each of you who pitched in and spread the word. Unexpected and amazing, both.]
Hunters and Farmers
3 Feb 2010 at 5:31am
by Seth Godin
10,000 years ago, civilization forked. Farming was invented and the way many people spent their time was changed forever.
Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.
It's not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills. Thom Hartmann has written extensively on this. He points out that medicating kids who might be better at hunting so that they can sit quietly in a school designed to teach farming doesn't make a lot of sense.
A kid who has innate hunting skills is easily distracted, because noticing small movements in the brush is exactly what you'd need to do if you were hunting. Scan and scan and pounce. That same kid is able to drop everything and focus like a laser--for a while--if it's urgent. The farming kid, on the other hand, is particularly good at tilling the fields of endless homework problems, each a bit like the other. Just don't ask him to change gears instantly.
Marketers confuse the two groups. Are you selling a product that helps farmers... and hoping that hunters will buy it? How do you expect that people will discover your product, or believe that it will help them? The woman who reads each issue of Vogue, hurrying through the pages then clicking over to Zappos to overnight order the latest styles--she's hunting. Contrast this to the CTO who spends six months issuing RFPs to buy a PBX that was last updated three years ago... she's farming.
Both groups are worthy, both groups are profitable. But each group is very different from the other, and I think we need to consider teaching, hiring and marketing to these groups in completely different ways. I'm not sure if there's a genetic component or if this is merely a convenient grouping of people's personas. All I know is that it often explains a lot about behavior (including mine).
Some ways to think about this:
George Clooney (in Up in the Air) and James Bond are both fictional hunters. Give them a desk job and they freak out. Farmers don't dislike technology. They dislike failure. Technology that works is a boon. Hunters are in sync with Google, a hunting site, farmers like Facebook. When you promote a first-rate hunting salesperson to internal sales management, be prepared for failure. Farmers prefer productive meetings, hunters want to simply try stuff and see what happens. Warren Buffet is a farmer. So is Bill Gates. Mark Cuban is a hunter. Hunters want a high-stakes mission, farmers want to avoid epic failure. Trade shows are designed to entrance hunters, yet all too often, the booths are staffed with farmers. The last hundred years of our economy favored smart farmers. It seems as though the next hundred are going to belong to the persistent hunters able to stick with it for the long haul. A hunter will often buy something merely because it is difficult to acquire. One of the paradoxes of venture capital is that it takes a hunter to get the investment and a farmer to patiently make the business work. A farmer often relies on other farmers in her peer group to be sure a purchase is riskless. Who are you hiring? Competing against? Teaching?Free inspiration and insight
2 Feb 2010 at 5:22pm
by Seth Godin
The Lemonade movie is so professional, engaging and inspiring that you've probably already seen it. If not, here it is.
Todd Sattersten has written a free ebook about pricing that's well worth the time it takes to review. It will change the way you think about pricing.
And if you can, take a look at this poetry video from Gabrielle Bouliane. She left us a very powerful message before she left. It might change your life. (Thanks Paul).
Who will save us?
2 Feb 2010 at 5:57am
by Seth Godin
Who will save book publishing?
What will save the newspapers?
What means 'save'?
If by save you mean, "what will keep things just as they are?" then the answer is nothing will. It's over.
If by save you mean, "who will keep the jobs of the pressmen and the delivery guys and the squadrons of accountants and box makers and transshippers and bookstore buyers and assistant editors and coffee boys," then the answer is still nothing will. Not the Kindle, not the iPad, not an act of Congress.
We need to get past this idea of saving, because the status quo is leaving the building, and quickly. Not just in print of course, but in your industry too.
If you want to know who will save the joy of reading something funny, or the leverage of acting on fresh news or the importance of allowing yourself to be changed by something in a book, then don't worry. It doesn't need saving. In fact, this is the moment when we can figure out how to increase those benefits by a factor of ten, precisely because we don't have to spend a lot of resources on the saving part.
Every revolution destroys the average middle first and most savagely.
Modern procrastination
1 Feb 2010 at 6:11am
by Seth Godin
The lizard brain adores a deadline that slips, an item that doesn't ship and most of all, busywork.
These represent safety, because if you don't challenge the status quo, you can't be made fun of, can't fail, can't be laughed at. And so the resistance looks for ways to appear busy while not actually doing anything.
I'd like to posit that for idea workers, misusing Twitter, Facebook and various forms of digital networking are the ultimate expression of procrastination. You can be busy, very busy, forever. The more you do, the longer the queue gets. The bigger your circle, the more connections are available.
Laziness in a white collar job has nothing to do with avoiding hard physical labor. ?Who wants to help me move this box!? Instead, it has to do with avoiding difficult (and apparently risky) intellectual labor.
"Honey, how was your day?"
"Oh, I was busy, incredibly busy."
"I get that you were busy. But did you do anything important?"
Busy does not equal important. Measured doesn't mean mattered.
When the resistance pushes you to do the quick reaction, the instant message, the 'ping-are-you-still-there', perhaps it pays to push in precisely the opposite direction. Perhaps it's time for the blank sheet of paper, the cancellation of a long-time money loser, the difficult conversation, the creative breakthrough...
Or you could check your email.
Random rules for ideas worth spreading
31 Jan 2010 at 6:12am
by Seth Godin
If you've got an idea worth spreading, I hope you'll consider this random assortment of rules. Like all rules, some are made to be broken, but still...
You can name your idea anything you like, but a google-friendly name is always better than one that isn't. Don't plan on appearing on a reality show as the best way to launch your idea. Waiting for inspiration is another way of saying that you're stalling. You don't wait for inspiration, you command it to appear. Don't poll your friends. It's your art, not an election. Never pay a non-lawyer who promises to get you a patent. Avoid powerful people. Great ideas aren't anointed, they spread through a groundswell of support. Spamming strangers doesn't work. Spamming friends doesn't work so well either, but it's certainly better than spamming strangers. The hard part is finishing, so enjoy the starting part. Powerful organizations adore the status quo, so expect no help from them if your idea challenges the very thing they adore. Figure out how long your idea will take to spread, and multiply by 4. Be prepared for the Dip. Seek out apostles, not partners. People who benefit from spreading your idea, not people who need to own it. Keep your overhead low and don't quit your day job until your idea can absorb your time. Think big. Bigger than that. Are you a serial idea-starting person? If so, what can you change to end that cycle? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person. Try not to confuse confidence with delusion. Prefer dry, useful but dull ideas to consumer-friendly 'I would buy that' sort of things. A lot less competition and a lot more upside in the long run. Pick a budget. Pick a ship date. Honor both. Don't ignore either. No slippage, no overruns. Surround yourself with encouraging voices and incisive critics. It's okay if they're not the same people. Ignore both camps on occasion. Be grateful. Rise up to the opportunity, and do the idea justice.Upcoming events
30 Jan 2010 at 7:10pm
by Seth Godin
I'm thrilled to invite you to a killer evening with the brilliant Steven Pressfield (and me, it's a tag team) at Borders Columbus Circle in New York on Monday, February 8th at 7 pm. It's free but space is pretty limited. First come, first served.
I'll be in Orange County on February 11th.
Utah on February 12th. No head shaving this trip, I promise.
I'll also be in Toronto on March 2nd. Say hi if you can.
Chicago, March 24th.
I'll be in Belgium on April 1st. I don't get to Belgium ever, so here's your big chance.
Ogori (and generosity)
30 Jan 2010 at 5:59am
by Seth Godin
PSFK writes about a cafe in Japan with a simple rule: you get what the person before you ordered (and paid for), and the next person gets what you ordered.
Take a few moments to think about that.
Would you go?
What would you order?
Is this an opportunity to give or an opportunity to take...
I think we have Ogori opportunities daily.
Strangers, Critics, Friends or Fans
29 Jan 2010 at 5:59am
by Seth Godin
The work you do when you spread the word or run an ad or invent a policy is likely aimed at one of these four groups.
Strangers are customers to be, but not yet Critics are those that would speak ill of you, or need to be converted Friends are those that might have given permission, or even buy now and then Fans are members of your tribe, supporters and insidersYou already know the truth: can't please all these groups at once. And you also probably realize that each of us with an idea to spread has a knee jerk default, the one we lean to without thinking. Many marketers are evangelical, focused on strangers at all costs... they'd rather convert a new customer than revisit an old one. A cubicle worker, on the other hand, might focus on no one but the boss, at the expense of broadening her platform.
Before you launch anything, run down the list. How can you optimize for the group you truly care about? How much is that optimization worth? (Hint: a new true fan is worth a thousand times as much as a slightly mollified critic).
Newsfeed display by CaRP