Have you ever eaten roadkill? I know several people that have, but it’s not something that appeals to me. Besides the yuck factor, there’s the risk of disease. So why would you tolerate Roadkill Marketing in your organization?

What’s Roadkill Marketing? Just like it sounds. It’s driving in any direction toward a distant business goal, picking up whatever leads, prospects, or customers you happen across on the side of the road, and trying to build a growth path on the energy they provide.

There’s lot’s of good marketing going on out there, but Roadkill is particularly unconscious and insidious. Its main symptom is focus on marketing tactics ahead of marketing strategy. I’m a great believer in execution, but execution without direction is a waste of effort. Let me give you an example.

At a sales meeting I heard a marketing person ask a B2B sales team what they thought they needed. They dutifully gave the list of usual suspects: 1) a lower price, 2) more literature, 3) a prettier website, and 4) some advertising. When asked about the advertising, one sales person suggested a billboard. I found this last suggestion particularly interesting and my Roadkill radar clicked on. Since this was a B2B company, I asked on which highway would they place the billboard? Who did they want to message, and what message did they want to convey? And could the get the message succinct enough to be read at 50 mph and 50 yards away?

The biggest barrier to good marketing are not the tactics or communication channels. It’s identifying your market segments, the prospects, and understanding their business needs, developing a go-to-market strategy, creating a value proposition, positioning, and messaging. Then it’s experimenting in attracting attention, building a connection, creating a compelling reason to take the next step, and getting someone to actually take that step. These things take a little time.

But because everyone loves action, tactics take precedence. Marketers get to show they are producing literature, making the website prettier, and doing a billboard. Activities that are pretty much useless. Never mind that they don’t often complete many of these tactics, because they are rushing from one tactic to another without measuring what’s working. They are driving endlessly, hoping to pick up some roadkill.

OK, perhaps this is a little harsh. But action is easier than thoughtful planning and asking tough questions. But action doesn’t necessarily give you results unless you learn from it and adapt to what you’ve learned.

Marketers please take the following pledge… and let a little rage out in your comments.

The No Roadkill Pledge:

1.   My tactics will be based on sound strategy and planning.

2.   I will seek to understand my customers/prospects, as well as their businesses.

3.   I will support sales and be a team player.

4.   I will lead.

5.   I will listen.

6.   I will be agile. Experiment, learn, and adapt.

7.   I will complete one thing well on time rather than 10 things next month.

8.   I will not create boring marketing.

9.   I will constantly strive to improve our data and analytics.

10. I will measure the results of my programs and prove the ROI.

What did I miss? Take the pledge here.

Do Great Things!

Lee Hobart Stocking
Principal
Prairie Sky Group
hobart@prairieskygroup.com
651-357-0110 (C)

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You’ve worked really hard on your strategy and plan. You’ve communicated it to the troops. You’ve done this frequently though a variety of channels. But six months later, your strategy isn’t getting traction? There are lots of reasons strategies fail.

In a study by Donald Stull (MIT Sloan School of Management) and Kathleen Eisenhardt (Simple Rules), only 55% of middle managers can name one of their company’s top five priorities. Worse, when given five chances to list their companies strategic objectives, half fail to get even one right!

If you say this is unlikely to happen in your organization, then ask the questions. The CEO’s we work with are often shocked at the statistic above, but the problem is due to one simple error in thinking. Communications doesn’t equate to understanding.

Even if your team can parrot back your key initiatives and strategy, it still doesn’t mean understanding. And without understanding, it’s likely all your hard work on strategy will not materialize. What can you do about it? By now, you’ve discovered that yelling louder doesn’t help.

Here are a few recommendations:

1. Determine your audience first. Is your message for internal, board, stakeholder, or industry consumption? Messages need to be tailored differently for different audiences.
2. Keep it simple. The greatest communicators often have just one message. As humans, we have difficulty remembering three things, much less a dozen.
3. Explain why. Why is this your strategy? Why is it imperative? What’s changed?
4. Explain how. How are you going to implement the strategy? What’s the plan?
5. Use stories. We are geared to understand stories, metaphors, and examples. It’s the way we simplify and remember.
6. Help them see their role and what is expected. Participation in the process by all levels, not just the C-Suite helps.
7. Ask for confirmation. At all levels, confirmation helps reinforce understanding.
8. Incorporate your strategy into your performance standards and measures for employees.
9. Make sure your strategy communication is not just top down. It has to be top down, middle-to-middle, and peer to peer.
10. Test and measure.

Again, there are multiple reasons why strategies fail. This is just one. When you reach a level of understanding, remember that is only the first step. Then the real work begins.

Do Great Things!

Lee Hobart Stocking
Principal
Prairie Sky Group
prairieskygroup.com
651-357-0110 (C)

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A CEO of a $50M SaaS company is faced with a strategic implementation problem. In order to recognize his strategic vision of double-digit growth he has challenged his sales team to get so many orders that his implementation team leader literally cries.

Failure of managers to work across disciplines to implement strategy is one of the top three killers of strategy. After working to develop a great strategy and plan, you’ve communicated and helped your organization understand the strategy. Then you’ve put performance standards in place. Your objectives are cascaded. It’s what happens next that’s important to your success.

80% of managers say that their objectives are limited, specific, and measurable. An incredible 84% say that they can count on their bosses and their direct reports to support them in working on the strategic objectives. But here’s the rub. Only 9% say they can count on a colleague in another discipline all of the time. And only 50% say they can count on them most of the time! (Donald Sull, Rebecca Holmes, Charles Sull -HBR Mar15)

Consider the ramifications. Sales waits on marketing to launch a new campaign. But marketing is waiting on development to release the specs. Compound interactions and delays will kill the launch. Of course it’s nobody’s fault. Everyone has a valid reason or rationalization.

Here’s what the CEO in the “Make Implementation Cry” situation above did to solve his problem. He brought all the leaders from each of marketing, sales, development, implementation, and service together. He’d made sure that they all had a common objective and reward for hitting the vision when the strategy launched. So he congratulated sales for making implementation cry. He reminded them that they weren’t going to make their bonuses if they couldn’t figure out how to help implementation because their bonuses were tied to revenue that wouldn’t be recognized if their software wasn’t installed. Within an hour the team had figured out a solution. Marketing would give implementation $200K to hire more installers and trainers. Problem solved. They hit their year-end mark.

Is your strategic implementation hanging fire because different departments aren’t working together? What did this CEO do? Here are a few solutions to the inter-department strategic implementation killer:

1.    Make sure your team has the same key objectives and rewards.
When a new strategy is launched many hang onto the old strategy. You can’t have a tacit strategy and an official strategy. Everyone needs the same strategy, objectives, and rewards.

2.    When you launch a new strategy and plan, makes sure you’ve budgeted for it.
One reason strategic plans fail is for lack of budgeting, both financially and resource-wise, as well as management attention. When you add new objectives or work, have you also budgeted for it or taken something off the table? Many managers complain they can’t support new initiatives (or cross-discipline efforts) because of this.

3.    Try Agile Development across other disciplines
A solution to doing many things poorly or slowly is to do one thing really well and fast. If this is supporting a new strategic initiative or another discipline then your rate of success is improved. (see the Prairie Sky Group e-Book on Agile Marketing)

4.    Hire for Teamwork
More than all of these there is one thing that the CEO did in this example. He made sure that one of his company values was teamwork, and he hired for it. Marketing didn’t see giving up part of their budget as an obstacle because they were wired to work as team. They all knew they had each others’ backs. Look at your core values if your have cross-discipline issues in supporting your strategic initiatives.

Solve the cross function issue and you’ll be well on your way to a successful implementation of a new strategy. How many other solutions to this problem are there?

Do Great Things!

Lee Hobart Stocking
Founder
PrairieSkyGroup.com
hobart@prairieskygroup.com
651-357-0110 (C)

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Yesterday, I had a colleague send me a link to a site that offers to write your blog for you.  The price was very reasonable, an introductory offer of $68.75 per blog!  He asked for my reaction.

My reaction was, “Really?”  And not in a good way.

Think about it.  Do you really want to phone it in?  If you are truly passionate about your business, how can you simply hire out the content and voice of your business’s soul?

I believe that marketers and business bloggers need to provide thought leadership, push the envelope, and not just offer rehashed stuff.  Because when you do rehashed stuff, your readers won’t tell their friends about your posts.  It will be boring.  Your readers will drift away from your blog.  Your posts will wind up like my insurance agent’s newsletter.  I will never read his stock subject, “Summertime Grill Safety.”  I might look at “Five Ways Not To Blow Yourself Up.”  But no newsletter or blog service will ever come up with that title.

Like every other industry, the marketing business can also follow the path of mass production.  Figure out how to produce more at a lower cost, offer it for a lower price, and then spend the money you make “marketing or advertising” your service to the masses.  You may sell something.  So will a hundred other organizations.  They will all be the same.

Yes, occasionally there is a technical discontinuity that happens in the marketing business.  For example, the creation of websites becomes more automated and doesn’t require experienced html programmers.  This can lead to lower costs for putting up a site, and suddenly there are website companies springing up from South Dakota to Manila.  This doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of improvements in technology or marketing.

We are told that blogging helps generate leads, and social media helps leverage your content.  I believe this to be generally true.  But you need to do the hard work.  Thank you to those that do it.

So if you are contemplating blogging and want to generate leads, I would advise against using a blog mill.   You might just as well lock yourself up with everyone else… or blow yourself up.

Do Great Things!
Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Driving Sales With Customer Focused Marketing
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

PS: For those of you who want to stop the other kind of mill you can visit this site.

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I heard someone say, “Marketing is just publishing.”  And if this is true, then the saying “Content is king,” should also be true.  The question is… does your king have clothes?  And is he dressed appropriately?

Great content is at the heart of any great marketing campaign.   It is also independent of media, and shouldn’t be confused with media.  Media is the way content is distributed, while content is the value and message of the information being conveyed.  In Quid Pro Nada, I discussed content as the currency in the new Internet marketing world and the value of giving it away for free.

Great content is also hard to accomplish.  A lot of content is garbage, mostly because it’s self-serving and sales oriented.   Talking about the features advantages and benefits of your products and services tends to be boring.  If you are still producing this type of marketing content, it’s why 95% of marketing literature thrown away (AMA).

Having a content strategy is a place to start.  Content strategy means that you have a content map of prospect needs for particular stages of the buying cycle.  This helps avoid offering ‘problem identification’ content to someone in the ‘evaluating stage’.   It also means that your messaging is consistent within any particular buying stage or part of the sales funnel.  Yet, as a marketer and consultant, my biggest content issues are tactical.  In thinking about content I’ve come up with four key elements and a set of questions you can ask yourself about each to see how well-dressed your king is.

The four elements are: 1) Creation, 2) Quality, 3) Focus and 4) Media.

Part 1:  Creation:

Marketing’s job is not content creation. A lot of CEO’s and sales people think it is.  But I rarely find a marketing person who is also a subject matter expert on the things that prospects, customers and clients care about.  That’s a tragedy in itself.   This doesn’t mean that marketing can’t create content, but unfortunately most marketers are too removed from the customer to understand their issues and interests. Rather, the best understanding of customers comes from Sales or R&D.

Marketing’s role is one of content facilitation.  Trying to get sales to create content is like… insert your favorite metaphor.  However, think of them as a source.  Sales people like to be interviewed.   Talk to them. Put them on video.  Go on a ride-along.  Sales can be a great source of truth. While you’re on a ride-along, interview customers and prospects.

The other area where real ideas for content are created is in the backroom of R&D.  If your marketing is not connected with R&D or consulting in a services organization, you are missing a great opportunity for content creation.   True R&D people and consultants are creative and naturally curious.  They have the ability to think about things differently and can be a source of thought leadership and content.

Lastly, good content has to be part of your organization’s culture.  Management owns responsibility for culture.  So if your CEO is not promoting a culture which values, creates and shares content, then have a strong talk with him or her.   It’s up to you to convey the value of content to the organization.  There are lots of ways upper management can promote content creation, from providing incentives, to allowing time for it, to setting an example.  Come to think about it, rather than talk to them, interview them on camera.

The questions to ask about content creation are:

1. Who owns content in your organization?
2. What are the best sources for content?
3. What is marketing’s role in its generation?
4. What is the value of great content?
5. How can you promote the value of content to your CEO?

In Part II I’ll discuss Content Quality.

Do Great Things.

Lee Stocking
The Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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There’s an old 3M cultural rule that allows employees to spend 15% of their time working on their own ideas without management intervention, so long as their work remotely relates  to the business.  It’s an unwritten rule, and it’s a good one.  I can personally attribute $60M in business as a direct result of this rule.

Recently, I was advocating the implementation of a similar 15% rule for a client in order to boost morale, spark creativity and reward employees with the freedom to work on their own ideas.  While in tacit agreement, the CEO expressed reservations about the potential loss of productivity and the ROI.  She asked how would we measure the program.

While a legitimate question, my reply was that you don’t measure the program.  Not directly.

We hear a lot about how marketing is now a science.  How unless you’re measuring ROI and quantifying each customer touch point, lead source, lead score, and so on, that you are wasting effort, and not as likely to be successful.  Measurement is king.  Quantify everything.

Being an “analytic” and having spent a short part of my career as a “process” engineer, I tend to agree that measurement is a necessary and good thing.  There’s an old statement that says you can’t improve something unless you measure it.  However, only up to a point.

Why?  Because sometimes our marketing and sales results come from people, and there are qualities about people that are hard to quantify.  How does one measure passion?  How do we measure creativity, determination, compassion or empathy?  Or the freedom to create with 15% of your time? These are valuable human traits, and I believe that they can add to the success of any marketing or sales program.

The problem is when measurement is taken to an extreme.  I’m not a fan of measuring everything.   Too many times we seek security in numbers, as if they alone are the key to control, and predicting the future.  The numbers become the end.  Because we can measure something, doesn’t mean we have to.  Sometimes we have to trust the spirit in people.  Their desire to succeed and create.  Managers measure passion, leaders enable it.

In quantum physics, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is often misstated so as to imply that simultaneous measurements of both the position and momentum cannot be made.   And while a slight misstatement, I believe it can be applied to business.  If we try to measure passion or creativity, we cannot understand their momentum.   As a matter of fact it dies.

Your thoughts?

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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Here’s a model I’ve developed to think about the four basic building blocks for inbound Internet marketing: 1) Content, 2) Contacts and 3) Tools, all of which are first surrounded by a clear and concise #4; Messaging.

The first building block is Content.  Without content there really is no value you can provide or conversation that you can construct with prospects.  In Quid pro Nada, I outlined the value of giving away useful information.  Development of valuable content to share is often the major bottleneck of companies today and should be the first priority of CMOs.  However, content is driven by thought leadership and that is the responsibility of the CEO and part guiding corporate brand.

The second building block is Contacts.  Contacts are relevant to both Inbound and Outbound marketing, particularly in Email marketing.  Choosing segments is the first step (Segmentation) and helps refine messaging by targeting specific messages to specific prospects.

The last building block is Tools. These can be Search Engine Optimization tools and processes, Pay per Click services, Sales Force Automation or even Email Marketing which is more an Outbound Marketing tool.  Unfortunately, tools are often the first building block chosen as a result of the Silver Bullet phenomenon (link).  Though sometimes selecting a tool, catalyzes the need for content, segmentation and messaging.

The checklist before you begin:

1. Has messaging been developed and tested?
2. Is the segmentation identified (and the messaging developed for each segment)?
3. Is the tool appropriate to the task?
4. Finally, do I have a plan to integrate these in a measureable inbound campaign?

Thanks.  Do great things.

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry with Qualified Leads^SM
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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I see Steve Jobs is in the news again regarding his health.  I hope he can come back from what appears to be an extension of a serious health problem.  He is an iconic figure in American business and few companies have such a connection, culture and success driven by their CEO.

I once got a job offer from Steve Jobs.  I say this not in the “My mother petted Secretariat” sense because I hate name dropping.   But his name in the news got me reflecting on our conversation and the value of doing what you are passionate about.

I’d received an offer from Alvy Ray Smith of Pixar to come and help them with the practical aspects of marketing what was a very nerdy technical product.  I was dubious of their budget, focus and willingness to change.  At the time Pixar was a recent spin-off of Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic and had just been acquired by Jobs.   I got a call from him one night urging me to take the offer.   I had two reservations.  The first was that Jobs had a terrible reputation for meddling and being a tyrant.  I had this on first-hand experience from a friend that worked directly for him at Apple.  I was worried about my freedom and budget to do what I thought needed to get done, though I could see living in Marin county. The second was that Pixar’s stock options were something I wouldn’t offer a janitor.  I used the second in the negotiation, and we failed to come to terms.  It was fifteen years before the options actually came to fruition.

At the same time, I’d received another offer from a $50M (3 year investment) startup at Mead Imaging.  They were recruiting smart people I knew from all sorts of fields.  However the technology was very dubious.  I’d done a lot of research and was skeptical when they told me that I had to suspend judgment on the technology because that wasn’t my job.   For me, I don’t need to control everything, but I do need to believe.   We also did not come to terms.  They closed their doors 30 months later when the technology failed to prove viable.

I wound up staying with my current company and taking a slightly different assignment with someone who simply said… I believe in what you’ve started, and I want you to finish it.  You get to do important work, have broad responsibilities and the budget as well.  The assignment led to a game changing product that sold $20M over two years.  It was incredibly hard work, but a lot of fun.

Hopefully you will get the chance to do a lot of great things in your career whether it’s in sales or marketing.  You can only make your decisions based on the information you have at the time.  But more than money, technology or who’s your boss, it’s worth doing what you’re passionate about because otherwise it will be a drag, and you won’t be any good at it.

I talk to a lot of people that are recession-bound in positions they don’t particularly like.  I sometimes say to them that I don’t particularly regret my decisions. Most regrets are around the things I didn’t do, but this doesn’t include turning down Jobs.  What I do regret is what I haven’t dared to do.  Daring to do something takes a whole other level of guts and passion.  In this case it was not arguing with him on the budgets to get done the things I thought needed doing.  I don’t know him at all, but I learned something from our brief connection.  I get the feeling he always dares, seldom compromises, and has unquestionable passion.  Maybe this is what makes him the iconic hero of business that he is.

Godspeed Mr. Jobs.

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Driving Sales Through Customer Focused Marketing
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (24×7)

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3M is a successful product development company.  Not only have they developed new products, but whole new categories of products as diverse as copiers, magnetic and optical storage, non-woven fabrics and the proverbial yellow Post It.

3M uses an R&D model where scientists and engineers in a central research facility don’t have an immediate product development goal.  Their focus is to develop new science.  Core science developed there finds it’s way out to product research and development in business divisions focused on products and market segments.  Traditionally they hire PhDs for their Central Research… really smart people with heads three feet across, and they set them loose on fun stuff.  Passionate about what they do, they share what they find with the development labs.

3M also has an unwritten cultural tradition that allows employees to spend 15% of their time working on their own ideas.  This is time that managers can’t ‘second guess’ or override.  The process, which has been in place over decades, breeds a type of thought leadership and product leadership that has been studied and emulated by many.  It also makes the bean counters and upper management uncomfortable because they can’t always measure the immediate result.

In Becoming the World’s Greatest Lover/Marketer I wrote about what Thought Leadership is.   So let me add what it is not, which also helps sharpen what it is.  Thought Leadership is not:

• A marketing or PR campaign
• About your products or services
• A set of communication tactics
• An event or this year’s campaign
• Someone else’s job

If you take these approaches, you are likely to fail.  Thought leadership requires a cultural transformation in most organizations, and it can’t be mandated.  3M’s new product development process has strong similarities to thought leadership, especially in the cultural aspects of allowing time to think and create, instead of simply produce.  It has similarities in the sharing of core ideas and technology.

So… what if your people had 15% of their time to do what they wanted?  What if you shared what you were excited about?  What if you rewarded the behaviors that you want to develop?  Gave away your secret sauce?  What if you played.  Had a little fun?  Developed a glue that didn’t stick very well and attached it to little yellow pieces of paper?

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The CEO of a client company once told me I shouldn’t do a webinar on the company’s, secret sauce.  They were a professional services company, and he was worried the competition would go to school on them, learn something about their secret sauce, and then use it against them.  I asked him if no one knew about the secret sauce, then what good was it?  I asked him what would happen if that competitor began giving away their knowledge?  How would customers and prospects react?  I promised him I would give the attendees only a taste.  Well, it might have turned out to be an appetizer.

Giving away your secret sauce is a type of thought leadership.  You find forward thinking companies and individuals doing this.  CEOs and bean counters don’t like it because it’s hard to quantify the immediate return.  That’s what makes it hard to instill in a company, and why it has to be top down driven.  But what is thought leadership and why is it important?

Here’s my definition of thought leadership:

It is the ability to share with passion the things that truly advance the art and science of your company’s business, your understanding of customer needs and your marketplace, and to do this with confidence and without thought of risk and immediate return.

The longer term value of thought leadership is that it can help a smaller companies leverage their size, become better known and increase their reach.  This creates larger audiences with more significant clients and reduces the cost of client acquisition.  And like brand, it can add to the valuation of the company.  In addition, from several of my last posts, it can help retain customers and engage them in new products and services.  There is value in thought leadership.

A key characteristic of true thought leadership is sharing; sharing ideas, technology, knowledge, and intellectual property, all without the thought of immediate gain.  It contains elements of passion, generosity and education.  Ultimately, like brand, it is about what others say about you.  You can’t say you are a thought leader or if you do, no one will believe you.  It’s like saying you are the world’s greatest lover.  Though that also has something to do with sharing, recognition comes more with simmering the sauce over a long time.

The combination of sharing without asking for something immediate in return is what makes it so hard for senior management to appreciate thought leadership and get behind it.  Like brand, marketing’s job is to help lead organizations into creating a culture of thought leadership, and to help show that ROI.

While the webinar was going on, I shared a text from a prospect with the CEO.  “This stuff is great.  I am reminded again of why we should try to do business.”

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