Show Me Where You Spend Your Time and Money…

And I will tell you what your priorities are.

When I conduct a marketing or sales audit I want to learn where individuals spend their time and what the company spends its budget on. Often, the two are not in sync. The company will state their objectives. However, their budget allocation and where their staff spend their time are in completely different areas.

Let’s look at marketing. Everyone wants growth. You know, hockey stick growth that is promised in almost every new product launch or annual business plan. While we all want to have the “Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG)” that Jim Collins talks about, we don’t necessarily allocate time and resources to achieve this type of goal.

Richard Rumelt, Professor of Business at UCLA, defines the kernel of a great strategy as the foundation.  “The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: (1) a diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge, (2) a guiding-policy for dealing with the challenge, and (3) a set of coherent-actions that are designed to carry out the guiding-policy.  ”

When you assess your marketing strategy, ideally in a structured approach of using a marketing audit, you must be able to identify an unambiguous item that needs to be addressed. If you avoid hard choices your strategy becomes fluff. If it is fluff it will not help you move forward in a meaningful way. And if you are not moving forward you run the risk of not being able to maintain your customer base, profitability or key employees because a competitor is actually doing something positive and constructive within your industry.

While this is a high level view,  you should also be mindful that your confirmation of the problem will be the foundation for your time and resource allocation. This helps shape something coherent, measurable and achievable. I have seen too many (and created some bad projections myself) unachievable projections even if everything was 100% and you captured every available customer.

On another note, if you owned 100% of the market the government would step in to check for any anti-trust or anti-competitive behaviour and nobody wants that.

In conducting a sales audit I have seen similar outcomes. Meeting with sales executives they all talk about the amount of time they spend with customers or prospecting. When you ask them to track their time for a week, and perhaps comparing to their actual calendar entries, they are regularly surprised where they actually invested their time.

I track my time so I can see where I am investing my client efforts, business development, personal and professional development and administrative time. Reviewing the summary each month enables me to readjust if necessary or just live with the investment because it was appropriate and successful.

I am not advocating for a punch clock type of time management system like I used to do working on a loading dock in high school and university (yes, I was a Teamster). Periodically an assessment should be taken to assess the expenditures of time and money. This is not for penalty purposes, unless absolutely warranted. This is for redirection or reinforcement of existing activities relative to the objectives that were set.

When you look at your monthly budget, don’t just say “we are on budget” or “we are not on budget”. Review the achievements made with the investments committed to ensure there is still consistency. Sometimes events arise that require a quick redirect. This needs to be noted and captured for the annual summary of activities. This exercise also ensures you are not going off plan so often that you are actually wasting money and not working towards the ultimate goals that are in place.

When you put your time and money where your mouth is you are holding yourself, your colleagues and the entire company accountable. And when you are accountable to each other you become a highly effective team all operating under the same strategy. And that will provide the reasons to celebrate your success at your year end results meeting.

 

Shame on Us Marketers

Full disclosure – I am a marketer.

When I started my consulting practice I purposely avoided referring to myself as what I really am – a marketer. I did this specifically because so many people, potential clients in my mind, think they are marketing experts. So, as a good marketer, I set about to establish a different position for my consulting. Yet when people asked me “so what kind of work do you do?”, I described performance improvement for organizations and their people.

Yet, it seems to always come down to marketing. As Peter Drucker wisely stated, “Marketing is about knowing your customer so well that your product or service sells itself”. I thought I had this figured out but not quite.

Another important aspect of being a good marketer is the ability to assess your environment and adapt.  You know, like Darwin. It is not the strong that survive otherwise T-Rex would still be here. It is the ability to adapt over time. Sometimes you need to do this sooner than later if you want to survive.

And yet, this is where marketers have really lost their way.

Too many marketers have fallen victim to the shiny object or silver bullet syndrome to save their marketing position. Everyone is on Facebook, heck it is the largest country in the world so we have to be there. Or we have to send Tweets and get a million followers to create our tribe. These tools can be helpful but are not the answers in and of themselves.

It is imperative to know your customer first and foremost. Some friends and colleagues are tired of hearing me say you have to start with knowing your customer. I spoke to the Broadcasters Association of Manitoba earlier this year on this topic.

But knowing your customer simply from their digital footprint is not enough to help your product or service. People say things on their social feeds that do not necessarily resemble their actual behaviour. Anonymity can provide a level of protection that does not exist in real life.

While it is important to get a sense of people’s activities online this cannot be the only measure that you are using.

You need to get information from your front line staff and any other customer contact points. You need to understand the context that the data was obtained from and assess its validity. Many companies use Survey Monkey because they now don’t have to use a market research firm. The challenge is that many organizations do not know how to limit bias in questioning and sample selection to provide valid survey results.

For major work please use a professional researcher!

There is a fascinating book called “I think you’ll find it is a bit more complicated than that“, by Ben Goldacre. He features a wide variety of stories where he uncovers the “shameless misuse of science and statistics by journalists, politicians, drug companies and quacks” (from the back cover). Marketers make these mistakes when limiting their data sources.

I am a fan of simplifying things. But the premise of this book is that if you are incorrect in your data gathering it will lead to errors and potentially dangerous statements or actions. The same holds true for marketers looking for a magical solution.

Spoiler alert – there is a magical solution. It is called hard work and deep thinking. The human mind goes in places that we often don’t control properly or understand why. Last week I wrote about football players making a certain action on a specific play and not being able to describe to the coach why they did what they did.

Here is a reality byte – customers do the same thing.

Paco Underhill in his book, “Why we buy“, studies customers in retailers and includes several parts to his research:

• observe what the customer does in a particular aisle – often includes video taping the customer
• ask questions right after the observations by people that were observing in plain sight (they hire actors to blend in)
• review the tape for inconsistencies between the data sources

He found that very often customers say they did one thing when they actually did something else. And they are at a loss to explain why they did what they did.

Marketers have to get back to a full 4 P (product, place, price, promotion) job description to be seen as a more important reason and resource for the company’s future success. If you are a digital one trick pony I fear that you will be replaced by the next digital one trick pony. Worse, some artificial intelligence cyborg solution that will be coming very soon. You’ll be terminated.

Marketers of the world unite and bring your great mind, ability to think upstream of the problem and your passion for studying human behaviour. You can reposition yourself and the profession to be more valuable to the paying customer and your internal customers as well by building a strong foundation first and then adding based on what you want to do. There is always time to reset and wash away the shame that we have brought upon ourselves.

You Still Have to Play the Game

The start of the NFL season allowed all the pundits an opportunity to predict team records, Super Bowl matchups and top performers for fantasy leagues. Big Data and predictive or cognitive analytics were employed on a wide scale to assist the data scientists and football experts with their claims to football supremacy.

Based on all these prognostications the New England Patriots were touted to win all their league games, cruise through the playoffs and establish football immortality. Hall of Fame players predicted a New England route in game one because they had more talent (on paper) than the previous year and they were the defending champions.

Someone forgot to tell the Kansas City Chiefs about all these forecasts and what the “data was saying”. They turned the tables and crushed the Pats in front of their home crowd and millions watching on TV. KC was able to make plays on offense and defense and New England seemed lost as to how to defend against everything that happened, particularly in the second half.

I am a football fan (atic). I have been fortunate to play and coach at high levels. I have been involved with winning teams and teams that couldn’t win. Some of my best friends are from football throughout my life as teammates or coaching colleagues. In every situation we had to play the game to see who would win. Just like in the NFL.

Businesses are the same. Your best plans and beliefs are essential as a starting point. And you must execute successfully all the time. Mistakes in someone’s order in any business can be devastating beyond the short term if the cause cannot be fixed.

On paper almost everyone looks like a world champion until the game starts. BUT, we are human.

At this point technology like artificial intelligence (AI) doesn’t fully factor in the human element and the difficulty in predicting future behaviour. While customers often have consumption patterns or trends there are other environmental factors or competitive factors that occur suddenly or build up over time that can impact a person’s buying decision at that precise decision-making moment.

For these reasons Marketing has, in my opinion, the most important role in a company. Full disclosure – I am a marketer. Marketing’s job is to know the customer so well that the product or service is not sold to a customer it is requested and purchased by the customer.

Marketers can employ all types of scouting and analysis to ensure they understand customer trends, wants, needs, desires and what the competition is doing to address these same items. This will guide any adjustments to the original plan. The key, of course, is to properly communicate the revised expectation or process so the employees know how their job fits into the delivery of customer satisfaction.

I love the preparation and game planning in football. I also enjoy the planning and preparation in business. The launch of a new product or service. A special event or promotion that is unique and different. These special times require planning and training and preparation. And as well-prepared as you are there is invariably some hiccup that was unforeseen or not easily predicted. The better prepared you are to call an audible, and make the adjustment within the context of your original plan, the higher the likelihood you can still achieve your goals or objectives.

And as I said two weeks ago, because business is a regular and ongoing concern unlike a sporting match that is infrequent and highly intensified, consistency and adaptability are critical success factors in business over a longer period of time. As we saw in that fist NFL game this is the same in football on a game by game basis each season.

Give your people a chance to perform and celebrate their successes and correct their mistakes quickly. And remember that they are also human and should be treated with care and respect. Unlike football players, employees typically have long careers. The true measure of success is the long term satisfaction of the customer and the revenue that is generated with happy and accountable employees. This is the data that matters when the game is played.

Really Great Customer Service

My wife and I dropped in to an Italian restaurant that we hadn’t been to for awhile. It was over two years since our last visit. We used to go regularly some twenty years ago with our dear friends that have since moved away from Winnipeg.

Our waiter calmly walked to greet us once we were seated. He was pleasant but certainly not like some of the chains that train their staff to learn everything about you. Now THAT is annoying. It was hot so we just wanted water while we perused the menu.

We started with our favorite – pane fritto. Puffs of dough that you dip in marinara sauce. So delicious and just as we remembered it. When I splashed three drops of sauce on my new shirt I asked the waiter to please bring some soda water. With a slight smile he brought an extra cloth napkin and a glass of soda. It worked.

After placing our order we chatted about the good times we had there. Since we are somewhat fanatical about customer service, and what makes it good and bad, we were keen to assess this latest experience and compare to the excellent service we remember from the past.

Everything about the meal was excellent. Taste, temperature and timing of the dishes was on point.

After we paid I asked the waiter, Danny, if he would mind if I asked him a couple of questions. He was a friendly young man who slid into a chair across from our table. We were on senior’s hours with a late lunch/early dinner at 4 PM so the restaurant wasn’t too busy yet.

I thanked him for his wonderful service and we had a brief Q and A:

• I asked how long he had been a waiter. He described a six-year career in food services coupled with customer service in other industries, including time as a flight attendant.
• What has he learned about serving customers? His focus is on the people that he serves. He knows that poor service can ruin the experience of fantastic food.
• I commented on the impeccable timing of when he brought the dishes, freshened the water and brought clean cutlery. He smiled again and was appreciative of our gratitude. He just seemed to know how to manage the overall experience.

So what does this mean for other restaurants?

• Great food plus poor service equals a bad experience and “might not come back and we will tell our friends”.
• Great service cannot save poor food and “might not come back and we will tell our friends”.
• The quality of the food and the service must be consistently high for long-term success and “we will be back and we will tell our friends”.

We won’t post on social media, that’s just not us. We still use word of mouth. When service is poor I don’t want to destroy the business. I just won’t give them any more of my money. Too many cowards take to social media and blast companies with poor experience. I guess it makes them feel good. Just vote with your wallet because maybe someone had a really bad day and they struggled to be resilient and be at the top of their game for you.

Owners and managers need their wait staff to be human. Sure, consistency in process is important. But people need to be respectful to the restaurant’s guests. Wait staff are not the reason we go to a restaurant. It is food first that is supported by the right amount of time and attention from the servers.

Hosts/hostesses do not need to scurry around and ask everyone about their meals to the point of bumping into the servers or interrupting the customers’ conversations. If you are that concerned there is obviously a bigger issue that exists. Maybe it is inconsistently prepared food. In which case get a new chef.

Danny didn’t ask us how our “first few bites were tasting”. He came by and observed that we were enjoying each dish, commented appropriately and moved away. Perfect comments and timing.

When we were leaving we thanked him again for the fine service and said that we would ask to sit in his section when we came back.

And I will be telling the owner, Joe, about our recent great experience.