Category: Marketing Teams

Building and managing high-performing marketing teams. Org design, culture, collaboration, and practical advice on creating resilient, skilled teams that deliver growth.

  • Focus on quality – lessons from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

    Focus on quality – lessons from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

    Introduction

    What is “quality” content?

    If you’ve ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, you’ll know his reflections on craftsmanship go far beyond fixing bikes. As he wrote:

    “[In a craftsman], the material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind’s at rest at the same time as the material is right… The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of a religious worshipper or love. The daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.”

    So what does this have to do with marketing B2B software? Everything. Quality content doesn’t just appear—it’s the product of care, thought, and a refusal to cut corners. And in a world where ChatGPT and Gemini can churn out endless filler, the question is: how do we balance speed with true understanding?


    1. Quality comes from craftsmanship, not shortcuts

    Pirsig’s idea of quality begins with the mindset of a craftsman: someone who approaches their work as an act of care. Marketing is not so different. It’s easy to produce “good enough” content that ticks the boxes—an SEO-friendly headline, a keyword-laden body, and a quick conclusion. But “good enough” rarely makes an impact.

    Craftsmanship in marketing means paying attention to the details that others overlook. It’s about making sure the story fits the audience, the examples resonate, and the argument stands up to scrutiny. That effort creates trust with your audience.

    Shortcuts, by contrast, show through quickly. Readers can tell when a piece was rushed or when it lacks real understanding. In B2B, where buying cycles are long and decisions are complex, that kind of shortcut can erode credibility.


    2. It’s about how you conduct yourself to get the right results

    Content is at the core of almost every marketing role. But while output matters, how you go about producing it matters even more. The process you follow—whether you take time to think, reflect, and refine—directly affects the quality of what you publish.

    This isn’t about perfectionism. Few teams have the luxury of unlimited time, and deadlines are real. Instead, it’s about finding the balance between speed and depth. Are you creating something your company can stand behind, or are you cutting corners for the sake of throughput?

    The companies that consistently build trust with their audiences are the ones that find this balance. They know that content is not just a task to be completed, but a reflection of their brand, their people, and their standards.


    3. AI tools can’t replace real understanding

    Many marketing teams are now experimenting with ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI writing assistants. At first, it seems like a time-saver. You can generate an outline, expand bullet points into paragraphs, even draft an entire blog in minutes.

    But there’s a problem. If you rely entirely on AI, you end up with content that looks right but lacks depth. It’s the equivalent of a student handing in an essay written by someone else: the words are there, but the understanding is missing. Readers pick up on that lack of authenticity quickly.

    I know this from experience. I once tried using ChatGPT to write content as an experiment. On the surface, it looked fine. But the work felt hollow, and I learned nothing from the process. I decided never again—because without understanding, content has no foundation.


    4. Real learning builds pride in your work

    A better approach is to use AI sparingly—as a support, not a substitute—and to invest in real learning. Recently, I needed to use Docker to isolate two jobs running in Linux. I could have relied on ChatGPT prompts like: “Use Docker to create 2 new environments for me.”

    The AI gave me fragments of an answer, but nothing that built my understanding. I didn’t know why containers worked, what the benefits were, or how environments could communicate. If I had stopped there, I would have had a shallow solution—and no ability to troubleshoot later.

    Instead, I worked it out for myself, guided by Pirsig’s principle of focusing on quality. I learned enough to understand how Docker really worked, and I felt a sense of pride in the result. That pride matters—it creates confidence in your own expertise, and it shows through in the content you create.


    5. Human insight will always beat AI slop

    Ultimately, content written with care—by fallible, thoughtful humans—will always outperform what I call “AI slop.” Audiences crave originality, perspective, and voice. These are things that AI, for all its power, cannot truly replicate.

    There’s also a practical point. Every AI query consumes processing power and energy. By doing the thinking yourself, you save not just your credibility but also resources. It’s a small act of responsibility in a world increasingly flooded with machine-generated text.

    Quality content comes from insight, not automation. It comes from asking the right questions, reflecting on your experiences, and presenting ideas in a way that matters to your audience. That’s why, even as AI becomes more common, human-centered quality will continue to stand out.


    Conclusion

    In marketing, as in Pirsig’s philosophy, quality is not just about the output but about the mindset of the person creating it. AI can be a useful tool for sparking ideas, but it can’t replace the depth of insight you gain from doing the hard work yourself.

    Writing content that matters takes time, thought, and pride. It’s about more than hitting publish—it’s about understanding your craft well enough to stand behind it. That’s the kind of content that will always stand out from the noise.

    For more on this idea of quality in work, see:


  • A Checklist for Scaling from SMBs to the Enterprise

    A Checklist for Scaling from SMBs to the Enterprise

    If you’re growing a SaaS company, there often comes a moment when success with SMBs isn’t enough. You’re ready to move upmarket. But selling to larger organisations requires more than just a bigger sales target – it means changing how you think about customers, teams, tools, and messaging.

    Here’s a straightforward checklist, based on what I’ve seen work, to help you scale from SMBs to enterprise.

    1. Hire a Sales Team That Can Sell to Committees

    You can’t grow into the enterprise if your sales team isn’t ready for it. Selling to one or two decision-makers in a small company is very different from selling into a team of senior stakeholders with complex buying processes. Even if your organisation is small, make sure you have at least one or two people who can manage enterprise deals properly – structured sales approach, strong qualification, and an ability to drive deals forward across a buying group.

    2. Redefine Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

    In the early days, your ICP might’ve been simple: one end-user, one pain point. That changes when you move into larger organisations. Now you need to understand who your senior decision-makers are – IT, Finance, Operations—and what matters to them. And you still need to win over the end-users. Most enterprise deals depend on both.

    3. Understand Why Your Product Solves Their Problems (What is the “Job to be Done”)

    Enterprise buyers won’t connect the dots for you. It’s not enough that your product worked well for a team lead at an SMB. You need to be clear about which problems your target stakeholders are trying to solve, and why your product is the right solution. This takes more than just positioning work – it takes real insight from customer conversations and a solid understanding of the world they operate in.

    4. Build a Target Account List

    You need a focused list of the right organisations to go after. Use data — firmographics, technographics, and any buying signals you can get hold of. If you’ve already got larger organisations using your product, even in a limited way, start there. Prioritise warm accounts.

    5. Set Up Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

    You’ll need marketers who can work alongside sales and run targeted campaigns for specific accounts. Whether it’s one-to-one or one-to-few, the key is relevance and coordination. This isn’t cheap or quick to build – but it’s essential.

    6. Align Sales and Marketing at the Frontline

    If sales and marketing aren’t working from the same account list, or aren’t aligned on messaging and strategy, things break down. Bring in BDRs and SDRs who can work directly with field marketers. Shared goals, shared plans.

    7. Build the Right Tech Stack

    You’ll need the basics: a good CRM (usually Salesforce) and a solid marketing automation platform (like HubSpot). On top of that, I recommend:

    These help you run coordinated outreach and target the right accounts at the right time.

    8. Revisit Pricing and Packaging

    Your pricing needs to match how enterprises buy. That’s not just about the number—it’s about the model. Whether you go per-user, per-transaction, annual or monthly—make sure your pricing is clear and credible. If pricing becomes a point of confusion, you’ll lose momentum. Tools like ProfitWell can help here.

    9. Build Out Case Studies and Thought Leadership

    If you’re not already the market leader, your content needs to show that you understand the market better than anyone else. That means writing clearly about customer problems and how to solve them. Get case studies from the best-known companies you’ve already worked with – even if the deals were small.

    10. Don’t Forget PR and Analyst Relations

    Enterprise buyers do their research. That includes the press, analyst reports, and third-party content. Make sure your message shows up in the places they look.


    If you’re moving from SMB to enterprise, I’ve created a detailed checklist in the Resources section.

    📩 ben@bjrees.com
    🌐 www.bjrees.com


  • Why company culture is so important in marketing

    Why company culture is so important in marketing

    Culture eats strategy for breakfast

    Such a well known quote, it barely needs a reference (but I will do anyway – it’s Peter Drucker).

    One of my side projects is an attempt at taking all of my own knowledge from the last few years of marketing and putting them into an AI model. One of the issues with a platform like ChatGPT is that it will give you answers based on “What the world thinks”. For 95% of cases this is great of course – if you want to know the capital of France, you want the consensus, not an opinion. But these models don’t reflect the more difficult parts of marketing, the knowledge gained at the coalface of trying out real campaigns and seeing them fail or win – the things that make you stand out from your competitors.

    As an example I have recorded short posted a short video below of what my own personal AI tells me about company culture. This is based on years of notes on marketing strategy and so genuinely reflects my view rather than perhaps a more generic outlook.

    I also believe this is an important part of marketing. If you are saying the same as everybody else in your marketing then no one will read it. Why would they? You need to present an opinion.

    I work at https://www.syskit.com/, and I have spent the last few weeks trying to figure out why things are going so well for performance of the company. You can look at charts, you can create models but somehow they don’t quite give you the answer. The one thing I keep coming back to is the culture. A culture of openness, mutual support, great people and, the secret sauce – far fewer meetings – has created a culture where great work can be done and enjoyed. I listened to a great program this week on workplace culture which I could more or less summarise as “Fewer meetings” 🙂


  • What makes a great company culture?

    What makes a great company culture?

    A Year at Syskit

    This is a personal view. All I can write about is what I find to be a great culture, and I know others will have a very different point of view.

    And I definitely have it in my employer, Syskit. I have been lucky to work at some great companies (and some not so great companies…). But for some very specific reasons I believe Syskit to be at the top of that group. I have now been there for a full year so I wanted to do a quick review of why it’s so good, in no particular order.

    Fewer meetings

    As a company grows it gets more and more difficult to keep to a common path and collaborate effectively across so many different people.

    The answer to this problem is most definitely not having more meetings though. At first look, this seems like a good response. We all want to keep in sync with each other we’re struggling working remotely (if this is the case). Why not put in some regular weekly meetings or “catch-ups” to achieve that?

    From my experience, a great company culture needs as little time as possible in meetings. Why? First of all the obvious – nobody likes meetings! But there is something more subtle. There are some very important meetings that are needed for a company to run and those should be kept. What I believe should be lost, and what I see in great companies is the removal of “catch-ups” and other weekly meetings. My starting point with all of my colleagues is that I trust them all and know that they know their jobs. Why then do I need a meeting to check in? What information is actually being communicated, that couldn’t be sent in an email?

    At Syskit, I have now managed to get my weekly meetings down to about 4 or 5 per week. Most days, I have days with absolutely no meetings at all. Crucial to a well run company because it frees up your time for more impactful deep work. Looking back at the times when I have made big strategic changes or fixed really knotty problems they are always on days which are completely free. This is why I protect them so closely.

    Crucially, this is the culture at Syskit and it fits me very well 😊

    Informality

    It is hard to explain why this is so important to me and it’s not just a “work thing”. It is important to have structures and models in the workplace, but that doesn’t mean to say we need a culture of formality. I can genuinely say that I enjoy the company of my colleagues, that we chat about things other than work, and that we “get on”.

    My test for this is always:

    “If you were told that you were going to be stuck on a three hour train journey with a colleague with no books or phones, how would you feel about that?”.

    I believe this tells you a lot about whether you are on the same wavelength as your colleagues and for me informality is very important. We are not doing God’s work here (as an old boss put it), and I believe informality is a crucial part of any culture of smart people.

    A great product

    Why should this matter when we are talking about culture? Surely a great product is just about your company’s commercial viability?

    I think it is a lot more than that. You want to believe that you are genuinely creating something great. You might not be saving the world with your product, but you should be proud of it and for me, that is a really important part of company culture.

    Again, I have a test for this:

    “Would I recommend this product to a friend? I mean, a “non-work” friend?”

    I have worked at places where I wouldn’t recommend the company’s product to my friends, and that is fine. But I would recommend Syskit’s product to friends (who happen to be Microsoft 365 administrators! – that’s not all of them 😊), and that means that there is an honesty about the work which I think is important.

    This is strongly related to another point which is a focus on the numbers. Is the company hitting its targets?

    Again, why does this matter when we are talking about culture? Personally, I much prefer conversations in the workplace which are about customers, the product and whether the company is doing well. I find this more interesting than conversations about HR policy, organisation, and holiday entitlement.

    So what I like in a workplace is spending time talking about the commercials and driving the success of the company. It is only the numbers that show whether you are succeeding in your role and again, that is part of the culture.

    Expertise

    Again, a strange one perhaps. But I would argue in marketing in particular, that there is a very wide range in expertise in the market. Marketing well is very difficult. It is subtle, complex, often unintuitive and I would argue that B2B are marketing is just a completely different field to B2C. Budget allocation is difficult; explaining what you are doing to non marketers is difficult; getting alignment between marketing and other areas is difficult; focusing on three things instead of 30 is difficult. And getting into the minds of customers is the most difficult thing of all.

    Working with other experts and experienced people is crucial for me and I believe crucial for the success of any company. If you are working with people who think that marketing is just about optimising some Google ads then I believe you might struggle to grow in that environment.

    All of this is why I think expertise in a company is crucial to the culture. You need to be having intelligent conversations with people about tricky problems and personally, that is what I enjoy most about it.

    If any of this sounds even remotely interesting and you are looking for a new role in any field – marketing, development, product, sales – then reach out to me through LinkedIn and let’s talk.

  • How to conduct customer interviews

    How to conduct customer interviews

    I’ve created a new guide on how to run a customer interview tour. Download from below:


  • Remove meetings to achieve true flow

    Remove meetings to achieve true flow

    It’s been a great first few weeks at Syskit. I’ve really enjoyed it, and I’ve loved meeting the team. But more than this, I can directly see why the company is going to keep growing at an even faster pace than it has so far.

    Why? Is it the product? Is it the strategy? The market? Yes to all of these, but more than that it’s the culture of the company. It’s an open, communicative organisation with the right mix of autonomy and alignment.

    Even more than that though, the biggest strength I found is simply the lack of meetings! I’ve seen both sides over the years – places with multiple half-hour meetings every day and now Syskit where my calendar is pretty empty. The reason I think this is so strong strategically is that by freeing up people, up it gives them the chance to actually do the work and make a real impact. It’s a strategic decision because you pay a price of losing constant comms and interaction. But the payoff is worth it – multiple days in “flow“, feeling that you’re making significant progress on important tasks. I see more clearly now how time slicing is a killer for productivity and I would struggle to go back to that approach!

    With that, in mind, I’d better get back to it…


  • Speed

    Speed

    I’ve worked on projects where there has been a tenfold difference in the productivity of the teams. Specifically, given a piece of work like “Let’s build a new campaign” or “Let’s redesign the homepage”, I’ve seen the same team size do that in one week or in 10 weeks. What was that difference? Specific processes? Using a standard framework? Project management approach? How do you create a culture of speed?

    I don’t think so. From what I’ve seen over the years it’s something quite specific – a culture of trust and honesty – which then indirectly leads to much faster output. 

    I believe a high trust/honest culture has the following traits:

    • (almost) no meetings. The only meetings you should be having are celebratory – celebrating a new release or a deal closing. Why? Firstly, the obvious, almost everybody hates them! Most meetings are run on the HIPPO principle, which almost everyone dislikes. But why does it slow the business down? Because it delays decision making. Too many times I hear the phrase “That sounds like a problem, let’s put it on the agenda for our weekly meeting”. When you do this you’ve immediately slowed the whole project down by a number of days if not weeks. If you’re not at the meeting where thing X is being decided, then maybe you don’t need to be there. Trust your colleagues that the right decisions are being made. Trust that they understand your needs and you don’t need to spend your valuable time “Keeping an eye on things”.
    • Move fast and break things. Coincidentally, this week I’ve seen two errors from very well known organisations I suspect because they’re moving fast:

    • But crucially, I don’t think they’re moving too fast. I think it’s good that mistakes are being made because it shows a certain approach, that you are trying to get things to your customers as soon as possible. Note this is a strategic decision because there is a very plausible alternative (spend time and effort making everything perfect – the Apple approach). What’s this got to do with trust and honesty? You trust that when others make mistakes it was with the best of intentions. Trying to get things out trying to help customers is not being careless.
    • Proactively telling people about your mistakes. It takes some courage at first, but your colleagues will respect you more if you get in front of your mistakes first. Very difficult to do when you first start at a company. but worth the perseverance.
    • Sharing your work and results. if you can stand up in front of your colleagues, tell them how well you and your team have done, tell them what you did wrong and share all of the data (the good, the bad and the ugly), and be open to where you still need to do better – then you’re showing maturity as a leader, exactly the sort of thing that a good company will be looking for. Again this speeds everything up because you don’t need the endless one to ones. Everyone sees the same info, everybody knows what’s going on so you obviate the need for lots of half hour “catch-up” meetings killing your diary.

    These are all great things, but how do they save you time? They save you and everybody else time because you preempt the endless back and forth debating ideas and suggestions. “Perhaps this person knows what she’s doing, perhaps we should give her idea a shot before we shoot it down!”. That way you can go from idea to trial to implementation in a week rather than going round and round trying to decide something when frankly nobody has the answers. 

    But really the true advantage in terms of speed is the possibility of getting into a flow therefore getting through a higher volume of work. The book “Deep Work” by Cal Newport has been very influential on me. You need 4 to 8 hour blocks without interruption so that you can really get your head into a problem, to do significant and valuable work. I’d go even further and say the most valuable work I’ve ever done is when I’ve had multiple days free to remove myself from the day to day and create something significant. And that’s something we all want to do.

    Click here to find out more.


  • Have a plan. But double down on what’s working

    Have a plan. But double down on what’s working

    There are always too many things to do running a marketing department. The essence of your job as a marketing leader is making strategic choices about where to double down and where to pause. This is what makes the job both interesting and difficult.

    Below I’ve provided a scorecard that I’ve used many times in the past. It comes from the great Gabe Larsen, someone that I’ve followed for years on Linkedin, and I’d urge you to do the same.

    This is just a example of his scorecard with some semi random numbers filled in. These are the scores that you give yourself and your department to show where there needs to be improvement and where everything is “just fine”.

    An obvious first point – be honest. This is something for internal use only (as I say, the example above is semi-random). If you publish something like this to a wider group then there’s a risk you’re creating a problem for yourself (“I thought you said we were great on social media. It says here we’re hopeless!”). It takes a growth mindset to use this sort of thing really effectively. As always, fix the culture first.

    So once you get over the cultural and communication issues, the very next question is “So what? What do I do with this?”. To quote a friend:

    Eight out of 10 ideas are bad ideas. So the worst thing you can do is try to do everything. you’ll just burn everybody out. The “OK” thing you can do is to do nothing. At least you’re not burning everybody out. But of course the skill is choosing the right two things to take forward.

    What I like about this scorecard approach, is that it gives you the superset of all the things you could do which forces you to consider them. In the example above, the marketing leader has proactively decided to not do any business development work at all. That’s not because she just doesn’t have time or doesn’t know anything about it. It’s a proactive decision that this isn’t something that will move the needle. Crucially, this frees up time to double down on something else. And that’s how you move from being a tactical marketer to a strategic marketer.


  • Strategic marketing – knowing where to place your bets

    Strategic marketing – knowing where to place your bets

    Strategy is about making choices. If you’re not stopping some activities or choosing to not do something then you’re not being strategic.

    Easy to say, less easy to implement, particularly when the organisation wants “More leads, more leads, more leads!”. How do you say “I want to do less”?

    Almost everything in the world of strategy can be shown in a 2×2! I use the following simple model to help me decide what I need to stop doing and what I need to start doing more. It categorises activities into one of four groups:


    Opportunities (top left)

    The Spanish Prisoner
    “The Spanish prisoner”

    The place where 90% of the discussion takes place. What else can we do? What are we missing? What new things can we do to fill the gap?

    There’s a good reason why most time is spent here. Most earlier stage companies are in an aggressive growth phase – they’re not yet trying to cut costs and optimise the organisation. They just need to grow by any means. And this generally gets translated into “What new things can we do?”.

    But you only have finite resources. Given that most new activities don’t work, the skill is in choosing the right things and I’d argue that’s the difference between success and failure; between good leadership and poor. It’s better to do nothing at all than everything! At least you’ll still have a team at the end of the endeavour.

    Secret Sauce (top right)

    “Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce”

    These are the things that are working for you right now and making you money. Be very careful before you start reducing effort here, particularly if you’re not sure. For example, it may be that there are a number of review sites that are writing rave reviews about your offering. You may be completely oblivious to this but you’ll know soon enough if the product quality goes down and the reviews start getting worse. And by then it might be too late to stop the decline.

    The difficulty is being very honest about why customers buy or don’t. You may wish for example, that it’s because you have the greatest user experience on the market. But that might not be true! It might be that 80% of your sales have come through simple reliability, perhaps for quite a dull product. Not much fun, but if you move resource away from the wrong team It might be hard to get that good reputation back.

    The Past (bottom right)

    Knight, death and the devil
    “Knight, death and the devil, Albrecht Dürer

    The market changes. How you got here might not be the best way of moving forward. This can be a very hard pill to swallow, and can lead to some difficult decisions. But as I say, the world changes. In marketing there are activities that were very strong 15 to 20 years ago but do you now rarely see. An obvious example is print advertising. Yes there’s still some going on but it’s definitely not the business it was. I would also put an activity like cold calling into this category – It worked in the days of Glengarry Glen Ross but that was a long time ago!

    To stop some of these activities takes teamwork, trust and bravery. It’s far easier to keep spending the money, than tell someone you don’t want to do their favourite activity anymore. But that’s the job I’m afraid.

    Sirens (bottom left)

    “Tim Buckley”

    Sirens are activities that seem oh so tempting, but you need to resist. For example, most marketing departments want to do publicity stunts. They’re fun and the employees will love it! but they can be very expensive indeed. What seemed like a quick brainstorm decision can turn into months and months of graft with little return.

    Sadly as a marketing leader, your job is to say no, however tempting the idea. Again, I believe decisions here demarcate great leadership from poor leadership. If a member of your team comes up to you and says “I want to spend the next three years engaging with Gartner, when should I start?”, and you don’t think it’s the right thing to do, then you need to ignore that particular siren.


    Finally, it’s worth mentioning again, my examples above are specific to a particular company at at a particular moment in time. These will obviously be different for you! But the process – listing the hundred things that you could do next and pushing them into one of the four quadrants – Is crucial if you want to hit your goals without completely burning out the team.


  • Scaling up marketing

    Scaling up marketing

    Scaling up marketing is tough. You’ve missed the fun of the early days where you can try a new thing each week and you’ve not yet reached the safety of a well established brand. The board will be on your back, expecting enormous growth yesterday when you know in your heart that building a brand takes time.

    Assuming you don’t have infinite budget, infinite resource and a super-experienced team sitting there waiting for their next job, you need to prioritise. And to prioritise you need a strategy. Part of choosing a strategy is looking at your starting point. What are your unfair advantages? Where are you weak? Trying to start from scratch where you don’t have the expertise or traction in the market can be very tough, particularly if the board want results ASAP.

    I use the diagram below as a way of focusing efforts where it’s needed:

    Marketing pyramid v3

    Click here to download a copy.

    To help navigate this diagram a little:

    • There are five strategies listed from top to bottom. The further down the list you go, the less targeted the strategy becomes, though of course you are casting a wider net.
    • From left to right, the diagram provides a summary of what the strategy actually is, a grid showing where the strategy is most effective (is it better for large or small companies? And is it better for companies who already know what they want?), then most importantly, the cost of the strategy both in terms of budget but also in terms of the number of people you need to implement it effectively.
    • Crucially, when looking at costs you have to look both at the financial cost but also the number of people you need. To take a simple example, Google ads don’t need a large team to implement and maintain. However they cost a lot, whether you believe they are effective or not. In contrast, high quality content is cheap if not free to create. But you need a team of very talented people for this to be effective.
    • Finally I’ve put in a column of “how to scale”. Not everything can be scaled by pouring more money in. More money won’t give you higher quality content. More money won’t fix your hiring process. More money won’t fix your culture (in fact it does the opposite). When looking at how to scale it’s crucial to do the strategic diagnosis first of what you are capable of doing as an organisation, where the real problems are and so on. Without this you’ll burn everybody out, but also it will take far too long to hit the targets that you have.

    This is where the real skill comes in, in senior marketing roles. How do I make an impact soon? What numbers can I show that actually show progress for a long term objective? Where are the quick wins to keep the board onside? What can I do if I’ve got pots of money? What can I do if I haven’t?

    I’ve provided various resources which will hopefully help scaling up marketing. Otherwise get in touch to see if I can help.


  • B2B marketing help

    B2B marketing help

    One thing I learned very early on in my career – you can’t do a marketing job without almost constant interaction with the rest of the business. Whether that’s the sales team, the product team, HR or anyone else, you need constant input and feedback from both inside and outside the building.

    One very specific case of this – how do you get help with those difficult but crucial decisions that could make a long term impact on the business? one of the issues with being in a role for a long time is that you “Don’t know what you don’t know”. The only way that I’ve ever seen this problem successfully addressed is with external help. And by this I mean “Find somebody who knows more about this problem than I do”. A few days of insight from a guru in your field can save you months off time looking into something where you don’t know where to start. I’ve done this many times in my career, whether it’s “How does B2B marketing work in France!?” through to “What does world class product marketing look like?”

    As I say, I’ve worked with lots of these gurus over the years, but i just wanted to pick out three in particular who have made a significant impact on my development and understanding. If you want to make a significant step change in one of these areas I would strongly recommend following these people and subscribing to their feeds – I’ve been very lucky to have worked with all of these people directly.

    Gareth Marlow – leadership

    Gareth runs eqsystems.io and is the most knowledgeable person I know on senior leadership. Most of the problems I’ve ever seen with the impact of work done by teams, comes down to leadership. Why aren’t we getting more leads? Poor leadership. Why isn’t the product fit for purpose? Poor leadership. Why does it take us six months to do something that our competitors do in six weeks? Poor leadership. These problems are almost never caused by employees not knowing what they’re doing. It’s far more likely to be lack of direction and a poor culture.

    So if you have a problem with, say, lead generation then before you start looking at your Marketo implementation, look at how you’re leading the team. And if you need help with this then Gareth Marlow is the first person I would talk to. You can’t do everything yourself, you need your team to work In sync with you, aligned to the strategy. This is difficult, very difficult and I’ve found Gareth one of the few people who can help you navigate through the actions that you need to take.

    April Dunford – positioning

    As April puts it herself “Positioning has a positioning problem”. I would agree sadly. It’s a term that is thrown around a lot in marketing departments with very little understanding of what it means. The best way to get started with understanding this problem is to just buy this book!

    Additionally, if you can go and see April talk at an event or similar then I would very strongly recommend it.

    Richard Rumelt – strategy

    Another term that is heavily misunderstood – “Strategy”. If you’ve ever sat in a room and heard the phrase “Our strategy is to be the best in the market and to win” – then you need this book. True strategy (i.e. making choices based on diagnosis) is rare and again, an afternoon or two with this book will give you a step change in your understanding. What’s also great about the proper understanding of strategy is that of course it’s not just restricted to marketing. This book has helped me understand how decisions get made, how to make a proper argument for something and why some projects work and others don’t. Again, highly recommended.

    For any further help or if you just want to tell me what you thought of these recommendations, please get in touch or subscribe to the newsletter.


  • Creating a marketing strategy plan

    Creating a marketing strategy plan

    What should be in the plan?

    When I moved into the CMO role I realised a number of ways in which the position was different to what I had done previously. A lot of these differences are to do with being in a C-level role, but I’ll focus here on the CMO position and the new things you need to learn for that job.

    When I first started in this role years ago, it was overwhelming. Suddenly I was responsible for the marketing done by an already successful organisation, and there were 1,000 things I needed to get my head into. Yesterday. I realised then that what I needed was a structure for how to think about this set of responsibilities. After years of trying different models I managed to boil it down to the post-it note above, which is still stuck to my monitor years later. In my view, if you are in a CMO role, you should have a plan for each of these seven things. It might be that your plan is “This isn’t important to us, we’re a different type of business so I’m just going to ignore it”. But that’s still a proactive plan. If somebody asks you “Why aren’t you doing Google ads?” then you should have a well thought through answer, not just “Oh I haven’t really looked at that yet!”.

    1. Market research

    The core work on which everything below is founded. Market research – who actually wants the thing you sell? Why? What are the problems they are trying to solve? How many potential customers are there? How can you reach them? Who are the competitors? How do they position themselves? How does the market view their positioning vs. yours? And so on and so on. Often a founder knows these things (else you wouldn’t have got to a point where you have a viable company!). But as you mature you need product managers, product marketers and others around the business to understand the market more than anybody else. That last point is important – if there is another company in the market who understands how the market works better than you, then there’s a solid chance that they will beat you. Octopus Deploy is a good example of this. There is literally no company in the world that understands the deployment market better than they do. I believe this is a key reason why they do so well – if you are a customer why would you buy from the second most knowledgeable organisation?

    How do you do this in your organisation? Simple, not difficult. You (personally) need to go out there and talk to customers. Yes, surveys are good and there are other ways of getting quantitative data. But you need qualitative data to and that comes from talking to people. If you’re going to write copy for an ad, how can you do that if you haven’t personally spoken to somebody that you’re trying to sell to? It can be difficult finding these people but there are options. Put up a stand at an event. E-mail existing customers offering them £50 for a chat. Run online surveys. Find a friendly industry expert who can give you the lowdown. But as a senior marketer, you or one of your colleagues needs to be doing this task. Oh and buy the book Obviously Awesome by April Dunford!

    2. Content

    No one likes adverts. Digital ads do work as part of the marketing flywheel, you need great content. What is great content? Simple – it’s content that people actually want to read. 98% of the content out there is bland, copycat, written by people who don’t understand the market and can be generated by ChatGPT. Your content needs to be remarkable in both senses of the word.

    This is difficult. Finding people in your industry who can produce great content should be one of your highest priorities, but it will take up a lot of your time. You only need one or two but it’s much better to have one great writer than three average ones. And in my experience, it’s better to have somebody who’s an expert in your field and not the greatest writer in the world rather than vice versa. Most customers don’t mind about your grammatical errors.

    But the thing that is so great about having good content is that it’s investment that will last you for a long time. A well written article about your domain can work for you for years to come. And then you’ll start to get people sharing links, commenting on posts and reposting articles. “Marketing” from someone that doesn’t work for you is always far more powerful because it is genuine and authentic.

    But again, what can I do other than just writing great content? Well you can place that content on 3rd party sites. You can sponsor articles. You can encourage others to write about you. You can reuse content – if you’ve written a great white paper, cut it up in 20 different ways and use all of your snippets – a short advert, a podcast, a written article, a presentation. if you can get both things right (the creation and the distribution of information), then you’re maximising your use of content marketing as an activity.

    3. Sales enablement

    There are lots of different parts to sales enablement, particularly if you have a complicated sale that needs support. I’ll just focus here on the part that marketing can play.

    But whose job is it to do sales enablement? Sales or marketing? I’ll dodge that question by saying that “You need some group in your company that is worried about sales enablement”. That may sit in sales or it may sit in marketing, or even somewhere else. But you can’t leave this crucial role to salespeople themselves. Without a sales enablement function supporting sales team you’re sending troops into battle unarmed.

    There is an exception – where you don’t really have Sales at all! If you’re an online retailer and customers never really talked you during the sales process then sales enablement is less relevant for you. But otherwise, this is a key part of the senior marketing role and it is your responsibility to make sure it happens.

    So your job in marketing is to set up the opportunities for the sales team to smash home (and generally they are Opportunities in Salesforce that you want to get to Closed Won). Sometimes of course a salesperson will generate an opportunity themselves, nurture it through and close it. But you’re not doing your job if you’re not enabling them with support, collateral, training, insights, and thirty other things which make their life easier. You may not get the glory when the points are scored, but without that teamwork between sales and marketing, with sales enablement as the bridge, the opportunities won’t close regardless of how good the original lead was.

    4. Awareness

    As per the earlier image, if you don’t have a large number of people who already know about you then you need to start earlier in the marketing life cycle. Nobody ever went from “Never heard of you” to “Here’s £25,000” in a week. They went through a whole series the complex stages ending with the sale. And this starts with basic awareness. Have they even heard your name? Is there any association between your name and the value you offer? A large part of your job as a marketing person is building the brand awareness, so that when the customer is looking at solutions there’s already a name there that they can trust (at least in part).

    Building awareness is expensive, and in almost all cases, impossible to track. Yes you can do brand surveys and ask customers “Where did you first hear about us?”. And this is something you should do, perhaps a little later on. But either way, if you’re starting from scratch then it’s a long road ahead. And yes, there’s no way to go from zero to hero without a very large pot of money/investment.

    How do you do this? Depends enormously on the industry. Paid-for advertising is an obvious answer but there are others. If your budgets are low then some ingenuity and creativity is needed. You need a crystal clear value proposition (why should the customer care?), good designers, a “Keep it simple” approach, but hopefully this should be one of the easier things to get going. These are some of the things I’d be thinking about:

    5. Demand Gen

    This is a tough stage to summarise. Theoretically everything you’re doing above is generating demand. I.e. the demand comes from the accumulation of all the other activities you’re doing.

    But, in a senior role, you must know how to measure this even if you don’t know exactly what causes the generation of demand. To measure the performance of demand Gen, I would strongly suggest using “Value of opportunities created” as your KPI. i.e. Take the dollar value of opportunities created in a given month from Salesforce and use this to measure demand Gen performance. There are a few alternatives, but here’s why I don’t think they work:

    • Number of leads. Anyone can generate leads. You can fool Google it’s giving you lots of leads – but they won’t convert. The goal here is money and without knowing whether the leads are any good this is a meaningless metric.
    • Total revenue. Of course, this is what we’re all ultimately interested in. But there are so many contributions to this final figure (every department contributes to revenue), that it’s really difficult to pull apart where marketing has had an influence.
    • Awareness or some other early stage metric. You should know what these numbers are, but they’re just too far away from revenue. And it can undermine your credibility with the leadership team if you’re reporting on “Page visits” in your marketing performance meetings.

    So you must show the top level opportunity value generation numbers. But can you show further detail? I’d suggest the following as a starting point:

    • Split the figures out by region
    • Split the figures out by sales team (if different to above)
    • Show the numbers for revenue from existing customers vs. new customers
    • Show the numbers by different industries or segments

    And a final tip – start simple then build up. Start with the super-reliable opportunity value metric, then when you and the rest of the leadership team believe that number, move on to the next one. If you don’t do this then you’ll spend management meetings explaining 20 charts but without actually saying anything useful for the rest of the team.

    6. Partnerships

    Crucial for reaching customers you simply can’t reach on your own. This could be for a number of reasons, but often it’s a matter of size. If you’re a company of, say, 100 people and you’re trying to sell to Lloyds Bank then it’s very unlikely they’ll even look at you. So your job is to try and find a bigger organisation willing to partner with you. NB: there are also obviously times when you can partner with smaller companies, but that’s not the big win here. Of course the mountain to climb here is convincing then to work with you at all. The prize is worth it, but it can be a long slog (often years). And generally, “Go big or go home” – a single partnership with Apple will provide more value 10 partnerships with smaller firms.

    The two main types of partnership where I’ve seen most success are:

    • Technical partnerships. Someone else provides a bit of technology that you don’t have, something that might take you years to develop and you need to get to market quickly.
    • Commercial partnerships. Access to customers that you can’t reach on your own. A simple example of this is a new country – if you’re trying to open up Spain as a market, for example, and you know nothing about Spain then you need a partner or you’re going to spend a lot of time and money going in the wrong direction.

    Because building partnerships can take a long time and be quite arduous, it is often better to hire a separate “Partner manager” of some sort, not only to get their expertise but because otherwise it can be an enormous distraction from the core business.

    7. Customer Retention

    I thought I’d end on something slightly controversial. The business that you work for should have a deep understanding and strategy for how customers are retained. You should know why people stick with you.

    What’s controversial is what you can actually do about it in a marketing department. I believe most customers stick with the vendor because the product is great. Once you’ve bought from someone do you ever see their marketing again? You were busy using the product and getting on with your own projects and activities. A lot of money is spent on customer success and customer retention teams, I’m just not sure that’s money well spent. The product retains people. What that means, is that if you as a company have a problem with retention I would invest budget in the product rather than marketing. That’s a difficult argument to make if you work in the marketing department (“What do you mean you can’t help!?”). But that’s the essence of good strategy – making difficult calls where resource is constrained.

    So I won’t write more about marketing customer retention as I’m not sure it’s something you should spend a lot of time on. But as always, very happy to be proven wrong!


    These are the seven categories that I’ve used to try and understand all of the work that is going on in the marketing departments that I’ve been fortunate enough to run. as I say, in a senior role you should know why you are or are not doing something in each of these categories, and what value this work adds.


  • The marketing flywheel – an alternative to the marketing funnel

    The marketing flywheel – an alternative to the marketing funnel

    A lot has already been written about how the old marketing funnel model is no longer as relevant in modern B2B organisations as it used to be, and how a flywheel model is more appropriate for how customers really buy (as an old colleague said to me “The person who invented the marketing funnel should be shot!”. I think that’s excessive, but it makes the point…). Here’s how HubSpot describe the alternative approach: https://www.hubspot.com/flywheel.

    But rather than just repeat the work of others, I wanted to write an article on a model that I’ve been using for a few years now and which I found very helpful when making practical decisions about marketing activities. Models are all well and good but the reality is we have to make calls every day on where to spend our marketing budget and for this we need a robust model to help guide us in the right direction. Should we spend more on PPC ads? On brand building? On events? What? That’s more importantly, why? You will be asked why you decided to spend all of the budget on activity A rather than B. You need to have answers to those questions.

    Here is the short version of my PowerPoint that goes through this model (there is an 80 slide version of this that I’m working on as well). To summarise the context for this:

    1. It’s focused on B2B marketing; a small to medium sized businesses; in the tech space; in the English speaking world. It certainly won’t be relevant to everyone – take the best, leave the rest.
    2. It’s really only about marketing. For this to really work it has to be part of an overall marketing/sales/product plan.
    3. It assumes you already have a little traction in the market. If you’re starting from zero brand awareness, that’s a different job.
    4. There isn’t really anything here about the order in which to do things. I.e. what’s the strategy to do the right things first to make the biggest impact earliest? That requires a diagnosis of your company’s current performance and challenges, which is different for every organisation. But that’s the most interesting and difficult part of the job. If you try to do everything in this deck all at once you will fail – the trick is getting the ordering correct.
    5. The plan relies on and assumes a relentless focus on the customers’ real problems. This is a cliche for a reason – the best marketing plan in the world will fail if you don’t have a deep understanding of the customers’ problems.
    6. It uses the “Pincer” GTM strategy, where you are selling to both the senior decision maker and the end user at the same time. If you only need to reach one of those people, your job is much easier 🙂

    But to repeat, having some sort of model for how marketing works is crucial. Otherwise how can you make decisions about which levers to pull? About what effect you think you’re having? Of course sales is the end goal here but you need to understand what happens before the customer makes the purchase if you want to influence what happens at the end. And in a B2B process that can take months if not years from initial awareness to signing on the dotted line. Understanding the drivers between these two stages is the key to knowing how are you can influence the process and increasing the chances of hitting the revenue goals.

    A final note – all of this is, of course, based on the work of many others and I’ve blatantly taken diagrams and paragraphs from other marketing practitioners. Almost all of the ideas here from other people, all I’ve tried to do is bring it together and find the links and similarities. Any errors are mine.


  • How to make decisions

    How to make decisions

    There’s a myth that as you get more senior, you get to make more autonomous decisions about what happens in your business – what strategies to pursue, tools to buy, markets to go after and so on. “I’m the Head of Marketing, so surely I decide all the marketing stuff!?”

    In fact it’s the opposite – the more senior you get, the fewer autonomous decisions you make. Why? Because those decisions have a wider impact, so you need to consult more with others and bring others along with you. That doesn’t mean you don’t own decisions – you still need to lead on making the right choices and pushing changes through. But you don’t get to do that all on your own.

    I’ve used the following framework to help me decide how to make different types of calls – hopefully you’ll find it useful. Whenever a new decision needs to be made, I try to classify it in to one of three categories:

    1. Decisions I can make on my own. Using the example of marketing, there are certain things which have more or less zero impact outside your department. Things like “What subject should I put in this email header? What messaging should we use for this campaign? How should we set up Marketo to work more effectively? What ideas do we have for getting more people on the newsletter?”. I struggle to think of more! You might still choose to communicate what you’re doing for info – transparency is always preferable – but it’s optional and something you might do after the fact. I think, for a senior role, this is around 5-10% of the decisions you make.
    2. Decisions that I make, but where I need to consult others. If something is a marketing problem, then you should make the call. However, this doesn’t mean you don’t need to consult your partners first – Sales, Product, Finance, HR, Technology (depending on what the question is of course). Most decisions you make will have upstream or downstream consequences – if I change our Marketing Automation tool, what will happen to the leads going to Sales? If I decide to target Belgium instead of Netherlands, how will that impact Sales figures? If I decide to position our product differently, how does that align with the Product roadmap? And so on. Crucially, this isn’t just about telling people what you’re doing – you should be consulting with those people to really understand the impact, then adjusting your thoughts accordingly. The trick is being clear upfront about the decision-making process – that yes, you’ll be deciding whether to switch to Marketo, Hubspot or Pardot, and you’ll be listening to everyone’s views on the subject. But ultimately you’ll carry the can for that decision, so it needs to be yours. I estimate around 70-80% of decisions are like this, depending on your role.
    3. Decisions that I want to happen/influence, but aren’t mine to make. We all depend on each other to be successful – the success of a marketing department is wholly dependent on the activities of other teams. We can’t sell a product that doesn’t exist (well, you can, but you shouldn’t!). Sales teams close our pipeline. HR helps us build our team, and so on. And we’ll often need those teams to do things for us. But if it’s a Product, Sales, Finance or HR decision to make, then it’s not your call – and it’s important to recognise that. Your role is to try and influence that plan. Sometimes you’ll get your way and sometimes you won’t. If it’s the latter, you need to adjust your plans accordingly and still find a path to success – there will be reasons why option B was taken instead of option A, and you need to find a way to accommodate that decision. Around 10-15% of decisions are like this, in my experience.

    Being clear at the start of a process on which of these you’ll take is really the difference between a decision that lands with an organisation (because you’ve taken their views into account) and a decision that never quite gets taken up and implemented. The real skill is balancing the consultative approach with the importance of actually making a decision and driving it through. Not easy, but it’s a far stronger approach than making calls on your own – and none of them ever being implemented.


  • Beware roles that advertise long hours

    Beware roles that advertise long hours

    A friend is looking for a new role at the moment. He’s lucky enough to be able to pick and choose what he goes for, so I asked “What really attracts you to a job? What puts you off?”. It’s always interesting to know what people are looking for, how to genuinely attract great candidates (or put them off of course).

    His response was interesting – “The biggest red flag is when they talk about long hours. Something like ‘This won’t be a 9-5 you know!’. Something like that really worries me”. I pushed a bit further, wondering what it was in particular that worried him.

    “It’s a sign that they don’t know what they’re doing. Any manager who know how to do his or her job, should know how to fix processes and automate systems so that the job could be done in normal hours. And I don’t want to work for someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing – it will just frustrate me”.

    There’s a lot being written at the moment of how important flexible working is, for work/life balance. And a few companies are even pushing towards 4 days weeks or 4½ day weeks. But that wasn’t the point here – the issue was that, if a manager is consistently asking their team to work 8am-6pm, or longer, it shows that they are winging it – they’re not making the effort to improve productivity, by automating systems and fixing processes, and therefore don’t know how to run a department properly. And who wants to work for somebody like that!?

    Of course there are blips – sometimes end-of-quarter can get a bit much. Planning processes often don’t fit into a neat 37 hour week. And if you’re out on the road, you have to do what needs to be done in the time available. But in the general course of things, 37 hours should be enough to do most roles.

    Crucially though, if this doesn’t sound like reality for you, remember, it’s not completely up to you to fix it. This is largely the role of a good operational manager – someone who understands the importance of fixing processes so that that painful activity only takes 20 minutes next time, instead of 5 hours. This is a Sisyphean task – hence why it’s called Continuous Improvement – but you need to get started.

    I’ve always believed in automating and fixing processes. Sometimes this come from buying tools, sometimes from fixing processes, often a combination of the two. Some of the improvements we’ve made in marketing the last six months include:

    1. Using Canva to significantly speed up production of ads. We’ve created core templates so that we’re not asking the design team to repeatedly produce the same thing, and we can create ads quickly in multiple languages.
    2. Improve processes around briefs and tickets – like any fast growing company, there’s too much to do. So many great ideas, so little time! For one part of marketing we’ve already moved off JIRA and onto Airtable, fixing lots of associated workflows at the same time, and will likely follow suit for other areas too. It’s improved flow enormously and cut out unnecessary manual steps that caused a lot of pain for various folk.
    3. Improve autonomy for regional marketers. This isn’t something a tool can fix – this is about how you collaborate as a team, when you need to ask for permission to do something, when you can approve something yourself and so on. Personally I’ve always believed in “Ask for forgiveness, not permission”, so I strongly encourage everyone to do things, to try things without checking in with five other people first. If, for example, you spot an opportunity to place an ad somewhere, and it’s in budget – go for it!
    4. Brand guidelines – again, rather than asking for all work to be checked all the time, by providing the company with brand guidelines, it enables people to create ads and copy themselves – they can do the work themselves to figure out if, for example, they’re using the logo in the right way, without checking in with someone first.
    5. WordPress permissions. On the same theme of autonomy and delegation – set permissions for people on your website so that, for different sorts of copy, the right people can make the changes needed as-and-when. NB: these permissions should be very different for the homepage vs. a blog article! But for the latter, any marketer should be able to write, publish and share a blog on their own.

    These all sound like quite minor things. But continuous improvement is a long game – lots of small fixes that, one by one, lead to enormous improvements in productivity. We’ve already improved our speed to create agile, relevant ads down from weeks to hours and, hopefully, given the freedom to various marketers to jump on opportunities when they see them. And we’ve certainly made the process of managing expenses much easier – as an employee it’s almost trivial now, and I know there’s far less pain for our finance team too.

    So anyway, next time you go for a job and you hear a lighthearted quip like “We like to burn the midnight oil here, that’s alright isn’t it?” – run a mile. It’s not laziness on your part, it’s a sign that your future manager doesn’t quite know how to run a department, and that’s something that will impact your job satisfaction far more than the number of working hours in the day.


  • Why ROI calculators aren’t enough

    Why ROI calculators aren’t enough

    ROI calculators are a pretty common tool amongst B2B marketers. On the face of it, the logic is simple – show a calculation of how the time saved from subscribing to your product equates to money and how that money is less than the annual subscription cost charged. Then surely the sale should be in the bag – who wouldn’t want to save $$, how could anyone say No?

    I think this sort of calculator is useful for a limited purpose – it provides a supporting tool for your advocates in the org to help them convince their bosses to make the purchase. And for that it’s valuable. However, I’d argue it doesn’t help with the core problem – convincing buyers of the real value they’re getting – as it doesn’t help with the core reasons why people actually make purchases like yours.

    An ROI calculator usually looks something like:

    1. Your devs/finance team/marketing team/HR/etc. cost $50 an hour per person in fully loaded costs.
    2. At the moment, 10 of them are wasting an hour a day on repetitive tasks – tasks that your product can automate away.
    3. In any given week that’s 10x50x5 = $2,500 wasted on pointless tasks. In a year, that’s $125k.
    4. Your software only costs $35k per year. So that’s an ROI of over 250% ! Or more simply, a straight saving of $90k a year.

    At this point, you can produce your pen and ask them sign on the dotted line (well, click a button on a Docusign document) and start figuring out your commission.

    Why doesn’t this work? There’s some lower level arguments to be made against a calculation like this – do you really believe the figures? Is all of that time genuinely saved or does someone else still need to do some manual work somewhere? Is the org really doing the task that badly today? And of course this is missing the implementation fees and ongoing work needed to keep the automated system working.

    But I think there’s something more important, particularly when selling to senior buyers. There’s a dual problem with this calculation – firstly, that to make this saving the company would effectively have to fire someone, and secondly, in today’s environment, hiring and retaining staff is a far bigger headache than saving costs from letting people go. The calculation assumes an environment where the manager currently has too many people working for them, and is being asked to make savings. But this isn’t the reality for almost every manager I’ve spoken to in the last 10 years – the perennial problem managers have is growth and finding talent to fuel that growth. What they’re asking is “How do I find great people? I’m short-staffed, and just can’t hire the people I need. And when I do hire them, it’s such a hot job-market, I lose them unless I keep them happy!”. I can’t remember a single situation ever where someone has bought a product/service from a vendor, then “made the savings” by firing someone – it just doesn’t happen, and so is not believable to a client.

    The real pain that clients have is hiring a great team, building and developing that team, then keeping them engaged. By building that great team, they not only get the obvious advantages and pride of running a great organisation, they also get multiple benefits from being able to provide much more value to the rest of the org. I.e. instead of my team being seen as a “Cost centre, to be reduced wherever possible”, it’s seen as “An incredibly value part of the company that’s helping us grow and be successful”. This “Soft ROI” is what senior buyers are really worried about. Here’s how I’d describe the world of the average finance team, from talking to our customers:

    1. Finance teams are generally seen as a “necessary cost”. There is an unfair perception that they add little value.
    2. They spend enormous amounts of time on manual drudge work. I’ve seen this sort of activity called things like “Hamster work”, “Treacle” and similar terms, but the idea is the same – you have humans doing work that computers were designed to do.
    3. This is particularly bad in finance teams – practices that would be deemed unacceptable in a development or marketing department – are somehow okay in finance. I’ve seen teams working till midnight manually refreshing spreadsheets every 30 minutes, teams spending 1-2 weeks on month end (I mean, there are only 4 weeks in the actual month!). This sort of time-wasting has been reduced or removed entirely in most other parts of a high-functioning company.
    4. This drudge work leads to a very specific people problem – how do you keep your talented people motivated? There’s a chance that, when you hired them, you weren’t fully transparent with the manual work involved – now they’re here and they’ve had that rude awakening, they’re not happy about it, they’re getting de-motivated, and they’ll start to look for other opportunities.
    5. In parallel, your team isn’t doing any particularly interesting or value-add activity. This is problem both in reality and perception – that crucial project to work out the ROI on your vast marketing budget has been on hold for 9 months now, leading to significant waste. And your boss can only ask you so many times why it hasn’t happened yet?
    6. This all leads to employee churn, poor performance overall, and an endless cycle of hiring, and less-than-impactful work.

    This is an example from the world of finance, but of course the same could be said for other teams – though I’d argue to different degrees. The sort of waste I’ve seen in finance teams was ironed out years ago in development, where you see people automatically running 512 cloud-based tests at the push of a (build) button without a manual step in sight – the sort of automation finance teams can only dream of.

    How do you present this value, if an ROI calculator isn’t enough? Through great marketing – all great marketing is based on a deep understanding of your customers’ genuine pain points and how you can resolve those pain points. Instead of (or “as well as”) an ROI calculator, I’d be writing content about the pain points above. Show how you understand your customers’ worlds, how you understand that pain and can help solve it. It’s also a question of positioning – if you position your product as “A tool that helps save time”, then you’ll never really resonate with the manager’s pain. Alternatively if you position your product as “A service that supports you transforming your team from a cost centre [to be reduced] into a high-performing and motivated function valued by the rest of the company” – and you can connect the dots between that message and your product – then this is a much stronger way to appeal to the target audience.

    As I mention, I think ROI calculators still have their place. Once you’re in the door, and you have an advocate on the inside, then a tool like this can really help him/her make the case to their boss, who might want some numbers to back up the investment. But you need to win hearts and minds first – and that happens by understanding peoples’ real problems, and finding a way to help them solve those problems – ideally with the help of your product of course.


  • Scaling from SMBs to the Enterprise – a 10-Point Plan

    Scaling from SMBs to the Enterprise – a 10-Point Plan

    I’ve had this conversation about 6 times in the last year – how can you scale from selling to small businesses (SMBs), up to Enterprise organisations? What are the marketing challenges? What’s necessary, what’s nice-to-have, and what’s a red herring? This is something we’ve done incredibly well at Redgate over the last five years (from almost nothing, to now being more than half of our business), so, “just for the record”, I wanted to note down the things that I believe are important for success, and so that, when this conversation comes up again, I can just refer back to my notes!

    It’s important to note, this is what worked for us. We have a particular product set, in a particular market. We already had certain advantages and certain disadvantages. And I haven’t put much here about the ordering of implementation – this would depend on what you already have, and where you really are short. For example, if you already have a senior sales team in place, that’s great, you can jump past item #1 on the list. But if you don’t, that would be your first port of call.

    Additionally, there are some pre-requisites here. The most obvious is that you have some sort of product-market fit. You must have this if you’ve already been successful with SMBs! But if you’re still pre-PMF, none of this will work. This is a plan for building an Enterprise go-to-market on top of a successful SMB business.

    Anyway, here is what I believe to be a check-list for growing your business from SMBs to larger enterprises. This is a multi-year strategy – you’ll need faith in this all working: don’t expect results in month 3. But it will work, if all the pieces fall in to place.

    1. Hire a salesforce capable of the Committee or Consensus Sale. The first thing isn’t marketing! But any work you do understand customers, generating interest, changing positioning etc etc, will be a waste if you don’t have a great team in sales who can manage the deals, understand the needs of a complex group of buyers, take a sale through a standardised sales model and, eventually, close the deal. There are many different models for sales organisations and of course, if you have a smaller org, you don’t need anything complicated. But I’d suggest it’s necessary to have at least 1-2 people who can pick up some of those early Glenngarry leads, and really prove out your model.
    2. Build your Ideal Customer Profiles. Selling to SMBs you might have had a very simple ICP – perhaps you just needed to convince an end-user, possibly a team-leader. Very simple, and singular. But to sell to the Enterprise, you’ll inevitably be marketing yourselves to a wider group of more senior folk. NB: You can’t and mustn’t forget about the end-users: most enterprise sales follow the pincer model – you need to appeal to both end-users and the more senior people. But you can’t ignore the latter anymore. So who is your key senior decision maker? Heads of IT? Head of Finance? C-level execs? VP of Operations? Figure this and then make sure you know everything about their world – their concerns, their pain, their pressures. And then, in the next stage, you need to make the link between their world, and your offering…
    3. Figure out why and how your offering is uniquely positioned to solve the problems of your ICP. This is one of the hardest bits. As I say, you’ve had success selling your product to a more junior buyer at an SMB. But that doesn’t mean that the “VP of Operations” (or whoever this persona is) understands what you offer and why she should care. That VP has a world of problems that she’s trying to resolve right now and unless (a) you’ve figured out which of those problems your offering addresses, and (b) why your offering is the best solution to that problem – you’ll never get her interested enough to talk to you, however many marketing dollars you throw at your campaigns. This takes research, talking to those people, a deep, deep understanding of the true value offered by your product, and the skill to the link the two. Never underestimate the difficulty of this challenge.
    4. Figure out your target accounts. I.e. the organisations most likely to buy. Depending on the size/scale of your org, this might be 10 accounts, 100 accounts, 1,000 accounts or more. But you need data about (a) technographics, (b) firmographics, (c) ideally, history of interest in your market, to build out a set of target accounts. A “Quick win” here – if you’ve already had some success selling to larger orgs, just not nearly enough then target these warm accounts first. If “Bank of America” have bought $1,000 of software from you, then that’s an “in”, that should increase the likelihood of them appearing in your account list.
    5. Build an Account-Based Marketing capability. Specifically, you need field marketers working in partnership with your sales teams, who understand how to run 1:1, 1:few and programmatic campaigns to targeted accounts. Unfortunately, this isn’t a cheap skillset. But there are an enormous number of resources on what you’re looking for (e.g. SiriusDecisions), so you can start there.
    6. Hire the BDRs and SDRs in sales to work in partnership with the field marketers. I can’t emphasise enough how important the partnership is between sales and marketing. If there’s mis-alignment, disagreement, if you’re going after different accounts, don’t agree on strategy and so on – then you’ll fail. The core of great collaboration is working together on the same goals – hiring BDRs and SDRs in sales or marketing to work directly with your field marketers is key.
    7. Build the tech stack. You need a decent CRM (likely Salesforce…), a world-class marketing automation platform (we use Marketo) as a starting point. On top of that, there are two essential ingredients to a successful Enterprise GTM – a great sales prospecting tool (we use Salesloft – very highly recommended) and a “buyer intent” platform. We use 6Sense for the latter and love it, though Bombora is another contender here. Both of these are necessary for success – the first because, when you’re prospecting into larger orgs (with orchestrated plays, worked out in conjunction with marketing), there will be a very complex set of interactions between you and an array of people at the target org. You can’t manage all this by hand with multiple accounts, you need some level of orchestration. For the latter – “Buyer intent” (specifically – finding companies that are looking for solutions like yours before they’ve come to you) is a key tactic for targeting your effort. When you know that a given company is looking for solutions like yours, you can use the platform to spend on advertising targeted directly at them (rather than mass advertising which misses the target in 99% of cases).
    8. Pricing and Packaging. You need a pricing and packaging structure that matches how enterprise orgs want to buy. Too cheap, they won’t even look at you. Too expensive – well, unless you’re already the market leader, again, why would they look at you? But there’s more to do than this – the model for P&P is also crucial. Annual contracts? Monthly? Per-user, pre-transaction, or some other model? The primary goal here is to not make your pricing model a talking point for sales. If a customer is questioning your model and finding it confusing, you’ve created a barrier. There are some great third party companies that can help with this work, we’ve had great success with ProfitWell for example.
    9. Content, Case Studies and Thought Leadership. More on this below, but companies like to choose the winner in a given market, particularly if they’re new to that market. What can you do if you’re not the de facto market leader right now? Write incredible content about the market, the problems (your customers have), and how they should solve them. This insight comes from deep understanding of the market, but needs to be translated into great articles (there’s no point knowing things and not telling everyone!). You also need case studies from existing customers. Of course there’s an issue here – if you’ve never sold to an Enterprise, how can you write a case study for one!? You need to bootstrap this process – start with a well respected medium size org on your books, perhaps a well known name. Start there, then build up as you get more and more clients.
    10. PR, analysts, article placement. How do prospects know that you, specifically, are the winning vendor in the market? They read press, they read articles, they go to their analyst. You need to be in front of all of these, and that’s all based on the thought leadership work you’ve done previously.

    In a sense this is an over-simplified plan – how do these all work together? What do I do first? Are they all necessary? How do I know it’s working in the early days, when I don’t have all this yet? All very good questions. Here, I think it’s really important to show early wins, hence why getting senior sales reps as a first step. Those first reps won’t have all of the support and help outlined above – they’ll have to do a lot themselves, beg and steal to get what help they can. But if they can get a couple of deals over the line, this is incredibly valuable – for insights, for case studies, for analysis of “What worked here? Why did they actually buy?” and so on. Those early signs will also help getting buy-in across the org for this new strategy, something that will then fuel future growth and success.


  • How We Grew Marketing Sourced Pipeline by 20% in One Quarter

    How We Grew Marketing Sourced Pipeline by 20% in One Quarter

    We’re about to go into our quarterly review period at Redgate. We don’t just run QBRs, we also run reviews across all parts of the business. These are a chance to examine the last three months – what worked? What’s going well? What’s not going well and needs fixing? All part of a strong agile process for keeping an eye on what’s really happening, and making adjustments through the year.

    But there’s a flaw in these meetings when it comes to marketing. The implication of this process is that the things we did in Q1 have a direct and measurable impact on the outcomes from Q1. I.e. when I’m talking about our Q1 outcomes, the activities that occurred in-quarter are the most relevant for discussion.

    But that’s a very partial view of the truth. As all marketers know, marketing is a mix of long, medium and short term activities which, if played right, add up to the outcomes we all seek, such as pipeline for the sales teams.

    We’ve just had one of our best quarters for marketing-sourced pipeline in a long time. I can’t say “forever” because we’ve changed how we measure things over the years, but a quarter-to-quarter growth of 20% is something I’m very happy with. I’m not giving absolutes in this chart, for obvious reasons, nor a key to what the colours mean!, but the chart below shows how COVID-19 hit Redgate for marketing sourced pipeline through 2020, then how we’re coming out of the pandemic stronger than ever:

    No alt text provided for this image

    So, great, and I couldn’t be more proud of the incredible marketing team at Redgate for making this happen.

    But we’re trying to build a scalable, predictable revenue engine here. It’s not enough to know “What”, we need to know “Why?” – what did we do to achieve this? What can we re-produce? What activities had no impact, that we can cut? This is a Sisyphean task, full of estimates, best guesses, rules of thumb. And I thought back to a poster that used to be on the wall of our HR department (back when we all worked in offices!) stating “Not everything that can be measured is valuable, and not all valuable things can be measured” – which is particularly appropriate here. But we should at least have a stab at trying to know what influences these numbers.

    Here’s my go, some based on data, some not. And I’ve given these in reverse “timescale” order – from things we did actually do in-quarter, ranging down to activities that have been in-play for years. And of course it’s almost impossible to weight these things – what was most important? What only made a small difference? Very hard to know..

    1. Project to “Leave no lead unturned”. A slightly clunky phrase, but we made an operational change in Feb to hire a couple of great temps who are responsible for passing the right marketing generated leads to the right people in Sales. Like every single B2B company in the world, our internal systems for lead flow are less-than-perfect, so, while we fix those issues over the year, we have two people passing leads over by hand, ensuring leads don’t get lost in various buckets, or in the wrong hands. By doing this we at least know we’re maximising the revenue for each lead we do generate. Timescale: 1-2 months
    2. Fast, agile response to a competitor mistake. Without going into details, one of our competitors made an error, and within days we’d made it clear to our customers that we were there to help them with an alternative if their bosses were asking them to “look around”. We explicitly didn’t “exploit” this error – we never mentioned the competitor’s mistake in any of our comms – but we did make sure that when people were looking for alternatives, that path was easy for them (for example, through comms and campaigns, through sales training – what should people say when these customers make enquiries? – that sort of thing). Timescale: 1-2 months
    3. A launch. We launched a new offering in February. Of course you can’t do a launch every month, or even every quarter (it can call your credibility into question, if you’re constantly doing grand launches for point releases!). We try to do 1-2 “big” launches each year – incredibly well researched, meticulously planned, focused on real customer needs, and when we get this right (like we did this time), these launches resonate really well with customers. Timescale: 2-4 months to plan the launch, but the research goes back much further..
    4. Experiments with digital spend. It’s so easy to just keep spending $$ on the same ads, the same channels (“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”). But end of 2020, we decided to do some bold experiments moving budget from A to B, and this has really paid off. What we found was the the efficacy of, say $1,000 is enormously different for different products at different lifecycle stages. Specifically, if a brand is well-established, then digital advertising is much less effective than for a new product or brand. This makes theoretical sense of course, but it’s great for the reality to match the theory. Timescale: 3-6 months
    5. Internal marketing re-org. This is way harder to measure. But, we made some changes in marketing end of 2020, to reduce the friction between different areas and to make the partnership with Sales simpler. Primarily this was about changing the responsibilities for our field marketing teams in different offices, making it easier for them to collaborate with their local sales teams. It’s hard to say “That change made us $500k in pipeline”, but what I can say is that it’s made it much easier to collaborate on various projects (e.g. some of the things above), which I think would have been far less successful without the change. Sometimes your job is to remove barriers and hurdles, rather than add new activities. Timescale: last 6 months
    6. Treating our customers with respect and empathy during COVID-19. Really? That led to marketing ROI!? We made a conscious decision in April 2020 that, during the pandemic, we wouldn’t exploit the situation for our advantage. We could have gone to customers and turned the screw on various deals, trying to take advantage of their difficulties. Instead we decided “How can we help our customers this year? How can we support our customers through this difficult time?”. We started things like the Redgate Community Circle, with a focus on educating customers (so that at least, through the year, our customers could spend time on self-learning). We made sure that, if a customer was struggling to get a deal or an approval renewed, we gave them that time and space, extending trial periods for example. We actively listened to the struggles they were having (e.g. healthcare orgs struggling to keep up with demand) and made sure adjusted our interactions to give them the support they needed – for example, providing additional free support to healthcare companies, no questions asked. Can I directly measure the return on this effort? No. Do I think it was valuable? Definitely. Customers like working with vendors who understand them and their pain. Timescale: 1 year
    7. Moving out of the pandemic. Obviously this isn’t something you can “do” – we as vendors have had zero control over the course of the pandemic. However I think it’s crucial to recognise where your success is a mixture of internal and external forces. In marketing, we have a symbiotic relationship with our customers – we’re always trying to understand their concerns, at the same time as representing what our company has to offer. It’s obviously been beneficial to Redgate that our customers are feeling more confident, perhaps a little more willing to think ahead and getting back to solving some of their long-standing problems. Timescale: 1 year
    8. Long term brand work. We’ve made a number of changes over the years to clearly associate the value customers get from us with the Redgate brand. Specifically, it should be trivially easy to remember “I learnt a lot this year about how to do my job better. It was Redgate that helped me out there”. Or, “I read a great article about what I need to do about problem X at my company – it was Redgate that wrote that”. We’ve done a lot over the last few years to simplify, simplify and simplify again our brands and the associations with that brand, which I think has at least partly led to current success. Timescale – many years!

    Obviously I’ve missed a lot of things here – so many great projects over the last 12 months, small and large. And, as I mention, it’s really hard to to figure out “Okay, but which of these were really important?”. Problem with that of course – successful marketing is a complex combination of lots of activities, hopefully orchestrated together to give the result you need. No single activity is sufficient or even necessary for success, but I think you do need most of these things working together for growth.

    But to go back to the original problem – how do we present a successful quarter as a set of repeatable, scalable activities? Should we just repeat all these things!? The skill is to choose between either stoppingmaintaining or increasing these activities. There are a number of areas which are certainly in the maintain mode – the brand work, experiments with digital spend being just two examples. We’ll keep doing these, but not more. And a couple of things you can’t or shouldn’t “continue” – marketing re-orgs are very expensive, and I certainly hope that we need to do less and less work supporting customers during the pandemic – an option I’d be very happy to lose! But the trick is knowing what to double-down on – something I’ll be working on over the coming weeks.


  • How Collaboration Can Grow Revenue

    How Collaboration Can Grow Revenue

    Why do Marketing and Sales departments need to collaborate? Sure, it’s nice, but beyond people getting on better together, how can it really impact the numbers, the outcomes for the business?

    We’ve just spent a month at Redgate improving the collaboration between the two departments and we can see the direct and measurable impact on new opportunity generation. Here’s what we did and what happened. NB: None of this is rocket science, these all seem like really obvious things to do. But it’s quite rare to see such a direct impact on the numbers, so I wanted to share “What we actually did” as it may be useful to others – it can be easy to miss some of the basics.

    What is Collaboration?

    To start with the obvious, it’s nothing to do with whether you “get on” or not, whether you’re friends. We have great relationships between the marketing and sales departments, we get on incredibly well, and we talk all the time. But that’s not collaboration.

    I feel there are three levels of what could be called “collaboration”:

    1. Sitting in a (virtual) room telling each other things – what your plans are, what the latest results are, your ideas for the future.
    2. Sitting in a (virtual) room listening to each other. A step up from above, actively finding out what others are working on, trying to understand their goals, and how you might fit in.
    3. Sitting in a (virtual) room looking at the same numbers, working on a common goal

    The first two are fine, and communication is great. But the third is what I consider true collaboration – what is our shared goal? What are the (shared) numbers showing? What can we do to fix this, together?

    And it’s the third of these that we kicked off at the start of 2021, and has shown direct impact on the outcomes we care about.

    What Did We Do?

    Redgate has a good problem (and has had that problem for a while) – too many “leads”. We get around 500 leads a day (a lead being “Someone who expresses an interest in one of our offerings, and gives us some of their details”). Great, what’s the problem? The problem is that salespeople’s time is invaluable and scarce. If we asked Sales to follow up on all 500 leads every day, they would waste an incredible amount of time chasing low quality leads, tyre-kickers, people who will never buy from us and so on.

    This is a standard problem in marketing/sales and the solution is some sort of qualification process. There are various models out there (the SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall being one of the more common frameworks), but we have a pretty simple process – use Marketo to score leads on two perpendicular scales – engagement, and firmographics, then only pass the good Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs – the Glenngarry leads!) through to Sales. It’s generally around 10% of the total, or 50 a day. Then keep the rest back to be nurtured from within Marketo until they’re ready for prime time.

    So far, so easy. But of course the point is that it isn’t easy. When you move from theory into practice, here are some of the problems you hit:

    1. What you think is an MQL, is not was Sales think is an MQL
    2. Worse – different sales folk in different offices have different views on what should or should count
    3. Different salespeople are happy with, and capable of taking on leads at different “stages” – from very early “Can I have a chat with someone?” enquiries to late stage “Can I get a quote please?” orders
    4. Even if you agree on criteria, what cadence should a salesperson follow with different types of leads? Three calls? A call, an email, then a call? When should they give up? How do you know if the process is being followed?
    5. How much extra work should sales people do to add context and info for a lead? Marketo/Marketing provides some data (industry, job title, company info, web usage etc), but not as much as everyone would like
    6. If you agree on lead qualification, how do you get the right leads to the right people in a timely manner?
    7. How do you learn and adjust qualification over time? If you find leads of type X are gold and leads of type Y never seem to go anywhere, how do you change the qualification process quickly? How do you get that feedback back in to marketing from an enormous and global Sales team?

    Most of this is operational – needing marketing operations and sales operations teams to work together alongside the rest of their colleagues. And there’s a lot to figure out here. But these are the things we did in January to try and tackle some of these problems. Not everything went smoothly, but enough went well to achieve noticeable differences in the numbers. And everything here was a joint project between various people in Marketing and Sales at different levels.

    • Reporting. We started by putting together some basic reports of MQLs and Opportunity numbers. We focused on “Consistent, simple but imprecise” over “Complicated but accurate”. And we spent time running these through with Marketing and Sales leadership, to see if we had a common agreement that we were looking at the right things.
    • Definitions. Next, we realised there were a lot of different definitions out there – what was an “Inbound lead”? What was a “Good download”? What should we do with “renewal referrals”? So we spent a lot of time talking these through – in 95% of cases, we were all aligned to start with, so we spent time on the 5%. As an example – what should we do if a customer has asked a renewal rep to add a license on to an order? Is that a sales person upsell, or just a customer enquiry that came through a circuitous route? (We decided on the latter btw)
    • Lead Types. We spent a lot of time simplifying the types of leads we’re interested in. From analysis of 2020 data we realised that the vast majority of leads came from a small set of sources – inbound emails/phone calls, web orders, downloads & free trials, events/webinars, reaching out to current customers, and prospecting out to new customers. There were then about 10 additional sources, most of which generated less than 1% of leads each – we simplified the model to the few that really matter.
    • Lead Flow. Armed with an understanding of different lead types, who should get what? And how quickly? We spent a lot of time with operational teams working out the processes then implementing manual processes (we’ll automate later…) to make sure all the leads found the right home (I like to think of this as “No lead left unturned”)
    • Follow up. Is every lead being followed up? With the right cadence? Again, some great work from our SalesOps team, and Sales Leadership making sure this was happening.
    • The Feedback Loop. We now track which leads are converting and which are too early stage or low value. We’ve already made one round of changes to the qualification process, and expect many many more as we learn over the coming months.

    What Impact Did it Have?

    This is what matters. If you did all of the above, you can give yourself a pat on the back, but it only matters if it made a difference to the numbers. So did it?

    Yes it did. I can’t post all of the charts here, but in summary:

    • January opportunity generation (before we’d actually made any changes) was more or less the same year-on-year. A bit disappointing, but we are in the middle of a pandemic.
    • So far, February opportunity generation has been between 20% and 30% up year-on-year, after we made the changes described above.

    Could this just be luck/the market? It could be, but poring through the data for “What actually happened here?” it clearly shows that the new opportunities are coming from the right leads being placed in the hands of the right sales people with the right information at the right time. Sales people feel like they’re getting decent leads from Marketing. Marketing people feel that all their leads are being “maximised”. And most importantly customers are getting the service they expect – help from Redgate when needed, and left alone when that’s what they want.

    I’ve been watching the figures every day like a hawk, to wait for things to go wrong, but the increase is very consistent.

    Looking back over January, this effort would have failed if it hadn’t been for us taking a collaborative approach. As mentioned at the start, these things aren’t rocket science. So why didn’t we do it all years ago? Well, a number of reasons (having the right people in place for example), but primarily, that taking the more forensic, tougher and collaborative approach was necessary to proceed. We could have tried doing these things in isolation, but it would never have landed as well as it did.


  • Getting from Green Park to King’s Cross

    Getting from Green Park to King’s Cross

    Anyone who has used the London tube system much, will know that there are two routes from Green Park to King’s Cross – the Victoria Line and the Piccadilly Line. The Victoria Line is the “Right” way to get from Green Park to KX – it’s quicker with fewer stops, why wouldn’t you take this route?

    An important principle at Redgate is that we’re outcome-focused. Everyone says this of course (who would ever say “I don’t care about the impact of work, not my problem!”), but it’s important to understand the implications of this approach. Specifically that “It doesn’t matter how you get to your destination, as long as you get there”. It doesn’t matter if you take the “Right” way, the “Wrong” way, or any which-way (as long as it’s ethical of course!) – your job is to achieve your goal.

    Seven years ago now, I was out near Green Park, London with a friend (back when that was a possibility..), and both of us had to get the train back north from King’s Cross, leaving in 25 minutes time. We got on to the platform at Green Park Station and of course headed towards the Victoria Line. But as soon as we got there, I noticed all of the trains had been cancelled – so rare for the Victoria Line! At this point I started whining about the trains, how we’d never make it in time, how we were doomed. But my friend turned to me and said “Follow me”.

    We ran as fast as we could to the Piccadilly Line platform. Luckily the train was due in under 2 minutes, so we jumped on and waited for the seemingly endless stops to King’s Cross. As soon as we got there, we sprinted through the station, along the platform and leapt onto the train with about 45 seconds to go. We made our train, and got home at exactly the time planned, even if we were a little breathless for the start of the journey.

    We achieved our objective the wrong way. It was far more effort and we made the worst (but necessary) choice. But it doesn’t matter – we made it!

    It’s crucial when you’re trying to achieve a goal that you don’t get anchored to a particular solution or approach. For example, if your goal is to “Increase leads in the EMEA region”, you’ll likely start with a marketing plan of how you’ll achieve that. An array of strategies, with particular spends, campaigns, reports and, crucially, dependencies on all sorts of other things happening – both internal and external – which will be out of your control. But any one of those things can go wrong, and your job is to maintain the relentless march to the outcome. Reports not available to you? Make them yourself. Email nurturing track can’t be implemented? find another piece of technology that can do it for you. Budget constraints? Find innovative ways of making the same impact with great content instead. Internal resource not available? Find a contractor, find a temp, phone a friend!

    It’s very likely that when you reach your destination, you’ll be exhausted with the pivots, the workarounds, the manual processes, the hacks. But at least you will have got there. For me, that’s what “Outcome focused” truly means – ingenuity and agility on how to get there using whatever means you have at your disposal, even if at times you know you’re doing things the wrong way.


  • Working from Home

    Working from Home

    Lots of people have written about the “New world of remote working” (so much so, that that phrase has become a cliche in the space of six months). But I think it’s still an interesting topic, because I have a hunch the changes we’ve seen in 2020 will become permanent, even as we start to move out of lockdown.

    I agree with the comments many have made, that “The genie won’t go back in the bottle” (another cliche…). I struggle to see a scenario where we’ll all go back to the old way of working – 5 days a week in a single, centralised office. Why? Because it’s working better now from both sides.

    First, compare the old and the new as an employee. Work pre-March was long commutes either pumping CO2 in to the air in your car, or squashing in to a train carriage, losing hours of your day in both cases, to sit in an office and stare at your screen, out for a £6 Pret sandwich at lunchtime, then home, exhausted. If you manage to fit the £80-a-month gym trip in there, great, but you’re home even later.

    Now? Count the ways in which work has improved for the employee:

    • Firstly, the instant time saving on the commute. No commute takes less than 30 minutes, and often much more, if you add in a tube ride, or traffic problems. So many people are immediately getting 1-3 hours of their lives back.
    • Cost of the commute. Either petrol savings, or season ticket. This can easily add up to hundreds of pounds a month.
    • Lunch – eating at home is generally cheaper than buying from sandwich shops. I know that’s tough on the city-based sandwich shops, but more on that later.
    • Health – eating at home can easily be more healthy than eating out-and-about. You can spend 10 mins prepping something in a kitchen, making it much easier to do something good for you.
    • Exercise – going for a run is much easier (with that saved time), or a lunchtime cycle ride if preferred. Pilates classes on Zoom are also easier if you’re not having to find somewhere to change afterwards.
    • Flexibility. A big one I believe – being able to organise your work-life balance is much easier when WFH. A simple example, if your kid needs dropping off at the school gate at 8:40am, you can do that and be back at your desk for 9am. That simply doesn’t work if you have a 1 hour commute to London. So you need to have nannies or lean on friends/family. Additionally, there are benefits like “Being in for the builder/delivery”, getting the washing done, finishing an hour early to go and see family/friends and so on. A lot of this stems back to point 1 – the time saved no longer spent on the long commute.

    Secondly, what about the employer? Unlike the list above, I think there really is only one of note – but it’s a big one, and one that matters to every employer: the cost of running an enormous office, often in an expensive central location. Recently, the city law firm, Slater and Gordon have given up their London office – why keep it? After salaries, office costs are often one of the biggest bills for an org, and it just doesn’t seem necessary any more.

    There is an additional important point here as well – not so much a benefit for employees, but a worry that didn’t turn out to be true. A lot of companies worried about productivity drops in a remote world. But that simply hasn’t been the case – if anything productivity of employees has actually improved, as people adapt to the new ways of working and gain the benefits listed above.

    Seismic shifts like this one tend to only happen when it’s good for “both sides”. Of course there are people who will lose out from this shift – property developers in the cities, sandwich shops in central locations and so on. And of course, I’ve completely ignored some of the problems caused by remote working – isolation for employees, loss of cohesive for company culture, and many more.

    But my point is that I struggle to see a way back. The new world will be one of mixed models – some WFH, perhaps visits to new, smaller offices for 1-2 days a week, perhaps for team events only. Most office work is spent starting at a screen (for better or worse), and that can now be done more cheaply, and with a better use of everyone’s time, with more people doing this from home.

    What impact will this have?

    Firstly, I think the benefits above will become embedded in company working models. Meaning – companies will lower their annual rent costs and related costs (office maintenance etc). And employees will just get used to be able to manage their work around their lives and vice-versa. This will become expected of any role – any job that asks you to be in a central London location for 8:30am will become far less attractive, as employees raise their expectations of working life – suddenly this will become a big negative on a job ad, rather than just an accepted necessity.

    But I think there are two more big additional changes that will happen, one about the towns and cities we all live in, the second about how we look for jobs going forward.

    One of the problems with everyone WFH-ing, is that the whole infrastructure around centralised office work is struggling. If you were running a sandwich shop, book shop, stationary shop, gift shop or similar next to a city law firm in January, it’s hard to see how your business will return. And that really is a shame, particular when your business is failing through no fault of your own.

    But that misses the point that, the need for these services is just the same – it’s just the location has changed. if there’s a movement of, say, 50% of office workers to be at home, then naturally the environment around peoples’ homes will flourish instead. So we’ll start to see new bakeries, new local shops, new cafes sprouting up in heavily residential areas, particularly as lockdown ends and people want to head out for lunch a bit more. This could be a real resurgence for some areas that have struggled to date.

    More than this though, I think we will see different impacts for different areas. I know the South East of England best, and I’d suggest there are two types of town outside London, whose fortunes will change. Firstly, there are cities/towns like Cambridge (where I live now) and Bury St Edmunds (where I was brought up). Both are great places to live, each with their own character. But they’ve always struggled from being just a-little-too-far from London to commute regularly. It’s possible, but a little exhausting. That’s always kept the population down for these towns, because it’s really not commuter-territory if you want to work in London. But that’s not a problem anymore! You can get a job “in London” and now work 3-5 days a week from your flat in Cambridge. This should significantly increase the numbers in these areas, leading to growth of local infrastructure.

    Secondly, there are places which have always been commuter towns – 30 minutes to London by train, but without a whole lot going on there (few local restaurants, cafes etc). These towns could go two ways – either they’ll start to get that infrastructure too, forced by all the local residents (no longer commuting to London), who want nice places to eat and drink. Alternatively (and hopefully not), they’ll struggle as people move away over time – if the only reason you lived there was the commute, and that’s no longer relevant well, why stay?

    The other side to this coin though, and I’d suggest an even bigger change, is how the world of work opens up for you as an employee (and also, as an employer of course). Most job searches start with location – “I’m looking for a Java developer role within 45 minutes of Reading”. But if you remove that constraint, the world is suddenly your oyster! Well, the country anyway. If you only have to visit the office 1 day a week (or even less), you don’t mind a 2 hour commute both ways. Suddenly you can get a role based half-way across the country. As an employee, you can start looking for the things you really care about – the actual role, company culture, the domain and so on, rather than being artificially constrained by geography.

    This democratisation of work, will positively impact the good employers too. Some employers will be worried (“What if all my employees leave, now they can all look further afield?!”). But that misses the point – as an employer you can now look further afield for talent. And this will have a positive effect for great employers who genuinely care about their employees, their culture and the work they do. The knock-on effect here will be that, good employers who don’t allow remote working will find themselves struggling against those that do.

    Again, I want to re-iterate, I’m knowingly ignoring many of the problems that remote-working will bring. I’m not denying those are there. And I think a 100% remote-working world (without any physical interaction with colleagues, either for work, team, or social events) is not something I would find attractive.

    But I feel the benefits of the new hybrid world outweigh the downsides for employers and employees both. And because it’s beneficial for both parties, I think the current changes will stick even once the vaccine is available. Why go back to something less productive, more polluting, more expensive and less flexible, now that we’ve all seen something better!?


  • How to Present to an Exec or Board

    How to Present to an Exec or Board

    For better or worse I find a lot of my tips and tricks for working in a software company from fiction books and films. I learnt most of what I know about how to present to senior folk (an Exec team or a Board even) from a two-minute scene in David Mamet’s film “The Spanish Prisoner”:

    In this scene, the main character (played by Campbell Scott) has to present to the board on his new idea (“The Process”) – how do you present something extraordinarily complex and nuanced to a group like this?

    There’s a great line early in the scene when Ricky Jay’s character starts to talk about the team and the effort behind the work and the CEO responds with “I know you’ll understand when I say that’s neither here not there”. Harsh, but what the board really want to hear about is:

    1. How much money will we make?
    2. What are the risks? What do we actually own?
    3. What are the timelines?

    The presenters then go on to speak to these points and get what they want from the group.

    Of course this is fiction – rarely would a senior team make investments based on so little information (and I’ve never known a senior team care so little for the people behind a project!), but it makes the important point – know your audience, don’t waste their time and concern yourself with what they want, not what you want. At a very practical level, next time you’re presenting to a senior group, consider chopping half of your presentation out (regardless of how short it is already) – the skill of summarising key strategic points, and speaking to the point is valued enormously in any company.

    Of course I’ve always found marketers good at this sort of thing. Good presentation skills are often expected of marketing people, but there’s more to a great presentation than good elocution. What’s needed for a pitch to a senior team? Knowing your audience, not wasting their time, and concerning yourself with their needs, not yours – a concise description of “Marketing humility”, the skill of putting the customer at the centre of everything you do, and leaving your own concerns to one side. It’s at the centre of how great marketers think.

    Watching this scene again also reminded me of a great talk I heard from Erica Seidel a few years back at a MarTech conference. There she talked about the three skill areas she looked for when hiring senior roles:

    • Attitude – what general approach/attitude does the candidate bring to a role? Positive? Pro-active? Team player? Team builder?
    • Aptitude – can they do the actual thing they’re being recruited for!? A VP of Sales needs to know Sales obviously.
    • Altitude – can the candidate talk to colleagues at all levels? Can they summarise a strategy in 2 minutes to the CEO, then spend all afternoon in a workshop going through the details with the implementation team?

    Erica’s point in the talk was that, of course, everyone focuses on the 2nd of these. And most people ask about the 1st. But few ask about the last, and it’s a great skill to have as a candidate. The ability to turn on a sixpence and completely change the way you present a proposal from “This is how much money we’ll make, and why the risk is low” to “Here’s the 25 pages detailing how this is all pieced together, and how we’ll run the project” is a scarce talent and invaluable to employers.

    The film is one of my all time favourites, and of course anything by David Mamet is great. Films and books often provide great lessons like this because a great writer will be able to summarise the essence of a situation in a few moments, more succinctly than a 256-page book. I strongly recommend watching the whole film through – there’s so much more in there about other aspects of company life too, all of which I’ve found useful over the years :).


  • Join a Scaleup to Scale Your Career

    Join a Scaleup to Scale Your Career

    It’s hard getting ahead in Marketing. It’s a discipline changing every year (certainly true of 2020), it covers an enormous breadth of disciplines which need a great variety of skills and it’s notoriously difficult to prove the impact of your work. So what can you do to give yourself the best chance of success? Of growth and moving to the next level?

    I’ve always believed that a significant part of your career success is dependent on the organisations you work for. You can be the smartest marketer around, but if you’re working at a deadbeat company in decline, you’ll struggle to grow and show success. Equally, for better-or-worse, if you’re only an average marketer working at a place growing 100% year-on-year, you may get away with perhaps more than you should!

    So obviously we all try to work for exciting growing companies. But the other big factor is the size of the company you work for. I’ve worked at companies of 50,000 employees and of 2 employees (one of which was me!) and it makes an enormous difference, not only to the sort of work you do, but also your chances of learning and growing. A growth mindset is crucial for your future success. I’ve personally found that Scaleups – organisations that sit between early stage startups and the big corporates, focused on scaling up to the next level – have provided the best opportunities for growth.

    My first job out of college was at British Airways, as a developer. I had no idea what to expect, but it started well. The first month was a formal training program (on their systems), and it felt very structured, almost a continuation of college. I was getting training and everyone seemed to know what they were doing.

    So a great start. But 6-12 months later, something didn’t feel quite right. I soon realised that every problem (at my level), every process, every significant decision had already been figured out by someone, likely years before. A simple example – the precise naming, file location, structure, font and format of every doc I had to write had all been worked out approximately 10 years before. I suggested “Perhaps for a small change, we can just write a short note (a ‘Minimal viable document’!), something really useful to the reader, rather than writing 25 pages, taking more time than the actual code change”. That didn’t go anywhere. I soon found that my ability to grow on-the-job was very limited – it’s a cliche, but you quickly become a cog in the machine.

    So many years later I tried a startup. A very small startup in fact, just two of us. There was not a formal training program when I joined here! And it was really exciting – I did really enjoy this time. Certainly, a little hairy at times – there wasn’t the backup of a large corporate with deep pockets. But the rollercoaster ride was part of the fun. And I definitely felt like I had an enormous influence over the strategy for the company – this is one of the key attractions for smaller orgs.

    But this comes at a price – I was there for over 3 years in a Product Manager role. But my growth in the disciplines of product management and marketing was pretty close to zero. I learnt a lot about the hustle of working at a startup. I learnt a lot about closing deals, about getting 25 things done all at once. But my understanding of the emerging disciplines of product management, product marketing, brand, digital marketing, marketing operations etc etc didn’t advance in three years.

    So where’s the Goldilocks zone? Where can you get this sort of support for growth without just becoming part of the machine?

    I now work at a company of 400 people, in a strong growth phase with a laser-focus on learning and development of its employees. A Scaleup like this – somewhere moving from the stage of “Everyone doing everything, just get the release out!” in to a more disciplined stage of “Okay, how do we scale all this? We have success already, how do we make this 10x bigger?” is the sort of environment where you can really become a master of your discipline.

    When I worked at the startup, I did all of the product management, a lot of marketing, some development work, and a lot more besides. I did what needed to be done to survive, as we did everything we could to find some sort of product-market fit. I didn’t have the time to work out “What would be a better way of running that digital marketing program? How would I do that better next time?” – the rollercoaster was moving too fast for this sort of introspection.

    At Redgate, we have a marketing department around 45 people strong. We have product marketing, digital marketing, brand, ABM and customer marketing functions (all with disciplines within each of these) as well as a nascent marketing operations function. We pride ourselves on being world-class in all of these areas. Of course we’re not there yet – part of a growth mindset is accepting that you’ll always be striving to do better – but I feel we improve at everything we do year after year. However great, say, our digital marketing team was a year ago, they’re better this year (through growth and learning activities), and will be even better this time next year.

    We even run an internal conference devoted to the goal of growing our capability. Called “Level Up”, this year will be a week long event covering an enormous range of topics across the whole business. Previous years have been a single-day offsite, but with everyone working remotely this year, we’re trying something new. I’m really excited about this as, yet again it reinforces the crucial role that learning and development plays when a company is scaling up. It’s just not good enough to still be working in the same way this year as we did a year ago – as the business grows, we need to grow as well.


  • Under-promise, Over-deliver for product-led growth

    Under-promise, Over-deliver for product-led growth

    There’s a lot written about the advantages of product-led growth (PLG), how it keeps marketing and sales costs down, how customers prefer it and so on. All good, but I struggled to find much on the actual strategies to use – how do you do it?

    There are obvious things like having a product with amazing product-market fit. But that doesn’t really help with strategy – it’s not particularly insightful, and it is, of course, the task that vast parts of your org will be working towards – what do the customers want? What is the market? How do we iterate towards their needs? And so on and so on. Let’s assume you’re doing all you can in that direction.

    How can you help as a marketing department? Well, there are lots of tactics: focus on inbound work, build a community, make sure the CTAs are in the product (to help people from product-usage to getting in touch), design trials properly to that people understand the value. Fundamentally, you’re trying to use the product and usage of that product as the channel.

    But I wanted to focus on one specific strategy that has been pivotal at Redgate, about the messaging and tone you use with customers – and it’s something that is (sadly) pretty rare in the world of marketing. By definition, most PLG is targeting users of your product, and there are specific ways in which you need to change the way you interact and message to this sort of customer.

    It’s an enormous over-simplification, but the process for PLG, runs something like:

    1. Through some mechanism, a new user finds your product,
    2. User tries product, loves it, buys it,
    3. User tells colleagues, friends, everyone about how great your product is. Go back to step 1!

    The question is, how do you amplify this cycle? Can you catalyze this, or do you just need to let it run its course?

    The “trick” we’ve found most effective for messaging is “Under-promise, over-deliver”. And you can see how that runs counter to the standard marketing mindset.

    To see why this approach can be so effective, firstly ask yourself – as a user/consumer yourself, how many times have you bought or tried something – either in a work or personal context – and been disappointed? For me, this is (sadly!), the standard process for making purchases: you’re sold something based on a promise, and over a period of time you realise that it’s not quite what you hoped for. Whether it’s a piece of MarTech, a meal out, a new laptop, an agency’s services, whatever – our general experience is one of disappointment.

    But here’s the “trick” – where this hasn’t been the case, where a product is genuinely at least as good as the promise, if not better, then these are the times, and the only times when I’ve recommended that product to someone else. Going back to point (3) above – the process of recommendation or word-of-mouth is the fundamental driver of the product-led growth model (from a marketing perspective).

    Take a specific example. You’ve been asked to market a new piece of MarTech, say a chatbot system. You’ve got a good product, it’s better than most of the competitors, and you’ve been tasked with implementing a PLG strategy – you want to build the business from the bottom-up. You’ve now got two choices:

    • Extoll the virtues of this thing – tell customers that every user will love it, it does everything the competitors do and more and that it will “Transform your business overnight, doubling your customer base, as they all start buying from you, because of your wonderful chatbot facility”. Or,
    • Something with a little humility. Be clear about the scope of impact a chatbot can have – “Help your customers interact with you in a way they prefer”, “Lower your support costs by 15%”, and so on.

    Option 1 is fine if you just want the initial sale, and don’t care too much about the ongoing word-of-mouth process. Do you care if that customer decides to recommend it to friends and colleagues? Perhaps not.

    But if you do care about these things, option 2 is the better strategy. Why? Because, taking the product functionality as a given, the individual is far more likely to go through a process of:

    • Let’s try this product,
    • Wow, this is better than I thought! I was really ready for disappointment, but this is way better than expected!
    • I’m going to buy it. But more than that, I’m going to tell others – it’s so rare to find a product that’s better than expected, it’s worth mentioning it!

    ..and so the virtuous cycle begins. Of course another key point is that end-users do tend to be more skeptical of OTT marketing messages. So it’s a welcome relief to those individuals when they finally get a vendor that is straightforward with them, even to the point of humility.

    There are many examples of this out there – companies where the product is genuinely better than the marketing message would imply:

    1. Redgate – I would say this, but it’s been our strategy for 20 years. And it works – Word-of-Mouth is still our strongest source of leads.
    2. Apple – my experience of Apple products, is that they repeatedly surprise you (in a good way!), with features and usability that you didn’t expect.
    3. Assassins Creed video games – one for the gamers, but these titles are always, for me, better than I expected. They don’t tell you everything you’ll be getting, you find this out yourself through game-play.
    4. SouthWest Airlines – the website makes it feel very standard, but anyone who’s ever flown with them will know that the experience is a long way from this. Always a pleasure to fly SouthWest (I can’t help recommending them!). I just hope they get through the current crisis intact.
    5. Brancott Estate lower alcohol wine – the label makes it look really average and “Supermarket-ey”. But it’s an amazing wine with only 9% alcohol. I must have recommended it to 10 people already.

    So why doesn’t everyone market this way? Because there is a tension between immediate sales and long term growth – and taking this approach, of under-selling yourself – requires some faith. And you’ll be asked by your colleagues, “Really, that’s the best you can say about this?! Aren’t you a marketer!?”. So you have to hold your nerve a little, and take some risk. Of course one way of de-risking is to try and measure WOM recommendations over time – are you getting leads in, seemingly from nowhere? If you ask customers “Why are you looking at our products?” and you get something like “A colleague told me about it”, then it’s a good sign that you are on the right track.

    Because of course when it does work, it’s one of the lowest cost and most effective marketing strategies there is. It just takes patience and sometimes nerves of steel.

  • External Marketing during COVID-19

    External Marketing during COVID-19

    Everyone’s got marketing advice about what to do in the current crisis, haven’t they? As though it’s easy and obvious what you should be doing in this “first-in-a-lifetime” situation we find ourselves in?!

    I don’t think it’s easy and obvious at all. But if you work in marketing, now is the time to earn your keep – do you really care about your customers and want what’s right for them? There are some hard choices to make, about how you react in the current situation – and those choices could have significant impact on how your customers view you after this is all over.

    NB: Context is everything – really this post is targeted at orgs that are still doing good business. For some, the current situation has seen their revenues disappear overnight, and those companies are in operational survival mode, particularly if they don’t have the necessary cash reserves to weather the storm. So this post isn’t for you – good luck of course if that is you, and hope you find innovative ways to keep going.

    But if you still have reasonably strong revenue streams coming in – this is the first of two blog posts about strategies for dealing with the crisis. This one is about the guidelines I’d recommend for your external comms – how you’re talking to your customers. The second will be about internal comms, helping your employees and company through the current crisis.

    Of course there’s been a great deal written about how marketing departments should change their outbound comms during this period – what’s in your emails? What are your sales reps saying? What are your offers?

    It’s interesting watching how companies are responding – from watching these for the last few weeks, I feel there are three different types of company, and that each should, ideally, respond in a different way – I try to give examples below of these three types, some with good responses, some with not so good. The three categories are:

    1. Orgs that can directly support the fight against the virus
    2. Companies that have a product relevant to the crisis
    3. Companies that don’t have a relevant product

    Organisations that can directly support the effort to fight the virus

    This doesn’t just mean companies that make ventilators, looking for a vaccine, or similar – it also includes organisations that are supporting the community directly: supermarkets and takeaway firms; delivery companies; hotels/travel companies that can provide free housing and logistical support, and so on.

    There are so many great examples here of companies who are stepping up and doing the right thing. For some of these organisations, the pandemic has increased business (supermarkets for example), and for some it’s seriously impacted revenue (restaurants and pubs). Really the task here is to focus on the good you can do and put your business behind it. Just a few examples I’ve seen:

    Deliveroo

    I love what Deliveroo have done here. Essentially, they’ve hacked their app to allow you to easily donate to an effort to deliver free meals to NHS workers. They have the capability (through their food delivery network) to genuinely help out with a specific problem – NHS workers being so overrun they can’t get meals easily – and they’ve made that easy for their enormous customer base to contribute. A great quick turnaround, directly helping those on the frontline.

    Chocolat Chocolat

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    On a smaller scale, Chocolat Chocolat (an amazing Chocolate shop in Cambridge) have raised money to donate what they can – chocolate – to workers at Addenbrookes (NHS hospital in Cambridge). Sure, it’s not sustenance, but it’s something that will bring some Easter joy to people who are working flat out to save lives.

    Hotel Football

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    Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs are giving up hotel rooms in their hotels free of charge to NHS workers during the crisis. Again, a situation where they didn’t have to do this – yes, the rooms are empty otherwise, but the hotel will still need upkeep and servicing, and it’s an innovative way to do the right thing, using what capability you have.

    These are just a few of the many many examples of great deeds done by organisations and individuals to directly or indirectly support the fight against Coronavirus, and all should be lauded for this work.

    Organisations with a relevant product or service

    And “relevant” is the key word here – it’s the distinction between this category and the next. Do you offer a product or service which you can genuinely say is beneficial to the general public at this time? Zoom is an obvious one – with so many people remote working, there’s a real need for video conferencing software to help colleagues work together effectively. There are lots of providers of course, but there’s no reason at all why Zoom can’t reach out and market its product in this time – they are genuinely helping people out. It’s the most obvious example, but there are a couple more I spotted that were also doing a great job.

    Ikea

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    Ikea ran a great campaign during the pandemic – they also have content about setting up a home-schooling environment, and plenty of great practical ideas for making “WFH work for you”. The point is that this is a genuine problem people are facing – “I’m now sat at home in my tiny flat, with two others, trying to work effectively for perhaps three months or more, I’ve got no space, no proper desk, no decent chair – I need help!” I also really like the tone they use in emails and the content they’re producing – “Make WFH work for you”, “Reach home-school serenity”, “Win at staying in this weekend”, “How to create a hobby-hub for the whole family”. Such a strong example of how to help out when your customers need you.

    Decathlon

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    In a similar vein to Ikea, Decathlon are running a great content campaign about helping people out with a second big concern – staying fit and healthy whilst locked down at home. Again, the key point here is that they sell products which are genuinely relevant to customers’ needs right now. It’s not a fudge or a sleight of hand – people are really struggling with fitness when most of their usual avenues for exercise have been closed off, and Decathlon are finding innovative ways to help.

    But, what do you do if you don’t have a relevant offering? The vast majority of us, particularly if you work in B2B, don’t have something that can directly impact the crisis right now – at least not if you are completely honest with yourself. What do you do in this situation?

    Organisations without a directly relevant offering

    Of course this is where most mistakes have been made. We’re all being inundated with messages from companies trying to use the current crisis to generate leads. Just in the last week I’ve had messages from sales reps suggesting “In this time of crisis, should you be thinking about your marketing agency?” and “Hope your family is well. Have you thought about benchmarking your paid search?”. It’s not that there’s no link between the crisis and these offers – it’s just that it’s tenuous at best.

    But, what should you do, if not crude lead gen? The strategy being taken by most decent orgs right now, is to give away your content for free. There are so many examples, but the two I wanted to highlight are Pluralsight and my own employer, Redgate.

    Pluralsight

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    It’s a simple strategy really. I can’t directly or indirectly help the effort against Coronavirus, and, chances are, my business is suffering a little. So what can I do? You do what you can do, and that’s to help out in any way you can – help customers take this opportunity to help themselves, fill some time, try and use this home-time productively. That’s what Pluralsight are doing by offering all of their incredibly valuable content for free for a month. And hopefully, in six months time, when people look back over this period and think “Who were the companies that acted with integrity, that I’ll go back to for my training needs?” – then Pluralsight will be at the top of that list of brands.

    Redgate

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    In a similar vein to Pluralsight, we’re taking this opportunity to support the community in the best way we can. There are other things we’re doing to directly support the COVID-19 fight, but for our customers we’re starting a new section of our site where we’ll be providing previously paid-for training content, and creating brand new training material, all just to help customers out during this period. Again, when this is all over, we want our customers to look back at Redgate and think “Yes, they did the right thing – they did what they could to help me out, even if only a small way”. We’ve also trained our sales teams to offer this material where relevant as well as a number of other activities, all with the same aim: look after customers, many of whom are going through a very tough period right now.

    So the real question is – which category do you fall in to? And be honest with yourself – if you’re not one of the very few who can directly help, then you have a simple choice: is my product or service, genuinely something which could help people right now (video conferencing, new desks/chairs, gym equipment), or is this just spin? It’s the time to do the right thing by your customers and make decisions that will impact how customers perceive and judge your brand in the next 6-18 months. Will you be on their blacklists, or will you be that company that, next time customers are thinking about who they want to work with, you’re at the top of that list?

  • Focus on Marketing Effectiveness to Scale Up

    Focus on Marketing Effectiveness to Scale Up

    Here’s a very non-theoretical problem – you’ve got two ways of spending some digital marketing budget, either a) LinkedIn advertising, or b) Facebook advertising. The former works pretty well, you manage to calculate a return of $1.50 for every dollar you spend. The Facebook adverts are more effective though – a return of $1.80 for every dollar spent. Question is – which do you do? Obvious isn’t it, it’s Facebook?

    No, the answer is both. I’d argue that, for most orgs, particularly those in a mid-stage, scaleup phase, the more you can spend on things that work, the better. Why? Because the only reason you’d choose one over the other is from a desire to improve Efficiency – to get more bang for your buck. But for many orgs that isn’t your job, your objective is to improve Effectiveness – to improve your outcomes, to grow, to maximise your revenues and profits as soon as possible. It doesn’t matter if some activities are less efficient – do them all!

    Les Binet and Peter Field explain the difference very clearly here, around 5:58:

    I think there’s an additional subtlety here for growing businesses – that the relative importance of these two approaches varies depending on the stage of growth for your company, and the objectives handed down by your boss or board. For some very early start-ups, you’re not worried about metrics like “Marketing ROI”, “Marketing generated pipeline” and so on – you’re just trying to find product-market fit, and finding any way of reaching your audience. Marketing effort is far more likely to be focused on early strategy – what is the market we’re after? Who are these people? What would they use instead of our product? Who are we competing with? How would we reach these people anyway? You’re not yet at a point where you know how to spend marketing dollars!

    For many large orgs, particularly those with investors, efficiency does become much more important – growth is relatively flat and the strategies might focus more on reducing the customer acquisition costs. I’ve spoken to a couple of people at this sort of company in recent years – not a role I envy perhaps, but at least it’s clear what you’re being asked to do. Your job is to optimise, find efficiencies, cut costs, track the Marketing ROI ruthlessly, and cut waste.

    The middle stage is interesting though. You’ve got product-market fit, you know your market, why customers buy from you and you’ve figured out a few channels and activities that seem to work. But now everyone just wants more. More leads, more growth, more $$ – there’s never enough! This is a great time for marketing – as noted in Rise of the Revenue Marketer, there’s a clear link between the activities of the marketing department and company success – it’s exciting, but it can also be a little daunting. Here’s a poorly sketched illustration, of the phase I’m referring to:

    Phases of growth

    The trick is to remember that efficiency is not your goal here. In the example at the top of this page, both tactics give profitable return – so you just need to do both. Accept that you’re picking both low-hanging fruit and high-hanging fruit. Some of your leads will be easily won – great customers, right in the middle of your Ideal Customer Profile. Sales pick them up, work the order in a matter of weeks, and hey presto – easy money. Others will be much harder to convince – the customer is a long way from a sure bet (maybe wrong industry, wrong org size, wrong technology stack). They’re very early stage – sort of interested, but they’re not sure what they want, or if they want it from you (tip – this is where great lead nurturing becomes invaluable). It’s going to take a lot of effort to win those deals – but you still need to do it. You’re not being measured on how efficiently you ran your campaigns (as mentioned in the video above, the most efficient way of running a campaign is to not run it at all!). You’re being measured on the maximisation of outcomes of leads, opportunities and revenue.

    There’s an obvious chink in this armour – a well run business has to be profitable. Is it really okay just to spend wildly? I believe strongly in tight budgetary constraints – total freedom on spend leads to laziness, and a lack of focus. In the example at the top, we’re still trying to measure what’s working and what isn’t. We’re not doing things that are unprofitable. And if the return on something was $1.01 for every dollar spent, I’d be far less interested. It’s important to still work very hard measuring what does work. You should be constantly looking for more impactful ways of spending money, and also discarding tactics that aren’t working (easier said than done!).

    But you need to be careful on cutting spend on the long-term brand building activities – the money you spend on non-activation activities that can’t be measured in the short term. These are the things that make you more effective in the long term. In a marketing department you have to weigh up your investments in short-term activation activities (“Click on this link to download our report!”), with those for long-term awareness of what you do – warming up customers for future activation. If you get this right, then you will be considerably more profitable – we all know it’s infinitely easy to get a customer interested when he/she is already aware of you, and has a positive inclination towards your offering or brand.

    So a strong mix of long-term brand building (or “Investment in propensity to buy” – far more palatable to many 😉) and a wide range of activation activities, focused on how you can be most effective – winning both low and high-hanging fruits – is, for me, the strongest strategy when your goal is growth. And if you want to scale up as quickly as you can – stop worrying about efficiencies – that’s a problem for the future!

  • Finding Balance in Marketing Strategy

    Finding Balance in Marketing Strategy

    It’s that time of year again (for us anyway) – putting together the detailed marketing strategy and plan for 2021. And yet again it’s hard going. I’m not complaining – if it’s not difficult, then you’re not doing it right. Our job as marketing leaders is to work through the almost-overwhelming volume of data and insights – both internal and external – and somehow distill that in to something concise and executable. Crikey.

    This year I was thinking why it’s so tough, particularly in marketing. My conclusion is that large parts of marketing strategy are about finding balance in your activities, making adjustments to budgets and activities to re-balance your efforts appropriately. This runs counter to an innate desire to “Make big decisions”, “Disrupt what we’re doing”, “Try something big, something new”. But most marketing is about balancing investments and activities across an enormous range of target persona, channels, offerings and activities. So why is this so complicated? I think the answer starts with the customer journeys that we’re trying to affect, and the extraordinary complexity of those journeys.

    I love this slide from Challenger:

    Challenger B2B Buyer Journey

    No need to (try!) and comprehend this – the point is that the way B2B buyers purchase from you is a long and winding road, full of shortcuts, blocks, backward loops and interactions between multiple people. To take a specific example from this diagram: yes, Web Searches are part of this journey. And if you thought that was something you wanted to fix in your planning next year because it’s not working so well – then that’s great. But it’s just one tiny part of the experience that one of the customers in a buyer group has for just one of your products. Neglecting the rest of the personas, the process and your range of offerings can lead to a scenario where you are “Robbing Peter to pay Paul”.

    To make this more tangible, here are just some of the balances we’re trying to get right this year:

    1. Brand vs. Activation. How are we splitting our budgets and investments between “Creating mental brand equity” (to quote Binet and Field) and aggressively generating leads today for sales teams? There’s a great post here, from Shane Murphy-Reuter about the need to balance activities to sow the seeds for the future, with the subsequent farming or harvesting activities needed to generate leads. And this is such a hard balance to get right – feeding the insatiable sales beast is core to our jobs. But we’re not doing our jobs properly if we’re not thinking about years 2, 3 and 4 as well.
    2. Balance across the lifecycle. As illustrated above, the idea of some sort of linear funnel for how buyers behave is pretty fantastical. Nevertheless, there are activities we do to either a) Build brand awareness/commercial intent, b) build early engagement, c) create opportunities, d) get the customers over the line or e) look after customers post-purchase. Heavy investment in any of these is so tempting – “If we get share of voice/share of search up, then the rest will just follow?!“, “We need to focus on conversion of engaged users to actual opps for sales!“, “Unless we convert these opps in to $$, why does any of it matter?” etc etc. But again, you need a balance and you need to ensure you’re not lurching too far away from any particular activity, not least because all of these stages rely on the others around them for overall success.
    3. Portfolio balance. If you only sell one product, you can ignore this. And lucky you! But most of us work for multi-product companies. And every product needs to double efforts to succeed! The problem of course is that marketing is a long-term gain. If you spent the whole of 2020 building up awareness of product X, ready for your sales team to capitalise on that demand in 2021, but you then move all of your efforts on to product Y, then you probably needn’t have bothered with the 2020 investment. You need to follow up on your work (“Okay, here’s the sales enablement material needed to convert that demand”) and that can make lurches dangerous, or at best, wasteful.
    4. Balance across personas. As we all know, customers buy in packs. Or rather, Buyer Groups, to use the correct phrase. And those groups will be a mixture of economic influencers, senior technical folk and end-users. It takes a long time to build up awareness and trust with any group of people and again, shifting effort away from that group, just as they’re getting interested and ready to consider you – can lead to a waste of that historical effort, budget and spend.

    So, I strongly feel that lurches, from one extreme to another can be dangerous, given the long-term nature of good marketing work. But obviously resources are finite – how do you manage and communicate this balance? How do you communicate the fact that, a shift in balance from A to B doesn’t mean that A no longer matters?

    I’ve started using a 2×2 for this, which I’m finding helpful:

    No alt text provided for this image

    For each quadrant, place all of your activities, personas, lifecycle stages, products in one of the four quadrants (best to do each separately…) and use this as guidance for where to invest more or less:

    • (top-left) Opportunities – Invest. These are activities which you think are important to your business, but where you’re under-investing right now. For example, if you felt that “Virtual events” was important for your strategy, but you weren’t doing much of it right now, this would go here.
    • (top-right) Secret Sauce – Protect. The most important quadrant here for communication. What are the things which are crucial to your business, you’re already doing them well, and you mustn’t screw them up? For example, if you do incredible work right now supporting sales people with a specific product, and that’s making a lot of money, that would go here.
    • (bottom-left) Sirens – Ignore. Sirens, because they’re so tempting – these are generally the new things out there, you read about on marketing blog posts (“Use TikTok to reach a new audience!”) but which are of no relevance to your business selling, say, logistical tracking software. Your job is to ignore these things.
    • (bottom-right) The Past – Reduce. Just because something worked for you in the past – a tactic, a persona, a channel, a product – it doesn’t mean it will work forever. This is the tough quadrant to fill. What are you doing right now which, if you were honest, is no longer relevant? If you were bold, what do you think is (now) a waste of everyone’s time? Your job is to actively reduce investment here, and hold your nerve.

    A 2×2 implies a process is easy – and believe me this process is anything but. But putting all of your activities in to this framework and using it to help your thinking, will help you decide “What can’t I touch?”, “Where does the balance need to shift?”, “Where can I take money from [to free it up for other things]?”. And it will also help you communicate to non-marketers the breadth of activity and work that adds up to the overall impact of your function.

    The trick is to not over-steer. It might be tempting to make bold moves, to put “Everything on red”, but marketing is a long-term game, and you’re gambling with someone else’s money! Getting the shifts in resource right – putting the money on things that are already showing promise, removing budget where it’s no longer making any impact – is the tough, but interesting part of the job. Good luck!


  • Why HR is the Most Important Department in your Business

    Why HR is the Most Important Department in your Business

    Surely not!? Surely it’s the Marketing department (I am a marketer after all)? Or maybe Sales, maybe Engineering, maybe Customer Support. But no, I want to argue that getting HR right is one of the step changes you can make to a business, with far broader impact than any of the areas listed above.

    There are a lot of well known beliefs, often cliches about the people in your business. A famous quote from Richard Branson is that “People are our greatest asset” (because if you look after them, they will look after your customers). But that isn’t what this piece is about. We all know that looking after employees is vital, and that your HR department is key to that. But I wanted to talk about something more – specifically, the implementation of good management practice and discipline, and how that underlies the success or otherwise of your company.

    We’re very lucky at Redgate. We have, by far, the best HR department (or “People Team” as we know them) that I’ve ever worked with. But this isn’t because they’re just great people (they are) – it’s because of the principles and management practices that they encourage, enforce and monitor in the company. I’ve listed these below. But the reason it’s so important to have a great HR department, is to make sure the company understands and sticks to these principles, even if it causes difficulty in the short term – to make sure the reality matches the theory. A lot of these principles have come from that group, but they also work closely with us to make sure we stick to them.

    NB: My experience of the last few years has been that every time you “fudge” these principles (for example, ignoring them to keep a talented individual happy) it leads to disruption, mis-alignment and bigger problems down the road.

    Here are some of the principles we try and stick to at Redgate, where our People Team have come up with these, then been instrumental in making sure they happen, regardless of department. A lot might seem obvious, but Redgate is the first place I’ve worked where these are actually implemented!:

    • Provide proper feedback. Everyone, in every role, gets a quarterly meeting where feedback is gathered from colleagues and peers. This is then discussed with the individual concerned, written up and uploaded to record. More than this, we don’t shy away from difficult feedback – better to mention issues early and often than wait until they’ve grown in to a “big deal”. It’s tempting when busy, to ignore this process, particularly where “You don’t think there’s anything that needs discussing – that person is great!”. But our People Team have made sure we stick to this principle, and it has pre-empted so many problems down the road, I’m thankful for this “enforcement”!
    • Simple management structures. There are different opinions and ideas here. But after many years we’ve come to the conclusion that “Simple is best” (“Ingeniously Simplicity” is part of the DNA of Redgate). Specifically:
    1. A manager manages approximately 4-8 people. You can strain this in the short-term (“I’m just managing 10 people for 3 months, to help a colleague out”), but long-term, if someone is a manager this is the correct number of people. And sometimes, for new managers, you might let them manage 2-3 people for a period, but that’s with a view towards growth.
    2. No dotted lines. No double managers. No “I’m half managing this person, also responsible for a bit of this other function, and still looking after bits of my old job. That’s okay isn’t it!?”. Make the hard calls on who’s doing what. Without this, you’ll never get true accountability, period.
    3. A manager is accountable for the people, function and performance that they manage. If you’re managing, for example, the digital marketing team, then you as the manager do far more than just handle the teams’ holiday requests – you understand digital marketing better than anyone else in the business (including your manager), you set the objectives for the team and are accountable for making them a great team, doing the best work they could be doing.
    4. A function is split in to simple, logical sub-units that everyone else can understand. For example, your Sales function might be split first by geography, then in to “Strategic Accounts”, “Mid-market”, “Inside Sales”, “Renewals”, then other functions like Sales Enablement, Sales Ops and so on. The details don’t matter, what matters is that people know that “The Mid-market team is responsible for revenue from that tier, if I’ve got a question I know who to ask, and if I want to hold someone accountable, I know the manager to talk to”. Again, Keep It Simple.
    • Professional Managers. You don’t get to be a manager at Redgate until you’ve been through a rigorous “Transition to Management” process, run by the People Team. So many problems occur when you “Give someone a chance at management” but either a) that person isn’t ready or b) doesn’t really want to do that role! The real problem with this is that it’s not just the new manager that struggles. It’s his/her team that really suffer, often in silence. So it’s vital that someone is ready for management (for everyone’s sake), and also really wants to do it – are they really happy giving difficult performance feedback as part of their job? If not, don’t take the role! As a manager of mine said many years ago:

    Everyone thinks they can do their manager’s job. The question is whether they want to

    • Do Performance Management. This is the most difficult area to write about; and I wouldn’t want to go in to details. But perhaps the most important part of the structure that the People Team provide us (and support us with) is performance management. Everyone has a Job Description and this is what people should be doing day-to-day in their roles. It seems obvious, but losing focus on these things is where many problems arise. And handling those mis-alignments early and often is the key to good performance management. If someone’s JD states that they should be “Creating a strong social media strategy, executing that strategy, and collaborating well with the rest of the business on social media plans” – then this is what they should be doing! If not, then the sooner you have a quick word (“I’m fine with you spending time on project X, but I still expect you to do these things in your JD”), the better. Of course there’s an art in being flexible, and giving people opportunities to grow – which we strongly encourage. But helping people grow in the role they’re doing is a key part of your job as a good manager. And of course, not being afraid to tackle difficult issues when they do arise.
    • Build a great team. If you are lucky enough to be managing a team, it’s your responsibility to make that group of individuals a team. I won’t wax lyrical here about what makes a great team – only perhaps that you know when you’re in one. But the job of helping those people work together, providing vision and common purpose, multiplying their efforts ten-fold to make them more effective – that, at its core, is a central part of your role. NB: It’s not the team’s job to make sure they work well together – it’s yours! Again, our People Team make sure that happens.

    These principles of management are to me, the under-pinning of any department – sales, marketing, engineering, finance, ops, research, IT, customer success, whatever you have at your org. And as I say, though they seem so obvious, they are rarely implemented.

    But why? Why do they matter so much? If you work in marketing, you should be spending the vast majority of your time thinking about great marketing. How can we reach more people? What do our customers really value? What market should we actually be working in? Is our brand still right? How can we run the best conference in the world? How can we help land that six-figure deal? And so on. My experience is that when you short-cut the management principles above, you find your time taken up with work which isn’t great marketing. Sitting in rooms figuring out “Who owns what?”, “Why these two people have clashing objectives”, “Why this person doesn’t know what he’s doing”, “Who’s really running that team, Jo or Colin?”, “Why team X just can’t seem to work together”. Firefighting people issues that just shouldn’t come up in the first place. Good management practice is how you pre-empt this stuff, so that you can spend your time on the great positive work you could be doing.

    To make sure these things are implemented you need an amazing HR department to frame the work, develop a programme and support it going forward. Of course, I’ve missed off 100 other things a strong HR team manages, and I apologize for that. But for me, these management principles are one of the key “value-adds” this group can provide to make your company and teams really thrive.


  • Your Customers Pay Your Salary (not your Employer)

    Your Customers Pay Your Salary (not your Employer)

    “Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers” – Seth Godin

    The simplest ideas are the best. But they can also seem the most banal. Hidden in the Seth Godin quote above is, I believe, one of the key differences between a mature and immature organisation. Between a company that is ready for prime time, and a startup that is just finding its feet. Actually, it’s not that hidden, it’s pretty clear – your job is to do what your customers want. When you do, they’ll pay you, and your salary will get paid. The alternative path (thinking that you know better than your customers) is a dangerous path.

    I know this seems hopelessly over-simplistic. And of course there’s more to good marketing than that. But it’s about making a choice early on – do you take the red pill of reality, accepting that your customers know more than you, that your job is, fundamentally, to adapt to their needs; or the blue pill of disillusion – that you know better than your customers, that you can “educate” them on their needs? I think the answer is reasonably easy, but why is the pill so hard to swallow?

    I’ve just come back from the Sirius Decisions Summit in Vegas. A great event, full of excellent speakers and real insight, as well as some great vendors (6sense was my favourite this time – worth checking out). One of they key messages that I heard repeatedly over the three days was the transformation of organisations from product-centricity to market-centricity. Again, that sounds banal – what does it really mean?

    It means a number of things:

    1. Your strategic decisions start from the needs of different groups of customers. From there, you work out the most profitable segments, and then what product work to do. You don’t start from your current product and see who needs it.
    2. You focus on the people who value you’re offering most (“All customers are equal, but some are more equal than others“). My favourite quote was from Lisa Singer – “The best development teams work on the things that the are most valued by your most valuable segment”.
    3. If you don’t know an answer, ask the customers. Assume the (aggregated) customers know more than you.
    4. Build your planning cycle from the needs of customer segments inward, rather than starting from your product, and building out “The plan for the product”.

    There’s also something else though, that they didn’t mention – and that’s about how we develop our offerings, and how we adjust our course as we get feedback.

    There’s a lot of online debate about what Agile development still means, so many years after the manifesto was published. For me, the clue is in the name. It’s not about speed, it’s about the ability to change direction (based on customer feedback!). It reminds me of this quote from Warren Buffett, way back in 1989, talking about ‘institutional imperative’:

     (1) As if governed by Newton’s First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction;

    His point, that he makes elsewhere, is that organisations struggle to change direction, once on a given path. It’s reasonable – you’ve thought about your next steps, you have a vision, you don’t want to flip-flop. You don’t want to look like you don’t know the answers.

    But what if the customer says otherwise? What do you do if you go out with v0.0.1 and 78% of customers say “You’re wrong – we don’t want this”. Do you stick on your current path, or do you pivot?

    This comes back to the humility of marketing, and starting from a belief that the customer is always right. Mark Ritson puts it well here – https://www.marketingweek.com/2018/04/03/mark-ritson-marketers-data-privacy/. That our job as marketers is to ‘listen’ and ‘serve’, not to ‘convert’ and ‘educate’.

    What does this mean practically? I always thought Jeff Bezos’s insistence on the “Empty chair for the customer” was a bit cheesy. But it’s not – it’s genius. It reminds you that, in every single discussion you have (whether it’s about a product feature, an advertising campaign, a sales tactic, an invoicing email, anything), you should always be referencing the customers’ point of view – it’s so easily forgotten.

    And of course the other way is to do it for real. How often do you talk to customers? How often do they visit your company? How many do you know? Personally? I have a rule-of-thumb that time spent with a customer is never wasted time. You always learn something, and even if you don’t, you do (for example, that many of your customers just want to buy and use your software, and not talk about it much! This is insight).

    But lastly, as Mark Ritson points out, you have to start with humility. Once you accept that your customers know more than you – because they’re paying your salary – you’ll find it much harder to fail in any endeavour. At the very least if you’re doing what customers want, there’s a good chance you can build a business on it in the long run.


  • To learn about the “Buyer Process” try buying something

    To learn about the “Buyer Process” try buying something

    I guess this is more a post about sales rather than marketing per se, but still – understanding buyer journeys and how you can help at different stages is an important part of the marketing role, particularly when the sales cycle is complex.

    I’ve read quite a lot about marketing funnels – how customers at different stages of their journey want to hear different things from you – so you need to interact with them in different ways at different stages. But it’s always felt rather theoretical – it looks good on paper, but does it translate in to the real world? Of how people actually interact with your company? Or is it just for nice PowerPoints?

    In the last few months I’ve experienced being on the other side – i.e. actually buying something – four different times. And all at similar price points to my company’s offerings. It’s been really interesting being the recipient of marketing (and sales) output from these four different companies. I’d say two of them have done a good job, and two have done rather poorly (both in terms of sales and marketing).

    Rather than name names, I’ll just list the things that I think the two good companies did well and not so well. Most importantly though, it was only by experiencing these processes for real – i.e. not on a PowerPoint slide – that I really understood the impact on the potential buyer. My top-level conclusion was that it’s very easy to undermine your product with poor marketing and sales, and most of these things were pretty obvious.

    Anyway, here are some of the things sales folk and marketers did well and poorly:

    1. Listen to the buyer, and adjust as you go along. This is the biggest one for me. I kept re-hearing things of which I was already convinced. A lot of marketing collateral, messaging and content is targeted near the top of funnel – “We’re just trying to get people in with a high-level aspirational message, to get the lead numbers up”. This is fine, but if I’m already on the phone to you, then I’m convinced of stage 1. A couple of times I was sent collateral introducing me to the company – but I already knew who they were and what they did! And worse, these were repeated at the top of every sales call. If I’m talking to a sales rep, I want to talk detail, functionality, price, engagement plans, PoCs, that sort of thing. I don’t want to watch a 10 minute brand presentation. Again. The best presenters jumped straight to the point in presentations and calls, not repeating old messages, and recognising that I was already convinced they knew what they were doing.
    2. It’s not just about functionality – I’m buying the company as well as the product. The best two companies start out with their company pedigree – how long they’ve been around, who their customer base is, even who’s on their board and who’s invested in them. When I know a company is run by the best in the business, and they have a long runway ahead of them, I’ll take them seriously. If I get a sniff that this is a start-up run out of someone’s garage, I’ll run a mile.
    3. Product vision and roadmap are key. Again, the best sellers presented a roadmap for where the market was going, how they understood the market infinitely well, how they would be providing functionality now and in the future (read “years”). These investments are always long-term and I need to know that the company has a vision of what’s coming and that they understand the market better than me. And that they’ll create product to match!
    4. Case-studies and big reference customers are really useful. The best sellers opened with “By the way, we’re currently being used by [insert long string of companies we’ve all heard of]. Do you want to talk to any of them?”. Immediately removes any fears I have that this is a two-bit organisation.
    5. Professionalism. Perhaps I’m repeating the same point here, but there was a marked contrast between the professionalism or “grown-up-ness” of different organisations. From the way people talk to you at a booth, to the way they run presentations. This was also reflected in the tone of the marketing material. I’m buying grown-up products, not toys for my kids! Some of the material was “fun” but expensive marketing software is a serious business 🙂
    6. Dump the superlatives. It’s a minor one this, but every time you use the phrases “best”, “unique”, “incredible”, “leading” and so on, it doesn’t mean anything. You need to use more descriptive and meaningful adjectives in your collateral. For example, if something is described as “The most complete database of prospects for …” then that means something – it means that there’s a good chance the database has the most entries and covers most of the market. All to be validated, but still good. However if it’s described as “The best database of prospects for …” then that doesn’t mean a thing!
    7. Great and intelligent objection-handling is key. By far, the biggest differentiator between good and bad was the ability of the sales person to listen to my objections and handle them well. Two examples:
    • How to do it properly. Certainly for one of the purchases I had some quite complex and internal reasons why I couldn’t proceed to do with priorities, timing that sort of thing. Rather than ignoring those objections, the great salesperson listened and came back with a plan for how they could work with me to alleviate my time pressures (rather than add to them), and remove this roadblock – a great piece of work that really helped the sale.
    • How not to do it. In contrast, with another seller in a similar situation (i.e. I was blocking based on various complex reasons), he just repeated the sales pitch again. I.e. ignored my objections and just kept hitting me over the head with the same slide deck. It didn’t help..

    It’s also worth pointing out that, if part of your role as a marketing department is to represent your company in the best possible light – i.e. to provide the best possible customer experience for customers – then your sales people are leading the charge on that front. My “customer experience” of all of these four companies was primarily determined by my interactions with sales people – and there was a marked contrast between the good and the bad. I like to end on a positive, so here are the traits of the great sales people (much of which follows from the points above):

    1. Knew their product. Not to the same level as their technical colleagues, but to some depth.
    2. Responsive. I.e. replied to emails and phone calls. So basic, but incredible how hard it was to get in touch with some people.
    3. Professional. I’m not your mate 😉
    4. Great at objection-handling – see above.
    5. Had my interests and goals at heart. The best took time to understand what I was trying to do.
    6. Grown-ups. This isn’t an ageist thing, but – I don’t like being sold six-figure pieces of software by kids straight out of college. A few years experience really shows in the call.

    So, if you want to really understand what the “Buying Process” actually means in the real-world try it out. Of course, if you really want to be sneaky, try it out on your own company! Or get a friend to do so. Hopefully you’ll be impressed. But it might also highlight where you’re dropping the ball or using inappropriate marketing at different points. Worth a try.


  • Your Primary Job as a Marketing Leader is to Prioritise

    Your Primary Job as a Marketing Leader is to Prioritise

    I’ve just finished the excellent Complete Guide to B2B Marketing by Kim Ann King. It’s very “List-ey” – it’s full of To Do lists (“Want to figure out your budgets for media spend? Here’s a 7-point list of how to do it”), which I really like. Many marketing books are rather waffly and vague, so a practical guide is always welcome.

    But, here’s the rub – by the end of the book it would be very easy to feel completely overwhelmed by the list of things you need to do to be running a world-class marketing organisation! From reading the book you’d be left with the impression that you must be doing all of the following:

     

    1. Fully integrated web, marketing, customer and predictive analytics
    2. Implemented full experimentation and optimisation platform
    3. Full marketing automation
    4. Advanced personalisation and targeting across all channels
    5. Complete oversight of the marketing funnel from out-of-funnel to leads to MQLs to SQLs to closed
    6. A clean, de-duped and pristine CRM
    7. A full inbound/content strategy
    8. Deep and extensive planning cycles from data to goals to strategies to tactics to results and back round again – carried out quarterly
    9. Segmentation, positioning, messaging, buyer personas and so on for every product group and segment
    10. A Brand awareness plan for new markets
    11. Demand generation activities across all stages of the funnel
    12. Full retention marketing plan for your “existing customer” segment
    13. A plan for organisational enablement for all of the above including budgets, staffing, forecasts
    14. On top of all this, keeping on top of new developments in marketing, self-education and so on

    ..and this is just scratching the surface. In fact she’s very open in the first chapter about how the role for anyone in marketing today can feel overwhelming, that there is so much to keep on top of.

    How do you cope with this? All of the things above seem vital, important – how can you be doing your job properly unless you’re doing all of the above?

    I’ve also just re-read Porter’s great article on Strategy (https://hbr.org/1996/11/what-is-strategy – you need an HBR subscription to read it unfortunately). One primary point he makes is to ask the question “What is a strategy?” and one of his tenants that qualifies an activity as “strategic” is whether or not you are making choices to not do something. For example, if at your business you want to “Improve the reporting system so that we can see product performance better” – this might be a big project, but you’re not choosing to not do anything. No-one would choose to “Make reporting worse so that we can’t see what’s going on”. All you’re doing is improving your business effectiveness.

    However if your company had two products, A and B, and you said that “We’re only going to sell product A going forward and stop selling product B” – that’s strategic, because someone else could choose to sell product B instead (or stick with both, or neither).

    How is this relevant to Kim Ann King’s book? You have to make choices. You have to make choices about which elements of marketing activity you are going to focus on, and to which you are going to say No. This is your job as a marketing leader, to prioritise and say no to things. Anyone can take the list above and propose “Doing all of the above”, but that road leads to a lack of focus and burnout.

    How do you choose? It’s the simple, but difficult job of understanding your business, and where your problems are. To take an example from my own organisation, Redgate. There’s a section in the book about “Building a community site, with content to build trust and inbound for your brand”. But, we are fortunate to already have this (a couple of sites, http://www.sqlservercentral.com and http://www.simple-talk.com). It’s not that these can’t be improved, but is it a priority to start a new community site at Redgate? No it isn’t.

    This is an easy one though – when you’ve already ticked something on the list. What about all the things you haven’t done yet? This gets more difficult, but then this is your job. Should you spend the next year cleaning and de-duping your CRM system so that you can implement advanced personalisation and targeting? Or re-branding your company? Or building analytical capability for the future? Or implementing a MarTech platform? Or experimenting with new channels?

    The job is to diagnose – what are your current problems? What is currently holding your business back, your constraints? What work could you do that would move you towards your company goals next year? This latter point is vital – if your company objectives are about growth rather than, say, cost-cutting, or process improvements, this suggest different activities.

    What’s very important is to recognise the different go-to-market strategy and type of company that you work in, compared to others. Perhaps my one criticism of this book is that, though it purports to be specific to B2B marketing, there’s not enough opinion on what is most useful for B2B marketing, and what’s more relevant to B2C. There’s some (e.g. that LinkedIn is more relevant than SnapChat) and there is more of a focus on lead nurturing through to sales people (more relevant to the high-value/low-volume world of traditional B2B), but there isn’t quite enough direction on “This activity is popular about B2C marketers, but really is a waste of time for you”.

    This is where your job comes in – what sort of B2B org do you work at? At Redgate, really we’re B2BC. We’re absolutely selling software to businesses – there’s no way Jo Public is interested in SQL Server comparison tools. But, where most traditional B2B orgs are high-value/low-volume with all that entails (low lead volume, high ATV, significant sales nurturing, multiple buyer personas in each org etc etc), we are much closer to B2C in our business model – low ATV, high volume, mass (1:many) digital marketing and so on. So for us, certain activities are more relevant than others. As an example, most marketing automation platforms use a nurturing model based on slowly taking leads through a number of stages (awareness, leads, MQLs, SQLs etc), using personalised content – based on in-depth data and analytics for different customer segments. This is needed because often B2B organisations have complex offerings that need to be explained and “sold” to companies, so that they understand the benefits of spending $500k with that vendor.

    But – what if this isn’t you? What if you sell software for $400 that, quite frankly doesn’t need explaining in this way? What if it’s pretty darned obvious what it does, and the free trial tells the end-user everything they need to know? In that scenario, is it worth investing millions of dollars in a new marketing automation platform? What’s the uplift going to be – will you ever get payback?

    It’s these hard decisions that you need to make to ensure you and your team don’t get overwhelmed with new activities. You’re making strategic decisions when you decide not to do one thing and instead do another. May be you put marketing automation off for a year (despite the overwhelming message from the industry that you have to be be doing it ) and focus on finding new customer segments instead? Maybe for you, it’s about starting a significant community platform this year, and everything else can just keep ticking along?

    Once you’ve decided, there’s then the equal challenge of leading the change through your organisation. Every idea (automation, branding, content, channel, sales support etc etc) will have its advocates in your company. You need to hold on to the logic for why you’ve chosen A, not B, and try to get that adopted through the company so that everyone is working to the same goals. The strategy is just the start of the process…

     


  • Measuring Customer Experience

    Measuring Customer Experience

    Customer Experience (CX) – it’s a popular topic right now, analogous to the importance of User Experience (UX) in the world of product development.  And something which I strongly believe is important for a marketing team to get right. So, we all know that getting your Customer Experience great and consistent is important for all of your customers’ touch points but – how on Earth do you measure if it’s working or not? Was it worth the effort?

    There’s a great piece I read here recently about the issue of “end-to-end” funnels – basically give up on the idea of a linear funnel where a customer moves through the buyer process from “Awareness” to “Discovery” to “Validation” to “Retention”, measurable through cohort analysis and conversion rates. The reality is that customers interact with your brand in multiple, unstructured, unordered ways at the end of which (hopefully!) they buy your product (aka the “Dark Funnel”). If someone is buying a car how did they end up at that decision? Sure they might have visited VW’s website, but they might also have asked friends, gone on to review sites, read a motoring magazine, asked a question on Twitter, spoken to the sales reps in the showrooms, researched forums – all in a semi-random order, unpredictable and – key – very hard to measure.

    I really agree with this – and the suggestion I take from this is: stop worrying about measuring it all and just make great customer experiences. That’s enough – if you’ve made your website great, your social media channels interactive and high quality, your support is top-notch, you respond quickly on forums, you’re friendly and positive at events etc, then belief is enough to justify this “investment”.

    But, is that enough – is there any way of measuring the impact of your work? Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one possibility – and it is the sort of thing that can be measured. But from a PDCA perspective (where we’re trying to measure the impact of our work and adjust accordingly), it’s very slow, and let’s be honest, optimistic to think that you’re going to be able to separate out the impact of your marketing work in an NPS score from everything else. What if your company has just released a ton of great product to the market at the same time – what had the impact on NPS? It feels unsatisfactory.

    So we need something more immediate. The best I could come up with, and the thing I’m going to try, is “Mystery Shoppers”. It seems obvious but in the world of User Experience what do we do to test the usability of our products? We ask users to try the product out – simple. So why not do the same for your CX? Get five people, at regular intervals to pretend they have a need related to your products – and to go through all the necessary interactions with your brand to buy something. From first Google search, to some forum interaction, maybe a question on Twitter, download a whitepaper (and try to understand it!), follow your Facebook page, phone up support, try to use the product, try to buy it, get follow-on help and so on.

    And you could have different types – someone acting as an end-user vs. a corporate buyer. Someone who is totally self-service/won’t speak to anyone vs. someone who wants to sort everything out on the phone. An expert vs. a newbie. A difficult so-and-so vs. a “happy path” customer.

    Then of course you can get both qualitative and quantitative data from those people about their “Customer Experiences” – put the numbers on a chart and use PDCA process to see where the problems are (“We’re great if you get us on the phone, but self-service customers are really struggling” or “They’re great once they’re using the product, but it was a mess up to that point”). And you can use the qualitative feedback to know how to act. If a mystery shopper says “I just couldn’t understand from your site what your product actually does“, then may be better explanation? Or better still, a video?

    It shouldn’t cost much to implement and the feedback should be invaluable – as long as you then act on it! NB: It’s also important to get people disassociated from your company. Just asking the people in your team, or a regular customer who has loved you for years isn’t enough. You want people who’ve barely heard of you, or haven’t interacted with you for years – proper, independent input is the most valuable, and what you should be seeking.


  • If a Brewery Can Innovate, So Can You

    This weekend we went to Southwold and Aldeburgh – two of my favourite places in the UK, for various reasons. One of these reasons is the Adnams Brewery, based in Southwold. It’s been going for over a century and has always produced wonderful beer (as well as other drinks).

    But a few years ago I noticed a new range of beers in the shop. It’s a new brand – “Jack Brand” in fact, and includes 4 or 5 beers, all of which I can happily say are really interesting, new beers. They are to an extent riding the wave of “Craft beers” of various sorts, the beers are often quite hoppy and will appeal to customers who like that sort of thing (including me), but that’s not quite the point.

    The thing that’s most impressive is that a company working in what is generally perceived to be quite a staid industry has managed to do some interesting commercial innovation. And they’re a small company too, I doubt they have enormous research departments to look in to this sort of thing.

    They’ve innovated in terms of the product (they’re not just re-labelling something else, but have come up with new, different tastes) and the brand. I also like the names of the beers (e.g. the one pictured – “Innovation IPA”!).

    And I’m pretty sure it’s been very successful – I’ve seen the beer in a lot of pubs in Cambridge and it seems to be doing well.

    So, if a brewery can do it, why can’t you? If they’ve managed to get their marketing team and their brewers together and come up with something this successful, what’s stopping you from doing the same? Of course there are 10s of thousands of articles and books on how to get the innovation process going, how to manage it in a standardised way and so on. But I’m not sure it’s that complicated – I’d be surprised to learn that the small group of people at Adnams spent months instigating a complex innovation process at the office.

    So the question is, what’s stopping you re-creating something like this in your business? A new representation of an existing product? A new, innovating way of using your product a different way? A new pricing system (monthly payments, daily even, free for non-commercial etc etc!?)? A radically cheaper, stripped down version for a different market? Or a much more expensive version with added services for a different market? Different brands for different groups of customers? Combinations of your products for different people?

    And the list goes on – many of these innovations are easy to implement, but they’re often not easy to make happen, particularly in larger organisations.

    And maybe that’s why Adnams managed to do this so easily – they’re a small company, presumably with little red tape and a culture where these things can happen without too much pain. What can you do at your org to foster this sort of activity? Do you block new ideas or nurture them? What can you do to help?


  • People. Customers. Action.

    I was mugging up again last week on the McKinsey 7-S Model, now pretty old, but I still think a great framework for looking at organisational effectiveness. All very interesting, but then I found the post that Tom Peters wrote about the book decades later and found a quote that I particularly liked:

    “You could boil all of Search [the book, “In Search of Excellence”] down to three words: People. Customers. Action.”

    You read further and then find that Peters actually wrote a piece years later undermining the need for a business strategy at all! Controversial when you work for a strategy consultancy, but ho hum. What he was really saying with that succinct phrase was “Get great people motivated to succeed, keep close to your customers, and get on with it! (i.e. a bias to action)”. Sure you might have a great business strategy, an okay business strategy, or no strategy at all – but that’s less important than having a motivated work force, knowing your customer and actually doing something.

    A lot of later literature on company performance has evolved from some of these principles that Peters and Waterman  professed. For example, Jim Collins’ “Good to Great” is an obvious descendant. And the now well-known quote that “Culture Trumps Strategy, Every Time” is rooted in this perspective.

    And it’s a perspective I love – there’s a real danger with modern businesses to think that the culture of your organisation is just some dull fluff stuff to do with foosball, free cokes and not having to wear a tie. But it’s not – the way people work, the way they like to work together, the behaviours that are encouraged or discouraged, whether the right people get promoted or demoted, the interview selection criteria, the management structures and goals – all this is, for me, even more important than the specific strategy plan you happen to be following this year. If you can get your people aligned with that strategy, then the multiplicative effect of that can be enormous. If you ignore your people, then your strategy will come to nought.

    A nice analogy was given to me a year or so ago about these elements of organisational effectiveness. Your company performance is a like putting on a play. You have:

    1. Your Environment: where your theatre is based. There’s little you can do about this, though you need to keep an eye on what’s going on in your neighbourhood, and adjust accordingly.
    2. Your Business Strategy: the script. This is what you’re actually doing, working on.
    3. Your Capability: the actors who are delivering the play.

    The point is – you can have the best script in the world, but if your players suck, or aren’t motivated towards excellence, the play is going to suck either way. But of course it’s not just about the players sucking, it’s actually about their motivation to make the play great – yes, they need the skills, but do they form part of a trusted team? Are they given the appropriate autonomy? Do they have clear goals? In essence, are they supported by the organisation, or held back?

    It’s this sort of question that you need to look at if you feel that your strategy isn’t quite going as swimmingly as you thought. Maybe it’s not the strategy, maybe it’s the support structure for your people and the culture you’ve created? Or maybe you drifted too far from your customers? Perhaps you’ve been blocked organisationally so that you couldn’t get on with your work? (On the last of these: there’s one thing I can guarantee – if you don’t do a piece of work, then you certainly won’t have any impact!)


  • Why You Can’t Pivot as Quickly as You’d Like

    Theamerican-sniper_612x380_1re’s a great scene, towards the end of the film American Sniper, where Bradley Cooper’s character has to take a shot from over a mile away from his target.

    But the point is, there’s a long time between the point he takes his shot, and when he finds out if he has hit or not. It’s not like shooting a pistol from 20 yards – you have to wait to see the results of your efforts.

    One of the authors who has been influential at the place I work is Jim Collins – in his book Great by Choice, written with Morten Hansen, he describes how you should “Shoot bullets before cannonballs”. What he means by this, is that in a world of uncertainty, full of assumptions, you need to test your ideas [with the market] with small bullets first (i.e. small investments of resource). Wait to see what hits, then go in with your cannonballs when you know what will work (rather than wasting cannonballs early on).

    This is a great idea of course – why start a team of 100 people on a project when you don’t know if it’s a good idea or not?

    And this is great, when you’re running a startup using a SaaS model and the Lean Startup principles – promote an offering on your site on Monday, check the feedback metrics Tuesday to Wednesday and pivot to a new proposition by Friday, if it’s not working out.

    But the issue is that, in my experience in the world of B2B, that feedback mechanism takes more than a week to work. Hopefully you have a great Agile team, producing a minimum viable product as soon as possible, getting early ideas out to customers quickly. And you’re doing everything you can to get qualitative and quantitative insight from those customers. But is this enough information to make a pivot? Do you really know if your bullet has hit home or not just yet? There are a few issues that make this process slower than we’d all like:

    1. As mentioned, the speed to get a first version out. The principles of Lean Startup are that you shouldn’t wait to have a fully working version before trying with customers. But I just don’t think you can get accurate, actionable feedback for an idea based on sketches on the back of a napkin. Particularly if you take in to account the points below.
    2. Numbers – we’re not making changes to Facebook here. Each new idea isn’t getting seen by 5 billion users. If you have billions or even millions of users, then it only takes a tiny percentage to react to your new offering to get statistically significant data on what you should do next. But what if you only have thousands of customers? Or hundreds? Most of these people have day jobs and won’t have time to tell you whether your new idea for an “Automated Dog Grooming Service” (I heard this a few weeks back) is a good one or not.
    3. Money – the true test. Someone looking at your sketch and saying “Yeah, looks pretty good” does not a sound, profitable business make :) If you want to test if people really like your idea (i.e. they’re willing to give you dollars for it), then you need to start selling it. And that involves sales cycles, proof-of-concepts, purchasing processes and so on. Particularly of course if you’re selling for more than $10 per month. If you want to test whether your $100,000 proposition is a winner or not, you’re not going to find that out in a week.

    So these things mean you have to wait for more than a few days to see if your bullets are hitting their targets, before you load up the big guns.

    But this is a problem – the issue is: when do I know if my bullets have missed? I started the project months ago (fired the first volley – not sure how long this analogy will last…), and I still don’t know if I’m shooting in the right direction or not? What do I do? Change target now? Wait and see? What if it takes 6 months, a year even before I know if the idea is good? Do I just carry on regardless?

    This is a real problem – kill a project too early, and you could be clutching defeat from the jaws of victory. Keep it going unnecessarily and you’re just burning money (and teams, that could be used elsewhere for more profitable gains). But how do you decide, when the evidence isn’t in yet?

    I think there’s a few things you can do in fact:

    1. Good ol’ fashioned product management. Is there a market for this product? People paying money for similar services? Who’s the competition? I love this tweet: https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/614904706624720896 – there’s basic work to be done showing that there’s a market for your service, people are willing to pay for that service, that the incumbent isn’t unmoveable and so on. If you have confidence you’re addressing an existing market, with a better product, in a environment where you have reach and brand recognition, you should have confidence of success that can take you through the low points.
    2. Being honest about the feedback you are getting. With a new idea I, personally, think that unless people are chewing your arm off to get something (“This is magic!”, “How did I survive without this!?”, “Please can I give you some money for this?”) then you need to be pretty cautious and honest with the feedback you are getting. Often we know a set of close customers really well, and this is great, but those close relationships can make it hard for said customers to tell you the truth about your new idea. You present something to them, you can’t help but convey your sparkly-eyed enthusiasm for this new miracle of software that you’ve created, and few people have the heart to tell you what a piece of crap it is. So despite the issues outlined before, you do need to be taking your idea to as many people as possible as early as possible. But more than that, you need to listen to them, encourage “constructive” criticism, and when 19 out of 20 people respond with “Meh”, hear that, and think about drowning your puppy.
    3. Hedge, intelligently. Have a fallback, be thinking about alternatives, alternate uses for the technology and so on. If you do get to, say, 6 months in to your project, and are beginning to have serious doubts, this shouldn’t be the first time you’ve thought about a bad outcome. Really you should have been considering the bad outcomes from day 1. I like to think of this as “Schrödinger’s Cat Thinking” – you don’t know, on day 1, whether the cat is alive or not, but you should be thinking about what you do in either circumstance. Perhaps there’s a way of developing the product so that it can be easily switched to another market? Or sold off to someone if it doesn’t fit with your business? If you’re a sniper, waiting for your shot to hit home, you should have a plan of what do do next, regardless of the outcome [by the way, I know literally nothing about such military affairs, so I have no idea if this is the case or not – but it seems reasonable]. In essence, if you decide to pull the plug, you should be ready to go with “What next?”, not sitting there shrugging.

    But the reality is that, even if you take these things in to account, you’re likely to have a long period in limbo, not sure whether you’re on to a winner or not, not sure whether to kill the project or not.

    And this is where leadership comes in. What effect would it have to go to a team and say “Well, things are looking okay – I’m not sure, but there’s a chance we might kill your project at some undefined point in the future. Still, off you go – make progress!”? All you’re doing here is undermining that team, leaving them in a state of uncertainty, likely to seriously damage productivity.

    Instead that team needs your support and backing. And they need to hear it from you. Yes, you may be only be 60-70% sure that what you’re doing is going to pan out, but internalising that uncertainty is part of your role – it doesn’t help to transmit your worries to everyone around you. So if you have a 6 month period where the project is in the balance, better to assume that project will succeed – and push it hard – than to dither and create a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure..


  • Better to be in the Arena Fighting…

    (c) Paintings Collection; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

    A place I used to work, perhaps 10-12 years ago, had (what I think, now) was a strange custom. Every Monday morning the whole company would get together to go through everything. There were around 70 of us, at the peak, and we would all stand around from about one-and-a-half hours going through sales, marketing, development, ops, specific projects and so on. This was tiresome, to say the least. I had this slight sense of dread each Monday morning as 10am loomed, and we all started shuffling to the space “around the boss’s desk” (difficult with 70 of you..).

    Anyway, thinking back, the main points I remember from these meetings were:

    1. There were pastries every time – and you had to position yourself well, to get the “good ones”. Other than the specific point I make later, this is almost the only thing I remember from, probably, 100-150 hours of my life.
    2. The reviews from sales consisted of trying to sell (to us), why the latest lead was inevitably going to lead to untold riches. When this didn’t happen (months later), rather than updating us on “I’m afraid that dead cert didn’t cross the line”, instead these deals were conveniently forgotten. After a year, you begin to get cynical..
    3. Development – every week the same: “We’ve done an extra week of work on product X. Nothing really to show”.
    4. Ops – incredibly, almost every week, the update from ops wasn’t about servers, our technical infrastructure etc, but almost always seemed to be about desks and chairs – that we were getting new ones, that we were re-arranging the current ones to suit new starters, that we’d “had a rethink about the larger desks” and so on. An extraordinary waste of time.

    So we’d endure these sessions every Monday morning – it filled the time until lunch – at the end of each session would be the CEO’s rousing finale, where he’d fire up the troops ready for the week ahead. This generally wasn’t great and, to be fair, how do you come up with something new week in week out? Particularly in quite a slow moving business where not a whole lot happened each week? “Go dev team, continuing to fix that next tranche of indecipherable bugs!!”.

    But, there was one speech which I do remember, and still remember to this day. We’d been going through a tough period with our investors, questioning our progress, our organisation, our management (how dare they, with their millions of dollars sunk in to us :) ), and a lot of people in the company, who’d been trying to make progress on product, marketing and sales, had had to spend a lot of time dealing with requests for information from these people. We knew we had to do it, but still. We’d also had some issues with journalists, and analysts too, not quite seeing our way on things – whether they were right or wrong, again, it’s an exhausting process, trying to keep these groups happy when you have a day job to get right.

    And it was at one of these Monday morning meetings that the boss stood up and gave a 20 minute oration on the topic of “Better to be in the arena fighting, than in the stands criticising and judging”. This is a relatively well known topic, and subject of such speeches, but it was such an impassioned 20 minutes, painting a picture of us in the company, fighting lions and gladiators (he had a background in the classics) whilst the petty and ill-informed outside world looked on, passing judgement without understanding the problems we faced (fighting lions!), that for once, it did genuinely rouse the company, and left us all leaving that meeting with just a bit more energy for the week ahead.

    There were, in fact, two things that I took away from this event:

    1. The value of a good speech, particularly in terms of timing. Our boss knew exactly what the feeling was in the company at the time (that we were all trying really hard to do something, and were being ground down by external sceptics), captured that feeling and spoke about that topic, rather than something else. And, as I say, I think a background in Classics helps!
    2. The subject itself – I strongly agree with the principle that, it’s better to be having a go at something, however well or badly, making mistakes, learning from those mistakes, trying new things, than to be on the sidelines, passing comment.

    It’s why I’ve never been a fan of journalists or critics – far better to be a musician, putting out an average album, than a journalist critiquing that album. What positive contribution do you make!?

    So, a great speech, given at the right time, with a point-of-view that I strongly support. I just wish I could remember something else from the 100s of hours spent standing around, chewing on Pret-a-Manager almond croissants (definitely one of the “good” pastries)…


  • The Difference Between Management and Leadership

    TheWeatherProjectWhat is the essential difference between “Management” and “Leadership”? Are these, basically the same thing – “The stuff you do when you get “Manager” in your job title somewhere? These are both such vague, all-encompassing terms (perhaps the worst job title for this is “General Manager” – it sounds like you “just do stuff” not even specific to a particular domain!) that it can be hard pin down any sort of definition of each. Also note, very few people have “Leader” in their job title, a lot of people have “Manager”. Why the difference?

    Completely ignoring job titles, which just confuse the issue, I’ll argue that these are very different modes of operation. In essence, Management is about “Things”, and Leadership is about “People”. This is a mild overstatement, but the difference is important.

    What does this mean? To understand this difference, it’s useful to think about some examples of the way the word “management” is used, outside the office – terms like “Pain management”, “Waste management”, “Estate management” and so on. All of these describe jobs that involve looking after processes, performance indicators, co-ordination of activities and so on. I.e. “Things”.

    Leadership on the other hand is a very different job. Again, various descriptions such as “Taking people on a path they wouldn’t otherwise take” and so on, but these can be a little vague. The definition I like, from a course I did last year is “Vision, Team and Communication”. It’s about providing a clear vision of where you’re going, getting the right team together and communicating that vision well. I.e. it’s about inspiring and leading “People”.

    And I think, therefore, that the skills needed are very different. Leadership isn’t about carefully managed processes and KPIs – measurement, recording, project management. That is all in the arena of “Management”. It’s about inspiring people to believe in what you’re doing, communicating clearly what the path is, and so on. You can be fantastic at managing projects, keeping on top of KPIs and so on, but wanting when it comes to inspiring the people around you. Similarly, you might be amazing at bringing your team along with you, and inspiring people – but absolutely hopeless at managing a project, and keeping on top of things.

    I think this is why “Manager” in a job title can be unhelpful. It’s often used to denote someone who is being asked to do both activities – “Manage” everything that’s going on in a given domain in the strict sense, but also “Lead” a group of people. And these tasks are very different – with different skill sets. I’d even suggest these are quite different personality types – management is more attuned to the Introvert type, lovers of process, people who find satisfaction in making sure everything is “In hand” and under control. Leadership is perhaps more appropriate for an Extrovert type – someone who enjoys telling a story, working with people (rather than spreadsheets), talking.

    But there’s an advantage here – and why I think so few have the word “Leader” in their job title. Management is, I think, quite a specific role – you need to assign people to these roles to make sure things get done. “Project Manager” is the classic version of this – a specific job needed to make sure projects are run properly (i.e. “Managed”!). But Leadership is something that can be done by anyone. You can have a new graduate come in, inspire the team with some incredible ideas for the future (“Vision”), help get the team coalesced and flying (“Team”) and is constantly re-telling the story of what’s happening internally and externally (“Communication”).

    Unfortunately, many job titles are confusing. “Product Manager” is a classic example – though some of this job is about “Managing the product”, really a lot of it is about leadership – inspiring a team to work on your ideas and communicating internally and externally about what’s being done.

    So it’s something worth thinking about – regardless of your job title, are you really doing a job of “Management” or “Leadership”? The former is relevant to many people (and the chances are, they do have “Manager” in their title somewhere). But I’d suggest the latter is appropriate for everyone.


  • The Value of Completely Arbitrary and Artificial Constraints

    Anish KapoorAnother slightly abstract post today, though based on very real and pragmatic problems. When working on a project, where there are 100s of different options for things you can do and you’re drifting in to option paralysis, often a manager will use a deadline (for example, an event, or a customer demo) as a way of forcing the team to make decisions and progress – aka “helping the team to focus” :-). But I’ll argue that you can go one step further, and just use completely arbitrary deadlines to help bring focus. Why wait for an event in the real world?

    I’ve previously mentioned Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt – a great book on how to create meaningful and useful strategies. One of the core stories in the book is around the moon landings in the 60s: scientists were worried about how they could design a landing vehicle to land on a unknown surface that would survive. This was leading to paralysis where the teams couldn’t progress because there were just too many unknowns in the problem. So, what did the director do, to aid progress? She set what was, essentially, a completely arbitrary constraint, that the moon surface would look pretty much like a desert in the US. What the director was doing here was setting a completely arbitrary constraint – how could she know if the eventual lunar surface was anything like the surface of the desert? Couldn’t she just have been so wrong that all of the work was a waste of time? My view is that it doesn’t matter – what she gave the team was a way of moving forward, getting something done. Maybe it was a waste of time, but better to do something – and likely learn some things along the way – than just do nothing, paralysed by uncertainty.

    There’s another more subtle theme that goes through this book as well – constraints over time. The concept of “proximate objectives” (i.e. setting a short-term objective) relies on a constraint in time – “We are going to achieve this thing in 6 months” (or a year, or whatever). Why 6 months? Why not 9 or 10? Why should your timescales be based on half of the time it takes for the Earth to orbit the sun? Again, completely arbitrary.

    One of the great things we’ve implemented at Redgate is the concept of release trains – see http://blog.red-gate.com/success-weekly-releases-occasionally-dont-release-release-wednesday/ for some more info. This is a method for running an Agile project and representing a backlog, by splitting the work for a project up in to separate carriages on a train. Each carriage represents a block of work which will be released. But here’s where it gets interesting – each block of work (or “carriage”) is a pre-decided length. For one project, this is 6 weeks – so every block of work carried out as part of the project needs to be done in 6 weeks. How can the team work with such artificial constraints? What if the work that needs to be done is 8 weeks? Or 4 weeks?

    Here’s why this works so well – if you’re adding a new feature to a product (let’s say it’s “Allow user to register on the site”) a large part of what the product manager and team have to decide is “How big is this piece of work? How long are we going to take on it?”. And this is a problem – how do you make this decision? How do you assess the importance of the work and stop at the appropriate point, before moving on to the next feature? This is a real problem – before you do the work, you don’t really know how important it is, so when will you know when to stop?

    Now, if we set, what is admittedly, a completely artificial length, to the piece of work we do – say 6 weeks – what does this give us? At least:

    1. A roadmap – we can draw the train (with carriages) on a piece of paper and say, “Here’s what’s happening in the next 6 months – we’re going to do four blocks of work on features A, B, C and D” (four blocks of 6 weeks is approximately a half-year, with time off for good behaviour). So everyone knows what’s coming, internally and if you like, externally. NB: We’re still Agile – nothing is set in stone, we can adjust based on feedback and so on. But you are giving visibility to those that want it.
    2. It forces good decisions in a team – if you want the feature to do everything, then it won’t look beautiful. Or vice-versa – but not both. For example, for our feature “Allow users to register on the site”, well it could integrate with all sorts of authentication mechanisms – Active Directory, 3rd party mechanisms, your own, but it’s not going to do all of those in 6 weeks AND have wonderful usability. The team has to start making grown-up trade-offs – is one sort of authentication okay? Is usability more important that types of registration? Suddenly the discussion is about the real value of each piece of work to customers – and this is good.

    I.e. it gives product managers visibility and a great tool for planning, and it gives teams a mechanism for making good decisions. But primarily it stops option paralysis – conversations like “Well, if we did make it look nicer, wouldn’t that be great?” or “Why don’t we add these other three authentication systems as well?”. It allows you to get on with something, do it, finish it, measure its success and move on.

    Of course there’s a risk – what if, by just adding that one extra feature, you did the thing that every customer wanted and that made the product a success? Well, may be, but two things:

    1. How would you ever know that, upfront? You can’t.
    2. Opportunity cost – what if the next carriage on the train was the thing that unlocked customers? You’ll never get on to it if you don’t get the current carriage completed.

    So I’m a fan of completely arbitrary deadlines – IMHO, don’t even bother looking for a real deadline (or other constraint), just set one at an artificial point in time. The benefits out-weigh the cognitive dissonance caused by working to something that seems somewhat random.


  • Great Customer Service – Detail, Memory and Management

    IMG_4855I was fortunate enough this week to go for one of the finest meals of my life. Just incredible food – however, that’s not what this post is about (I believe there are many blogs out there on all things foodie..). It’s about the superb customer service that came with the meal and the elements of that service that made it really stand out.

    Everyone understands the importance of great customer service, to the extent that re-iterating that point is like reminding people to breathe. But how to give great service is a more difficult problem. Is it responsiveness? Likeability? Efficiency? Politeness? *

    The three things that, for me, make truly great customer service are attention to detail, memory of the relationship and great management. I’ll illustrate with a few examples from the meal..

    My wife booked the meal and presumably mentioned it was my birthday. As we walk in, at the mention of the name on the booking, they greet me with “Happy Birthday!” – they didn’t need to look this up, they’d been primed before we got there – great attention to detail.

    Then they brought the menus – they knew my wife had booked the meal (and that it was my birthday), so the menu with prices went to her, not me – again, great attention to detail and memory of the booking (and also, top marks of course for not automatically giving the menu with prices to the man..).

    We explained that we (only!) had three hours for the meal, so didn’t want to feel rushed as we went through the courses (it’s a long meal). They helped us with this, advising a shorter menu, which was great. But then an hour later, the maitre d’ came by and enquired “Hope you’re not feeling rushed? Do you still feel comfortable about being done in time?”. I particularly liked this – he’d remembered what really mattered to us (that we had a relaxed meal, without feeling rushed,  but with a deadline) and asked us about what really concerned us.

    There were lots more examples of this – flawless attention to detail regarding our concerns. But the other thing I noticed, was the style of management used by the maitre d’ with the waiting staff, as well as by those staff with each other. The atmosphere with the customer was quite relaxed, informal and really put us at ease. But if you watched the interactions between the people working there it was one of ruthlessly high standards and not letting anything slip. When serving a particular dish, one of the waiters was standing in the wrong position to be able serve easily. Another of the waiters corrected him (with a look – hard to spot unless you concentrated!) so that the service was flawless. Also, looking towards the kitchen, you could see the maitre d’ constantly monitoring what was happening, directing staff, correcting staff and repeatedly striving for improvement.

    What I particularly liked about this management style, was that the manager had a relentless focus on improving quality at any cost. No concept here of ROI or cost-benefit analysis. If the service wasn’t good enough, then it wasn’t good enough. Of course this is easier in a smaller organisation (like a restaurant), and not such a simple problem if you’re a multi-national bank trying to service millions of customers. But for me, if you perceive service as a “Cost to be reduced” where you’re trying to make sure the customer gets “Just about good enough service that they don’t get hacked off” then you’re on a downward spiral. This has been seen in banks and other service providers over the last few years, where customer service has been outsourced to reduce costs. Contrast this with the restaurant where the manager, I strongly suspect, couldn’t give two hoots about the cost of his service – if he needs to increase salaries to get great people, so be it. If he needs to discipline and fire someone for repeatedly not reaching the high standards he insists upon, then so be it. If he has an attitude that every day was “Just not quite good enough – I need to do better tomorrow” then great – he might be difficult to work for, but to the customer the end result can make all the difference to whether he or she comes back again.

    This does come with challenges in a larger org – how to do you embed “Memory” of a customer relationship with your representatives? They can’t remember every detail of every relationship they have (or can they!?) – so you start to rely on systems like Zendesk or Freshdesk to keep track of customer support problems or CRM systems of course, on the sales side. That’s fine, but it’s how you use these systems that count. A boss of mine from years ago knew the football teams of every customer he ever spoke to – every call to a customer would start with “I saw Stoke City did well against Palace on Saturday – you said you thought Mark Hughes was doing a great job..”. Attention to detail and memory of the relationship. This data is available to you, but are you using it properly? A lot of the practices exhibited in the restaurant can be translated to the larger organisation, though it might need process to embed it.

    And the management style can certainly be translated to the larger organisation – my view is that the head of customer services shouldn’t care too much about costs or budgets. Yes he or she might need to be reined in at times (“No, you can’t hand deliver a fruit basket to that customer in Tahiti”), but with a ruthless focus on always improving standards, regardless of the obstacles, the end result will be great for customers, and for your business.

    * By the way, things like “Likeability” and “Politeness” are, for me, just minimum requirements. Hiring someone to do customer service who wasn’t a really likeable, positive and genuinely nice person is like hiring an actor who “Doesn’t like getting up in front of people”. It’s the essence of the role!


  • Why Doing Nothing Inevitably Leads to Failure

    Expo 70Every new idea is a bad idea. Well, not quite, but every time you choose to do something new, there always seems to be 100 reasons why it’s going to fail.

    Wrong people, not enough people, misunderstanding of the market, can’t extract value from it, too many changes needed, not our core competence, not completely aligned with everything else, too aligned with everything else (“it’s nothing new”), inability to execute on the plan, too many great competitors, too few competitors (so how can there be a market?), and so on and so on.

    So what do you do? There is always the easy option – do nothing! If the project looks Herculean, you always have this as a fallback option. By doing nothing you avoid all of the problems and risks listed above in one fell swoop. And think of all the the effort and resource you’ve saved? Sounds like a great option, no?

    Before my father retired, he was an architect. Winning business in the architectural profession changed significantly during my dad’s career. When he started most work was obtained through getting to know people in your area, discussing the idea then getting the job. And if you did a first piece of work for someone, then chances are you’d get every subsequent piece of work after that.

    But all has changed during the last 20-30 years, to a process of bidding for almost every job, similar to the world of advertising. Almost any piece of work over a certain value involves multiple firms bidding for the project. This is of course, a burden on every organisation leading, in the majority of cases, to completely wasted effort. You can argue it’s inefficient – so much time that could be spent more productively – but that’s the system.

    My dad’s approach in this situation was to bid on a lot of jobs. He had specialisms, in types of buildings, size of projects, and location, but he often strayed well outside these specialisms and sunk a great deal of effort in to bidding on all sorts of weird, wonderful and occasionally distant projects. A lot of time and effort was spent in bids that led to nothing, so why take such an inefficient approach?

    Whatever the reasons why, it worked. My dad’s firm grew over the last 20-30 years, and in all sorts of unpredictable ways. Where his earlier career covered a lot of factories and industrial work, later he did work for schools, medical centres, and a lot of very interesting housing work.

    For me, the secret of this success, which my dad confirmed, was that “You never know what will come of the work you do – the future is unpredictable”. He would often bid on, say, a school extension, lose the bid but then a year later, the school governors would get back in touch saying “We really liked the bid you presented a year ago, do you want to come in and talk to us about a new school building we’re doing?”. And this happened all the time. The point of course, is that if he had never bid on that piece of (rather speculative) work, he would never have made that contact, impressed that board, and ended up with another job a year later (followed by lots of follow-up work..).

    When he retired and passed the firm on to others, they took a different, far more cautious approach. Every potential bid went through a rigorous vetting process, questions like “Is this our specialism?”, “Is it too far away?”, “Do we have enough people to cover this if we win it?” (oh, what a good problem to have!) and so on. Through this, they bid on far fewer contracts and, guess what, are not doing so well.

    So, whatever the risks, however big the mountain of problems you face, however many countless ways something could go wrong, bear in mind that repeatedly doing nothing inevitably leads to a downward trajectory, particularly given the complete unpredictably of the future. Though it may be a high risk path, taking on all sorts of new and unknown projects, the alternative of doing nothing – though less risky and unpredictable – can be a somewhat sadder affair.


  • Why Complex Decisions Inevitably Take Weeks

    convergenceI often find that, when it comes to make certain types of decision in an organisation, this just seems to take weeks. And if you’re unlucky, this can roll in to months. Why? What is it, a lack of decisiveness? An unwillingness to commit to anything? Lack of identification of a “Decision maker”? Just weakness!? I suggest that it’s none of these things, but in fact inevitable, when it comes to a certain classification of problems. More specifically, with complex problems (definition below), there’s actually very little you can do, but accept the time it takes, and stop worrying.

    Here’s an example, of the sort of discussion that’s happening in offices up and down the country. NB: this is purely for illustrative purposes, and not related to any real events!:

    • Colleague 1 – “We’ve got a problem hiring account managers. Let’s have a meeting to figure out what we’re going to do about it”.
    • Three colleagues sit and discuss the problem and decide “We’re going to increase the salary on the website, to attract more people”
    • Colleague 1 tells the HR team. At which point the Head of HR points out “What do you think our current account managers are going to think when they see that salary on the website? We can’t do this – let’s have a meeting”
    • Colleague 1 and Head of HR have meeting and decide “We’ll increase salary for the role, but we’ll put a very wide range, to keep current employees happy”.
    • New salary range goes on job ad, on site
    • Applications start coming in – from lots of junior people who assume it’s a junior role, from the low starting salary
    • At the same time, account manager colleagues start asking “Why aren’t I getting that top range salary? I did an amazing job last year!”
    • Various colleagues and HR people sit and have another discussion about the salary range, and decide to tighten it up again, to stop junior people applying and to keep employees happy
    • Update page goes live
    • Colleague 1 chips in  – “Hang on, we’re back where we started! We still haven’t solved my problem of getting an account manager – what’s going on?” 

    This isn’t supposed to be an example of the difficulties of hiring. It’s an example of a long decision making process going round and round in circles, leading I suspect, to frustration amongst all of those involved.

    But why has this happened? Why is it so difficult? Fundamentally, it’s because the problem of “How will we get more account managers in the building?” is a complex issue – and therefore has different characteristics to simpler problems.

    The Harvard Business Review article A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making outlines a framework for classifying problems, crudely summarised as follows:

    1. Simple Problems – simple cause-and-effect problems, often with obvious answers. And often something that happens all the time. The example I like best is “What to do if someone comes in to complain about your hotel?”. Is this a difficult problem, requiring a committee of your greatest minds to figure it out? No! Just give the guy some kind words, may be a discount code and keep him happy. It’s a simple problem, and generally “Best Practice” should be applied.
    2. Complicated Problems – again, there is cause-and-effect here, but more expertise is needed to fix the problem. The example in the text is a problem with your car engine. There is a cause-and-effect going on here, but what is it? Can anyone fix it? No, you need expertise and it might take hours to diagnose the problem. Software Engineering can also, often, fit in to this category – okay, you want the website to do X and Y, and it’s certainly possible to do this, but it might take years of experience and expertise to make that happen.
    3. Complex Problems – the key difference between complicated and complex problems is that, for the latter, the domain is simply too complex and unpredictable to undertake a priori analysis and come up with the answer in one shot. There are feedback loops – making one decision impacts other parts of the problem space, which feed back in to the original decision and change the context. In the example above, increasing the salary range on the site causes disgruntlement amongst employees, leading to a revision of the original decision and so on.
    4. Chaos. No-one knows what the hell is going on, and trying to sit back and rationally analyse cause-and-effect is pointless. Your job is to “Stop the bleeding” and manage the problem actively.

    So, our example is a “Complex” problem – and I’d argue that a large number of management problems fall in to this category. Why? Because you’re dealing with people, their aspirations, irrationalities, emotions and so on, and these are unpredictable at best. Or even without the need to take peoples’ responses in to account, many problems still fall in to the domain of the complex. We had a recent process to try and figure out a new pricing structure for our products and suites of products, and this took weeks to figure out. Why? Because all of our products, functionality and bundles are weaved together in a web of interdependency – decreasing the price of product X makes bundle A a more difficult up-sell, but that makes the prices of other products in the bundle up for change, which then affects bundles B and C and so on, and so on. This took weeks to resolve as we went round and round trying to reach a stable equilibrium which made sense.

    So, making decisions like this are always multi-step. And worse, almost always involve lots of different people (particularly in an org where consensus building is important – a different topic, to come!). Many of whom won’t be available at the same time (people are busy), who often need different levels of information, already have different levels of knowledge of the domain space and so on.

    A very large number of problems fall in to this type – where meeting 1 leads to a decision which then affects others, leading to meeting 2, which then affects the decisions in meeting 1, leading to meeting 3 and so on and so on. What you’re trying to do is reach a stable equilibrium point – where, all things considered, most people are kind of happy with the outcome and all of the issues have been considered (many of which won’t have come out till meeting 2 or 3). NB: This is also why these decisions can often feel like compromises – because they are, and the better for it! There is no simple, obvious-to-all answer, a silver bullet which we should have realised on day 1.

    So next time you’re getting frustrated with a decision making process, asking your colleagues “Why is this taking so long? Just make a decision already?” take in to account that it’s likely to be a complex problem which can’t be forced.

    What you can do of course, is create an environment where the process happens as smoothly as possible – are the right people involved at different points? Are there people making the problem worse? Do you have people who can work through complex problems, with poor quality data, and intangible concepts? Can you yourself facilitate the process (rather than jumping in with the magic answer)? On this last point, I like the comment made by Kishgore Sengupta*:

    Instead of saying ‘Don’t just stand there, do something’ your new behaviour should be ‘Don’t just do something, stand there’”

    * I’d like to thank Cambridge Judge Business School for introducing me to these concepts, particularly for the course given by Kishgore Sengupta on complexity – fascinating stuff!


  • Setting Ambitious Marketing Targets is a Waste of Time

    red-business-graph
    We all, periodically set targets for ourselves and/or other marketing folk. How often have we started the year with a plan that goes something like this:
    1. Do activities a, b and c,
    2. Through activities a, b and c, achieve the following “up-and-to-the-right”* targets:

    up-and-to-the-right

    Great, we’re all rich! But what I want to argue is there are two problems with this type of planning and target setting – a minor one, to do with the shape of this graph, and a major one to do with philosophy of super-ambitious targets like this (the graph above suggests a 40% increase in leads per month over 9 months, and still going up…).

    Firstly, the minor point of the shape of this graph. Here’s what the graph above is actually saying:

    1. We currently get around 100 leads per month, and this is fairly predictable from January through to March.
    2.  I’m going to do something very clever at the start of the year that’s going to increase this rate of leads to 105 in Apr, then 110 in May and so on. I.e. not only am I going to increase the number of leads over the current “standard, background” rate, but that increase is going to keep getting bigger and bigger each month.
    3. In theory this goes on forever – by the end of next year we’ll have doubled the monthly lead rate and so on in to infinity.

    My issue is with the concept that the number of leads per month keeps getting bigger and bigger. In reality from the experience of running many, many campaigns, I’ve seen three types of chart:

    No Impact Whatsoever

    up-and-to-the-right

    Temporary Impact

    up-and-to-the-right

    Sustained Change in Awareness of Product

    up-and-to-the-right

    The first chart obviously means that what we did didn’t work – fair enough, learn from your mistakes and try better next time.

    The second shows that we did have an impact, and we did bring in more leads, but that when we stopped our activity the rate of new leads coming in each month dropped down to previous levels. This is a perfectly legitimate and potentially great result! If you managed to get 10 extra leads per month for 3 months (i.e. 30 new leads), if these cost $100 each to obtain (i.e. the “campaign” cost $3,000) and you actually made $200 per lead, then your campaign has given you an ROI of 100% ( ($6,000 – $3,000)/$3,000 ) – a great result! The issue of course is that once the campaign is over, you have to think of something else.

    The third shows an impact whereby you’ve done some sort of activity and this has led to a sustained change in the number of leads coming in each month. They key point here is that previously, whatever marketing you were doing, you were bringing in 100 new leads each and every month. This is no mean feat – if we weren’t doing anything right and your product sucked, then we’d be getting zero new leads per month. So to increase this rate to 110 and to sustain this is a significant achievement. Obviously there’s a relationship here to chart 2 – if you’re carrying out extra activity that’s costing you $100 per lead and you’re managing to sustain that over time (i.e. the activity isn’t getting stale, such that new leads are diminishing), then that’s great. But ideally, you’ve done something as a one-off (say, a great set of new interesting content, easily findable by all), which is providing a long term increase in the average number of leads per month – definitely a great achievement.

    So firstly, I have an issue with the shape of this graph. If we wanted to be really ambitious, I’d suggest that only graph #3 above (“Sustained change in awareness of product”) is what you should be suggesting – that you might be able to take the average monthly lead rate to a new plateau.

    But secondly, and perhaps a bigger question, is how ambitious you should be. Really, when we’re setting these “targets” what we’re setting is objectives for the coming period. I’ve previously mentioned the great book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt, and here Richard talks a lot about the need for good proximate objectives and how these objectives should be formed. Specifically, from chapter seven:

    One of a leader’s most powerful tools is the creation of a good proximate objective – one that is close enough at hand to be feasible. A proximate objective names a target that the organization can reasonably be expected to hit, even overwhelm.

     The bit at the end is particularly interesting – “..even overwhelm”. But what’s the point in setting a target if it’s going to be so easy to hit, that we’d likely overwhelm it? That’s not going to stretch you or your team is it? You might as well switch on to auto-pilot for the rest of the year if your target is going to be so easy that you’ll overwhelm it? And it is counter to many performance management systems, not least Google’s! As pointed out in this video about Google’s OKRs:

    Always have goals that are uncomfortable to push you to achieve more. If you know for 100% you are going to achieve your objectives, challenge yourself more. 

    There seems to be a mismatch here between Richard Rummelt’s approach and Google’s.

    Firstly it’s worth pointing out – the Good Strategy/Bad Strategy approach certainly doesn’t propose “do nothing” targets. In the example at the top, an objective which was “Just keep coasting maintaining a flat-line for leads” isn’t an objective, it’s just doing nothing! (ignoring the maintenance work required to keep these leads churning through of course).

    What is being advocated is something where you genuinely believe that you will hit a given target. I like to think of this as “Would I privately bet my own personal money on us hitting that target?”. It tends to changes one’s view of a target if one has to stake one’s own cash on it! If you can answer “Yes!” to this question, then it’s a believable objective.

    But still there’s the argument – couldn’t you have done more with a stretch target? An “easy” objective of say, getting 50 new leads though believable, is likely to get you just that – 50 leads, or thereabouts. But if you set an ambitious target of 100 leads, you might not believe it, but you might end up with 70 leads, or even 80, if you really “go for it”.

    Firstly, there’s a minor problem I have with this – I just don’t believe this motivational model. That I or a colleague will be more motivated to achieve more, by setting an unrealistic target. I’ve never seen this happen in the real world. In reality, people are motivated by much more complex factors – who they work for, their colleagues, their interest in their work, whether their work chimes with their personal ambitions, the ability of managers to create an environment of ‘flow’, clear simple objectives for all and so on. Not by having a big red poster on the wall saying “Get me an impossible number of leads”.

    But I think there’s also a major problem with this approach. For me, short term objectives are just stepping stones towards the long term goal of what we are trying to achieve. So if we were to get 50 extra new leads, this is a short term objective that is building towards a longer term of building your business, finding loyal customers to nurture, growing awareness, as well, of course, of generating revenue (for investment in the future of your business). So the short term objective isn’t the be-all-and-end-all. It’s a step on a long journey – and this is key. If you can’t predict, with any confidence that you’re going to hit that given target, how can you possibly plan for the future? If I set a target of 100 new leads, and then start building future plans based on that new revenue (e.g. hiring new staff), what happens when I miss that target? I have quickly re-jig my plans, rushing through changes, based on my (predictably) failed targets. We haven’t built any solid blocks for the future, instead we’re back to panic planning.

    In contrast, if we go for a lower target, and by tracking as we go along, see that we’re nicely moving towards hitting that target then, as we approach the end of the year, we can put our next set of plans in to place in a more measured fashion. Much more stable, much more predictable and, I’d argue, a bit moregrown-up than random objectives that no-one ever believes.

    This is why, for me, setting realistic objectives for the coming period is key, and why hopefully those big red “up-and-to-the-right” charts are a thing of the past.

    * Last week I heard someone use “up-and-to-the right” as a verb as in “How are we going to up-and-to-the-right that value?”! It seems the English language abusers attempting to “verb-ify” every word aren’t even sticking to single words now!

    4 thoughts on “Setting Ambitious Marketing Targets is a Waste of Time

      1. I can’t agree with the first chart explanation. Sometimes the flat line is the output of the extensive marketing effort. It is not always that easy to do nothing and get stable results. I think you should put another graph with the breakdown in the first month of doing nothing :)

          1. Adam – I think that’s a very fair point, and I’ve assumed lots of things. We have lots going on in the background, that sustains current levels though if I’m honest a very large proportion of that “Business as Usual” lead number comes from word-of-mouth and reputation. For us (and obviously different for different businesses) if we literally “switched off all marketing”, probably very little would happen in months 1 or 2. However, by 3 and 4, and beyond, we’d start to notice a drift downwards. I.e. the marketing has an impact, but it’s always delayed and chronic (rather than acute).

      1. Some really insightful points here. I fully agree about your points about marketing goal setting and the crappy assumptions we tend to make when doing so. Your 3 graphs are genius – and well worth anyone in marketing reading. There are a number of campaigns where I wish I’d asked the question, “realistically which graph do we really expect by running this campaign.

        As someone who has produced a lot of goals that have failed to have the effect I was hoping for, I’ve come to believe that objectives that state (effectively) we will grow by 40% and continue growth beyond that are counter productive. Objectives should be things we can actually do whilst measures might tell you whether you got the results you were hoping for. e.g. Our objective is to produce our product in German and to also produce a German version of our website and success would be an increase of 10,000 German users of our software. Whilst this seems a thinner objective and doesn’t actually give you what you want (the extra users) it is actually stronger because the team can actually all get behind doing something that is genuinely likely to make the businesses stronger.

          1. Thanks! For the top graphs there’s also the point that here we assume we get the “background” levels of leads for free – i.e. if we did nothing this month, we’d still get 100 people after our product or service. But for early stage companies this isn’t necessarily the case – if you do no marketing you get absolutely nothing. For them, achieving even a flat line with a modest budget is quite an achievement.


  • Process Hawks and Doves

    In US politics, and now politics around the world the terms “hawk” and “dove” (really “war hawk” and “war dove”) are used to identify politicians who have leanings in a particular direction – either towards controversial wars or against. The arguments always play out on both sides, hopefully tending towards a solid, well-argued solution for a particular scenario. But I always get the impression in these debates that really, almost regardless of the facts on the ground, there are individuals who have a leaning towards war and, in the absence of counter-argument, would take that route; and there are those of the opposite persuasion.

    This made me think about this notion of an internal bias, towards one approach or another, in the much less controversial area of process in the workplace.

    My very first working day (in a proper “grown-up” job, rather than spending Saturdays in a shoe shop) was at British Airways on their computer training scheme (the BACT program, now sadly no more) and I still remember my new boss’s boss coming in to give us a welcome speech. The main point he made, that I remember at least, was that the JFDI approach just wouldn’t fly at at BA. In a company of 50,000 with an IT department of 2,000, there were processes and systems that had to be adhered to, if the whole machine was going to work. I didn’t question this at the time and happily spent a pretty large proportion of my working life at BA making sure everything was in its right place – that docs were named and catalogued accordingly, that all docs were written in a certain style, signed by the right people and that all software was developed in the standard approach (whether changes were big or small). The incident I remember most was having to move my PC from one desk to another. I was about to unplug the thing and pick it up when I was given a stern look by my team leader – there’s a number to call, a form to fill in, then you wait for a team of two (always two), to come down and move it for you. Probably two days later.

    Since then I’ve worked in companies from two people in size to 75,000 and those companies have had very different approaches to process. At a two-person standup, the idea of adhering to some sort of heavyweight process (rather than JFDI) is laughable – we were always flying by the seats of our pants, just about getting things done as quickly as possible, nothing documented, done differently every time, code being shipped without testing, marketing copy being finished and sent out minutes before the deadline. Terrifying – or exciting, depending on the outcome!

    But the point of this post is not to argue for one way or the other. It’s obvious that in a larger organisation, there is a need for process. And in a startup it’s neither possible nor desirable to spend time creating much process.

    What I have found however, and have always found this, is that people seem to have an innate bias towards more process or against. And, like the war hawks and doves, there’s really not a whole lot you can do to change that innate bias. We can certainly have arguments in a specific situation – should we apply a new process to fix a given problem, or just get on with the job? And hopefully everyone will be swayed by the evidence – but this is always a fight against one’s own internal biases. I tend to think of those that prefer the JFDI approach as hawks (perhaps an association with a more cavalier, devil-may-care approach), and the process fans as doves (an association with meekness, and a desire for peace and order, perhaps?).

    (In contrast to my views on war!), I’m quite a hawk when it comes to process. I struggle with, what I perceive as, treacle, oozing through a company and slowing down progress. Particularly in the world of marketing, which for me is about inspiration, excitement, ideas, all mixed with a bit of science, marketing is an area where for me, process can slow down and kill the sort of ideas and innovation needed for great work to be done.

    But here I am, of course, exhibiting my internal bias! I believe it comes from working at startups (which made more of an impression on me than BA ever did), though maybe I’ve always been that way inclined. So I have to fight my own internal bias in discussions on bias and make sure my prejudices don’t colour my judgement.

    And, thinking more widely, I think this extends to many other areas of working life – we all have biases, whether it’s towards process or against, towards short-termism or long-termism, towards a more or less scientific approach to marketing, towards argumentative or inclusive management methods, towards talking or doing – but it’s important to be self-aware of what our biases are, and to adjust our arguments accordingly. What I often find is that spending time listening to the opposite point of view can really help making sure you’re not letting your prejudices override others’ views. It’s not always easy, but I think it can really help to keep yourself in check and, at least try, to come to some sort of evidence-based approach to debate and argument.


  • The Need to Constantly Change in Marketing

    images
    There’s a quote that I really like from one of Christopher Isherwood’s early novels, The Memorial:
    “Men always seem to me so restless and discontented in comparison to women. They’ll do anything to make a change, even when it leaves them worse off. […] Whereas […] we women, we only want peace.”

    Removing the sexism from this quote (it was written over 80 years ago…), gives you something like the following – I’ve removed all of the brackets etc, to make this more readable:

    “Some people always seem to me so restless and discontented in comparison to others. They’ll do anything to make a change, even when it leaves them worse off. Whereas others only want peace.”

    Now I think this quote applies to an awful lot of people and situations, but this is a marketing blog, so why is it relevant here?

    If you step back and look at the ever-changing world of marketing methodology, and look at it over a timescale of years, and really, decades, then the one obvious feature is the constant change in the methods recommended and used over this period. Some examples known to all of us:

    1. The Internet and digital media. I still remember the first time I saw a website address advertised anywhere, on the back of a Björk CD. At the time I had no idea what to do with it (I didn’t have a computer on the Internet) but I know I was impressed. Now of course, over the last 10-20 years, a marketing strategy which doesn’t involve a website and other elements of web presence would be laughed out of the room.
    2. The death of print media. Apart from the very occasional experiment, we haven’t used print media for advertising at Red Gate for at least 10 years. Again, when I was a kid, every video game, bit of software or hardware would buy quarter, half or full page slots in various print magazines and newspapers. This was expensive and, as an advertiser, you had no idea whether it worked or not. In contrast to digital media, a campaign based entirely on print media would struggle to be taken seriously today.
    3. Banner ads. Getting in to something more specific, banner ads are I think the VHS recorders of our generation. It is a “technology” that has both risen and (almost completely) fallen in our lifetimes. Obviously it grew with the growth of the Internet as a medium and was the obvious like-for-like swap for quarter page ads in print media (just scan in your print ad, and send it over to the magazine to put on their website!). But it has the same problems (lack of feedback for the advertiser) and, as we all know, nobody likes or clicks on them. There have been some advances in recent years (using pay-per-click banner ads through Google Display Network), but banner ads are now rarely at the centre of any campaign.
    4.  Adwords. Again, a medium which as grown with the rise of the Internet and Google specifically. Google make an incredible amount of money, almost exclusively from Adwords, and their whole machine is set up to promote Adwords as a necessary and wise choice for the modern marketer (have you ever seen a Google blog post titled “How you could spend a lot less on Google Adwords”?!). Ten or more years ago, the individual who looked after marketing at our company at the time saw how it could be used to massively reduce our marketing spend (compared to print media) and still get the same results (as well as the benefits of knowing what’s actually worked). This was something that was instrumental in the early success of Red Gate, particularly on a limited budget. But could the same be said today? Is Adwords still the most cost-effective way of generating leads, easily outstripping all others? What sort of future does it hold? I’d suggest the jury is out.
    5. Content Marketing. As I’ve written before, hard to find a marketing blog that doesn’t hail content marketing as the new messiah. One group in particular who were very early to recognise its value were the people who run marketing automation companies…

    6. Marketing Automation. The natural progression on from blind content marketing is the use of marketing automation tools to apply that content in the most relevant scenarios, measure the results, then adapt based on feedback. This is an area which is still in its infancy I believe, simply because of the hurdle to getting started (you have to install and setup something like HubSpot, Eloqua or Marketo – no mean feat).

    There are many other methods of course that have had their ups and downs – mobile advertising and social media are also current fashions but the general point is that like everything in the world of marketing these things come and go.

    But, there’s another important thing to note here – there are people who recognise the importance of the new marketing approach before others and are therefore, arguably, more likely to get the full benefit of using that new method first. Björk has always had a great reputation in the world of digital media (her latest idea – Biophilia, a sort of multimedia collection “encompassing music, apps, Internet, installations, and live shows”) is once again at the forefront of what can be done with digital technology (and its great btw!). Bowie is another who was always at the forefront with www.davidbowie.com – its changed many times over the years, but was a pioneering site for fans in the early days.

    Which brings me back to the Christopher Isherwood quote. There are marketing people who, because of their need to always be doing something new are more likely to find the new things that could be valuable for your business. They’ll always be on the lookout for the new trends, what’s coming up in the future and so on. In contrast there are also people who will stick to what they know, and will struggle to try out new things. Each of these approaches has pros and cons – there is a danger, with constantly looking for the Next Big Thing, that we can fritter away our time on endless trends that go nowhere when that time could have been better spent just getting the Adwords campaigns right.

    But the danger with the reverse position – of always sticking to what you know, and ignoring the world around you – is that you stick with something long after its valuable and never fail to capitalise on the new things coming along (in the early days, when you can have most impact). I interviewed someone for a marketing role 2-3 years ago who said “There’s nothing wrong with print media – have you considered going back to that?”. It’s not about whether he was wrong or right, it’s that this exhibited an approach to marketing that I would have really struggled to work with.

    I’ve no idea what the next big trend will be of course. I think there’s another phase in the content marketing/marketing automation marriage where we’ll soon be able to auto-create content for customers based on their very specific needs (imagine a situation where articles could be automatically created from pre-defined blocks of copy, pieced together based on our knowledge of the customer – an article for a large, late adopter pharmaceutical company would be subtly different to that for a small, early majority financial firm), though a lot of these things will require some real, solid output from the Big Data/Hadoop community. But who knows? The point is unless you’re looking for these new trends – or rather, employing people who yearn to find these new things – then you’re almost certain to miss them till its too late.


  • The End of the Marketing Plan

    Destiny(Sandman)

    I’ve read a couple of books in the last year both with something to say on the subject of marketing plans. Well, I’ve read one and given up on the other. The one I finished was:

    Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble, Barry O’Reilly and Joanne Molesky

    And the one I barely got started on was:

    Marketing Plans by Malcolm McDonald and Hugh Wilson

    This makes this a bit of an unfair comparison review of the two books, as I haven’t made it through the latter, but in a way that’s the point I’m trying to make.

    The latter book comes in at a whopping 592 pages – and that’s for the 7th edition of the tome. And the content is dense – every page is packed with data, information, tables, planning tips and tricks, processes and so on.

    In contrast, the Jez Humble book is being released through an Agile Publishing methodology (release early drafts to customers, gather feedback, rinse-and-repeat), where the first draft came in at a digestible 78 pages. And it’s very readable.

    But again, that’s not really the point – there’s nothing wrong with a long, intense study of a subject. The most interesting difference between the two books is the approach taken to marketing activity. To illustrate the difference, the following is a key diagram from  Jez Humble’s book:

    LeanEnterpriseThis diagram isn’t directly applied to marketing, but instead is making a point about how most companies develop products end-to-end. The authors describe this as “water-scrum-fall” – a process whereby yes, your development teams are writing and testing the code for a new product following Agile practices, and may have been doing so for years, but the rest of the organisation still works in a heavily waterfall based, linear way, with all of the standard problems of waterfall development – bottlenecks, blocks, wasted effort, wrong products to customers, late delivery and so on. By the way, HiPPO stands for “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion” ;-). NB: I won’t go in to the details of “Agile vs. Waterfall” as development methodologies – Wikipedia as ever has a good description.

    My contention is that I would add marketing and marketing planning in to this diagram as a part of the process of developing and releasing a product to market – and that we as marketers still, generally work in a heavily planned, non-iterative, and essentially out-dated approach to developing marketing campaigns.

    The Malcolm McDonald book provides quite incredibly detailed tables for the reader to fill in, allowing you to plan out your whole year of marketing in detail – which segments you’re going after (and everything about those segments), when you’re running campaigns, how many leads you will get from  each activity, forecast revenue generated and a thousand other things. In theory, all laudable activities. And for the last three years I’ve followed this approach (more or less – I could never quite stomach the level of detail required by the book). Every November/December I’ve spent weeks constructing a plan of, essentially, what was going to happen the next year in marketing, down to leads and revenue generated for the next 12 months.

    As everyone knows, these plans never come to pass. But, the argument goes – “It’s the planning that’s useful, and what you learn, not the actual plan”.

    Yes – to an extent, because a plan forces you to think about your goals and objectives, and that can’t be bad. But a key practice in Agile development is the concept of a backlog of work – you have a long list of activity that you want to undertake for a product, but the level of detail for those items is different depending on how soon you plan to do the work. If you’re starting something next week (at the top of the backlog), you’d better have a pretty good understanding and description of the story you’re tackling. However, if you’ve got something you “Hope to do  in about 6 months”, you can leave these items at a very high level, something like “Add in that cool Facebook sharing feature” will do perfectly well.

    Why is this a good idea? Because right now, you fundamentally don’t know what the future holds. Today in February 2014, I have an idea for what marketing we as a team want to be doing in 2014H2, based on the products we have, the customer segments we’re reaching (or not reaching of course!) and so on. But I’m also pretty sure that I’m wrong. That whatever we do in 2014H2 will be only barely related to my current thinking. Right now we’re planning a mass market activity, based on some of the traditional marketing approaches we’ve used before. But what if, in April this year, we suddenly start gaining some real traction with larger accounts in a specific segment? Then I might need to pivot and re-think plans to make the best of this opportunity. Any detailed plans that I had would be thrown out of the window.

    And the point made in the Lean Enterprise book, is why not apply the Agile development approach to other areas of the business too, such as marketing? Release early, gather feedback, iterate-and-repeat. The key benefit is that you’re getting early feedback on what’s working, then you build on that, continuously improving what you’re doing so that by the end of the year you have activities that you know are working – because you’ve been testing them for the previous 11 months and getting benefits (e.g. leads) all along the way.

    This is what we’ll be doing this year. I haven’t made a marketing plan for 2014 at all – and I’m feeling very comfortable with that situation.

    PS the image at the top of this post is the character Destiny from the amazing graphic fantasy novels – The Sandman by Neil Gaiman (I can’t recommend these books highly enough – I’m now on my 4th read). Destiny holds a book (the “Book of Destiny”) that contains the past, present and future of every living being. As I said, the novels are fantasy.