So isn’t this true for high tech companies? More often than not high tech companies try to claim “we are innovators”, “we are customer focused”, etc. While these are worthy goals, they re only worth claiming if your customers agree. I love the simplicity of killianbranding’s comparison of branding and an elevator pitch.

All companies have a brand – it is how your customers perceive you. Are you true to your brand?  It should be visible throughout every dimension of your company. If you are innovative, that should not end in engineering, customer focus means every person thinks of the customer first. Are these behaviors rewarded, re-enforced?

Now I am a big fan of social media tools, as they provide a great way to connect, communicate, and find information.  However, based on a recent marketing initiative, I realized getting back to basics is never a bad idea.

The background is we had a large set of customers we want to try to upgrade to a new version. We also needed to build a better way to communicate. Social networking tools – right? Wrong! We learned that of the customer base over 75% are not even in LinkedIn, never mind getting them to join a LinkedIn group. Maybe they skipped LinkedIn and went straight to Twitter….Now we did do a basic e-mail campaign. Great open rates, awesome click through rates, poor conversion rates. The customers were instead picking up the phone…and calling us. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. We called them, asked what they liked…they liked being called live!

Never in my career have I ever left a call or meeting with a customer saying, “I should do less of that.” From this exercise I learned you really need to understand how your prospects and customers want t be engaged. I say engaged rather than talked at. Are your social marketing programs creating engagement or are they the next version of SPAM? To tell I would categorize your “followers” as below:

1. Customers and prospects who read, comment and add value to your content
2. Influencers to re-purpose (re-tweet, link-to, etc.) your content
3. Groupies who follow you because they have nothing better to do

Given the social echo out there my guess is you have over 30% of  #1, you’re in good shape.

Many years ago I ran a series of webcasts which had a set of groupies from various F500 companies. After a couple of webcasts, I was extremely excited to have them added to our lead list. However, after the series and no interest in buying our solution, I realized it was better to focus on the ones who were too busy to spend 10 consecutive weeks on the webcasts.

Recently I have seen a lot of tweets by “industry pundits” and software providers who are publishing their “daily newspaper”. Really?

Certainly Paper.li is an interesting tool , but do we really need software vendors consolidating other news and issuing it daily? There are not enough industry blogs, eNewsletters, etc.  With tools like Twitter, LinkedIn I get more information than I can actually consume. Does a software company have enough compelling news to be issuing a daily?

Am I off base, it is the next big thing or another source of SPAM?

In reflecting on how this relates to marketing and sales, it seems you need a mix of fox and hedgehog skills. Your branding and messaging has to be hedgehog-like. No customers like an inconsistent brand. Similarly, when your sales executives are working with customers, being hedge hog like will give them confidence. However, with markets changing so rapidly, and customers priorities shifting, you need fox skills to execute and succeed. How do you execute your marketing campaigns when half way through your budge gets cut, or the results exceed expectations and you need to find additional resources to ramp up? Similarly, once you close the customer, how do you deal with new requirements that come up?

Review your team and assess. Do you need more foxes or more hedgehogs? Just do not keep any SBFs.

LinkedIn – Given this is the most business focused tool , LinkedIn is furthest along in the cycle. Users clearly know how to leverage LinkedIn for networking and prospecting, there are thousands of groups that can be leveraged. People get it. With their recent IPO, I put them as passed the “peak of inflated expectations.”  The logic on entering the trough of disillusionment based on needing better tools to help leverage capabilities like groups and eliminate SPAM. The group analytics are a basic start, but too many groups are flooded with stupid questions, and unrelated discussions. The relevancy Google has incorporated into search needs to be applied here. Of course there is huge potential to leverage LinkedIn more into web sites, CRM systems, customer feedback post sales, and service, etc.

Facebook  – Obviously the visibility of facebook is the highest, although the huge majority  are end consumers. Although businesses clearly understand they need to leverage facebook, most business people I speak to are still trying to figure it out. This is especially true to small and medium businesses, whose facebook pages are mostly one way (from them) promotional posts (I would call it SPAM). Personally, I think the small business opportunity for facebook is huge, however, they seem to be more focused on the consumer side.

Twitter  – Similar to facebook, the mix of consumer and business use has people trying to figure out the best way to leverage twitter.  Although more so than facebook, many people do not get it. Surprisingly, when I was interviewing marketing candidates, although all of them used Twitter as a tool, very few could actually give me concrete details on how their company benefited. Ultimately, when pushed most said, “it helps Google find us”. I personally have focused less time on Twitter, but in last few weeks have learned how good it is to find specific information and facilitate engagement. The engagement piece is what too many marketers leave out, which is as critical as creating content.

Blogs  – As a general  marketing tool, company blogs are becoming pretty mainstream.  I am putting them as coming out of the trough of disillusionment, simply because as companies kick this off they themselves go through this cycle. Starting enthusiastically for the first few weeks – posting regularly. However, after some time, they wonder, why don’t we have more readers, why do not get more comments, etc. Blogging is a marathon, so the key is sustaining great content, and engagement. Obviously, the other tools can be used to improved reach and engagement.

E-mail  – Not much to say here, although dismissed as “Marketing 1.0”, regular e-newsletters, and promotions of content are a key element of your social marketing strategy. Obviously, the response rates, opt-outs, and investment need to be managed appropriately.

As you look at your companies initiatives with each of these, I would expect you will go through this same cycle for each initiative. My recommendation is to pick ones that you can sustain, and then use those successes to add additional elements.

What tools are shooting up the hype cycle? Can someone point out a good post covering “the next big thing?”

This got me thinking about what happens beyond the hire, and while we all strive to build great teams, what happens when the team needs “coaching.” Below is a framework that categorizes employees into 4 quadrants.

The dimensions should be pretty straight forward. On the vertical axis what is the employee’s initiative: Do they create new projects? Come up with imaginative ideas? Do they push the boundaries of their jobs and strive to make everyone around them better? On the horizontal axis I measure ability to deliver: Do they complete projects? What kind of revisions or rework is required? How much supervision do they need?

This results in the 4 types of employees:

1. Top Right – GSD: Get Stuff Done. Clearly we all want our teams in this category. For the most part these employees need minimal guidance and when you go to them with an initiative, they have often already started, or they “get it” immediately. As a manager, the best thing you can do is help them by removing obstacles.
2. Bottom Left – SBF: Should be Fired. Although this seems obvious too often these employees are left to flounder. Maybe they are transferred to another department. My experience is these people can actually make everyone else less productive. Worse than adding no value they actually consume energy from the team.
3. Top Left – EPD: Enthusiastic Puppy Dog. These are the people who are always coming up with big thoughts, telling you they will pick up the extra project and that your ideas are brilliant. However, their follow though leaves a lot to be desired. Unfortunately, in some organizations these people rise up quite well.
4. Bottom Right – EBD: Eeyore But Delivers. This is the person who sighs ever time you ask them something, or rolls their eyes when you kick off a new initiative. However, once you leave their office they plug away, buy into your request and deliver what you asked for – on time!

OK, so these are a bit exaggerated. Given that – I always struggle between team members who with all good intention take on tasks they do not quite do, versus the energy of overcoming the Eeyores, who are always pushing back.

How do you do performance management of your team?

In looking at costs, I typically include the “variable” costs which include development of content (eBook, video, etc.), and paid promotion (paid search, banner ads, e-mail list rental, etc.)  While I do not include staff costs, you may want to do this as obviously they need to be paid for and justified. My reasoning is that the most important reason to measure is to assess your most effective programs and marketing channels. To the relative costs and returns are key. Including staff costs you are basically saying, should we do marketing at all. (Which may be a valid question…)

To compare campaigns, I use the following metrics:

1)      Cost per acquisition (CPA)

2)      Cost per qualified lead (CPL)

3)      Revenue returned per dollar spent on programs (ROI)

An acquisition, is getting a new name into your database: someone to nurture, drip market to. They register for a web cast, view a video, register for your blog, etc. To be clear these are relatively unqualified leads. However, based on the marketing channel, I expect you will see large variation in costs and quality across your promotional channels. For example, someone doing an organic search and viewing a customer video is probably more qualified than someone responding to a direct e-mail. Since you might be promoting the same content across multiple channels, I do not include the cost of the content development (asset) in the CPA.  The main goal of measuring the CPA is to see the most effective marketing channels.

Once you look at leads further into the pipeline, I include the cost of the content when measuring CPL. My logic being is that you will often create content and promote it across multiple channels. The main goal of measuring the CPL is to assess the most effective messaging and content.

Finally, the ultimate goal to close business. One question that always comes up is which campaign do you credit the deal to? Obviously, customers may participate in multiple campaigns. One option is to allocate the revenue across all campaigns a prospect participated in.  However, I find that gets pretty messy. My simple rule is that is the campaign delivers a qualified lead that enters the sales pipeline, then the forecast and closes, it gets 100% credit. While I recognize there are influencers and drip marketing that builds brand, I treat that as gravy.

Of course the definitions of lead, qualified lead need to be well defined and consistent across sales and marketing.

What other variations do you find helpful? What program and channels produced your best ROI? Finally, with the shift to content and inbound marketing how does this affect you investment in promotional channels, content creation, and staff?

So how do first impressions impact your brand? Very significantly! Customers first impressions can come from many sources: web site, sales person’s visit, telesales firm cold calling, a LinkedIn profile, an employee tweet, etc. As a marketing executive while you can control all these you can certainly define the tone and set the direction.

The first steps are to be honest with yourself on what your company brand represents:

1. Are you edgy, cool, or conservative?
2. Innovative, creative, or operationally efficient?
3. Premium priced or low cost?

Once you have captured the brand character then review all the communications channels and assess their value in re-enforcing the brand.

1. Does your web site reflect your corporate personality?
2. Do you blog on breakthrough ideas or are you contrarian, perhaps simply educational?
3. What tools does your sales team use? Do the graphics reflect the brand? Does the tone support your goals?

Branding gets built up over many years, but can get diluted without the right supporting focus and leadership. What are the best examples of consistent branding you know of?

So how we get in such places and how to avoid this? Here are the guidelines I give product managers and the rest of the stakeholders:

(1)    Before scoping and requirements, declare the business objectives of the release. These may include opening new geographies, new segments, it may be simply something that demos well. Internal requirements like technology updates or cutting implementation hours are also important, but should be justified just like any other investment.

(2)    Separate features that help sell versus actually help create value for the customer. Many times the features that help sell and are most memorable in the sales cycle are not the ones that get used day-in and day-out.

(3)    Create a positioning document before the release development really gets going. This helps frame the context for the rest of the organization. From this you can drive messaging, sales training, press release, etc.

I realize the above can be “101”, but since I was asked the question, I have posed it many times and found an equally cautious answer.

Last week I had an outstanding customer experience with Amazon. My recently purchased Kindle had an issue with its screen freezing. First I checked numerous web sites, and the support pages at Amazon, trying to fix it myself. Finally I phoned the customer support line. Unfortunately, when I phoned the rep wanted me to step through some diagnostics , however, I did not have it with me. He offered to call me back later – huh? When does a call center offer to call you back? Furthermore he asked what time would be good. Sure enough later that evening I got a call, and after some tests, told me he would ship out a replacement. He took the initiative to call me back. In almost every other situation, they would tell ME to call THEM back.

It fits with Amazon’s overall value proposition – convenience, online shopping, personalized purchase suggestions…