Thanks to the folks that attended the session, it was a great discussion! It’s been a really good day here in RDU with some really good presentations and I was able to meet some old friends, meet some folks I’ve only known online and meet some folks along the way. Kudos to the RTP organizing committee, a great day!
I’ve been having discussions with a bunch of people lately around what makes a good marketing leader for a project I’ve been working on. Just the other day I met up with a few of folks over coffee and the discussion got really interesting. By interesting, I mean pretty interesting as I started to see patterns in the work I’ve been doing and the things they were saying. The discussion centered on what situations, qualities and activities have made a difference in their careers as marketers.
It was such an interesting discussion, I decided to lead future conversations down this path and drilled down on it with a couple of other folks (marketers and non-marketers) over the last week or so. To that end, here are 5 items which surfaced as key lessons learned/attributes/considerations which help develop good leaders in marketing:
1. Good Marketers Trust Their Teams – One of the critical success factors for marketers is whether they can lead their organization to meet the demands of the market AND the business. To be able to support both, marketing leaders will need to enlist support from every part of the business. Too often marketers and product managers get mired down in trying to drive EVERY component of their products activities in the market and inside the business operationally which isn’t the best approach. Sometimes you need to delegate and trust the experts in each area to do their jobs effectively.
Prioritize what is really important and let the team do their job
2. Marketing doesn’t have ALL the Good Ideas – While decision making isn’t a collaborative process and a person needs to be accountable, too often marketers make decisions in a vacuum. Successful marketers take multiple inputs and decision what is best base on ALL the inputs and sometimes the good ideas just might come from sales, development or another group.
The funny thing about some marketers is that once he/she finds something that works they try it again and again and again — even if it doesn’t work for the current situation or are having diminishing returns on execution. I’ve seen a bunch of marketers say stuff like ‘this worked at X company’ or maybe they provide the ‘you haven’t done marketing’ excuse about why they are pursuing something or why someone elses idea is bad, whatever…. ultimately it doesn’t matter — a good idea is a good idea and you need to pursue those where ever they come from. Good marketers check their egos and preferences at the door when they go into decision mode
3. Nobody really cares about your product: The people that buy your products only care that they solve their problem and that a given vendor understands them. Most buyers think all the product are the just about the same, at least those on the short list.
I’ve worked at a bunch of companies that had killer technology and we walked around touting the tech and dismissing the competitors because their technology sucked, but we were still a rounding error in the market. The other companies had great exits or have grown to have great multiples even with bad technology. What’s that saying? The technology floor is littered with great products which failed or something…”
4. Tell stories: Whether it’s a new product being launched, a legacy product or a new market segment which is being pursued it’s typically the marketer with the best story, not product that succeeds. Product roadmaps, case studies and your prospect presentations are all about telling stories.
I have never won a deal on a feature or even a product, but I’ve lost a bunch due to the fact that I couldn’t get the decision maker convinced that going with my company’s offering over another made better sense in the long run of the relationship. Typically, if my story was more compelling I’ve won the deal – even with an inferior product
5. You have to be willing to do ALL the work: Many marketers come to roles with experience in one market segment or another, some may have even had other functional roles which influence what strategies they pursue and tactics they use. For example, a marketer with a sales background might put all the focus on lead generation since he/she isn’t familiar with or doesn’t like other marketing activities. Another way to put it, even though you hate crunching data/events/finance stuff, you still have to do the data/event/finance stuff so you either get good at it yourself or build a team which has diverse skills to support all aspects of marketing.
When I hire I look to balance my own soft spots and the team in general. I look for a more balanced background in applicants which have had multiple functional roles, this not only rounds them out from a skills perspective, but allows them to understand that building or promoting or selling the product is only one of the critical activities which make products successful in the market which is always a good perspective to have when you are a marketer.”
Discussion Group/Sample Overview
1. CTO*
2. COO
3. Sr Product Manager
4. QA Director**
5. Product Executive (actually his title)
6. SVP, Strategic Marketing
7. Director, Business Development***
*thinks he’s a marketer
**never had a marketing gig, but is really smart and knows a good marketer when he sees one.
***thinks bd is far more difficult than marketing, he might be right in that I know there is far more stress with a quota
Each year we are coming up with market strategies and tactics to help drive new business, but what have you slotted into your strategic plan for the customers you have? At the end of the day, your customers are essentially your best asset for a marketer – typically drive significant annual revenues, provide priceless word of mouth recommendations and provide insights from the market when we engage them. So why is it that many organizations relegate customers to a series of automated tools and process which focus on reducing costs, rather than investing in the relationship in their plans? In fact, if we present anything in our strategy about our customers it’s about reducing costs. So one of the questions I would always ask myself and my team about their strategy plans was: “What Are You Doing to Improve Your Customer Relationships and their Market Understanding?” Not only do I invest in my customers as it relates to the products I sell, I always try to improve their understanding of our shared markets. After all, an educated customer who is invested in the relationship is typically a more profitable one and more loyal.
Know Your Customers and Know Their Industry
As experts in the markets we serve, we often read more, have access to more information and definitely have more discussions with people in the market than our customers do. Much of information gleaned is used to build out our personal understanding of the market or the larger organization, but many of us tend to not share these industry insights and market information with our customers. Not sure why, maybe we are just too focused as marketers to get that next prospect or feel this information is somehow proprietary info. Whatever the reason, the industry analyst calls, market trends and other content we get access to is just the type of information your customer’s want/need to be more competitive in the markets THEY serve. So on some levels both us, as vendors, and them, as customer’s are sorta “all in it together in this shared market”.
Share the Knowledge Your Organization Has
We have all kinds of info we create to do our daily jobs as marketers which could be re-purposed for prospects and customers alike. We gather all kinds of market data – whether it’s usage trends on our SaaS platform by industry, learnings from speaking with customers or the information gleaned from the last analyst call, it’s all potentially interesting for your customers. It takes all of these sources to get a baseline understanding of markets and their problems to get approved projects and build sufficient products. Much of the information we get is not directly related to our products, but rather the markets our customers are in and could help improve our customers’ businesses as well.
Just as we invest in creating content strategies to putting people in the funnel, we also need to invest in creating content which strengthens our relationships with our current customers to maximize retention, so here are 5 ways to better share the information inside your company and help your customers improve their businesses:
5 Ways to Raise YOUR Customers’ IQ
So what is your CRM strategy to raise YOUR customers’ intelligence in 2011?
There are numerous reasons to do research, but hopefully you are pursuing a research initiative to better understand what is happening in the marketplace. To that end, the purpose of researching a market is for understanding, not to prove an idea you have. Ideas should come from your research, but too often marketers go into research mode to prove themselves right, their peers wrong or some other equally as jaundiced purpose. Research is about discovery and of course you frame your research in context of a hypothesis, but too often we develop a research framework that ONLY proves the hypothesis. If our goal is to go to prove a point we might pursue limited inputs, sources, survey samples or other put some other constraint one the effort that proves a concept we want to move forward and just satisfies some corporate mandate to do research as part of your checklist or product approval process.
I personally have done a whole bunch of market research that has proved my original idea wrong and I’m cool with that. The reason I’m cool with putting a bunch of work in is that if I hadn’t I just might have wasted millions of development resources and marketing expense pursuing ego based research, rather than striving to understand market facts. This presentation posits not only the orderly way to structure the effort, but how intangibles are increasingly more important in some markets, ok maybe all markets, which requires us to better understand context and culture in our research activities.
