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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Why don’t you pay your VP of Marketing or CMO the same as your VP of Sales?

This may seem like a radical concept. But as CEOs and business leaders, our success is often in how we hire, and how we motivate our team.

The classic answer to the question is that the VP of Sales is more important. They bring in the revenue. Power in a company is directly proportional to proximity to the revenue stream. Marketing is behind the lines. Therefore they should be paid less.

But in today’s environment, buyers say they find their vendors 80% of the time rather than the other way around. When they do find you, they are much further down the sales funnel than they used to be. They no longer rely as much on sales people to provide information, or help them understand how your products and services help them solve a problem. When the prospect doesn’t buy from you, 80% buy a similar product or service within 18 to 24 months. Sales doesn’t nurture prospects for that amount of time. Their attention span is too short. You don’t want sales doing these things, because they also aren’t very good at it, and you want them selling. <see How Many Sales People Does It Take To Screw In A Forecast?>

Who does these valuable things? Marketing.

Our prejudice is to believe Marketing offers less value. That the return is harder to measure. But whose fault is this? While there is a lot of crappy marketing going on out there, a big portion of it is our fault.

For what other function would you lower your expectations, and therefore pay less? When you set low expectations, you get crappy results. This doesn’t mean you should pay for crappy results. But what if you changed your expectations?

There’s a new wave of brilliant marketers out there, using sophisticated new tools to bring prospects through your funnel. They are going to work for the people who “get” marketing and who challenge them. They are going to add tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to their company’s revenues. But maybe not yours.

At minimum, they are going to want the same goals as sales if not similar incentives. Because when Sales and Marketing don’t have the same goals and rewards, they piss at each other, and your company suffers.

You get what you pay for. Raise your expectations… and your pay.

Do Great Things!

L. Hobart Stocking
Founder
Prairie Sky Group
651-357-0110 (C)

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Is your marketing boring? In the B2B space there’s a lot of boring marketing, and guess what?

No one is paying attention. No one cares about your HyperScotchaMatic 5000, or its 5 terabit backplane. No one cares about your products or your company. Because they’re boring. You’ve always been suspicious, and now you’re thinking, maybe we are boring, but we’re in a boring industry, we’re in the left-handed Crenznuts industry.

I have a belief that B2B marketing should be more like B2C marketing. That doesn’t mean you have to have an over-weight middle-aged guy dancing and making a fool of himself on your website (never did understand that). But unless you are interesting, you are wasting your time and effort. There are too many other fascinating things that compete for our attention. Let me give you a classic example of “not boring” from back before the “InterNets.”

A small local communications company wanted to send digital files from Customer A to Customer B. It was a business-to-business sale. They didn’t have a lot of resources and needed to get noticed in a noisy marketplace. The first thing they did was pick purple as their corporate color in a time when everyone else was staid. The second thing they did was reduce their value proposition to a simple saying that defined everyone else. It was, “FedEx delivers overnight, we deliver over lunch.”

Trite as it sounds now, the third thing they did was order 6000 pairs of purple high top tennis shoes.  Were they ever in style? At their first trade show, they had a booth many times smaller than others. It was mostly filled with tennis shoes and a display of their product. The product didn’t do much, it just sat on display, there was no “demo.” All the sales people at the booth wore purple tennis shoes with their suits. A little weird, but not boring.

When asked why by the press and prospects, they simply explained their value and  gave everyone a free pair of purple high tops. You see walking around a trade show can be tiring on the feet. Soon people were seeing purple tennis shoes on others and asking what they were and where they got them. After four hours, every one of 25,000 attendees and the media knew of the little company.

The quality of grabbing attention is the opposite of boring. It’s called fascination. Fascination helps us grab attention. There are as many ways to be fascinating as to be boring. There are also quite a few ways to go over the top. Being different by itself is not enough. But it’s a choice.

Things that fascinate are genuineness or true honesty, humor, unique voice, provoking an emotional response, creation of advocates, standing for values, creating controversy, focusing on others rather than yourself, and many more.

An output of fascination is “coolness.”  After we have been fascinated, and engaged, we then seek the confidence and social connection commonly referred to as cool.  Cool creates the longing to belong to a group. For example, Apple creates cool through design and marketing… don’t you secretly want to be cool with that new Apple i-watch.  Or perhaps you’re cool because you got the pair of purple tennis shoes before others.

It’s easy and safe to be boring. It’s hard to be fascinating and develop cool. You can’t fake it. But the last questions to ask of your B2B marketing department are… “Are we being boring?  Are we too comfortable? Will anyone notice or care?”

You know there was a reason you didn’t throw out those green leotards. You can be fascinating at your next company party. Or not. It would be cooler to wear them on St Patrick’s day.

Do Great Things!

Lee Hobart Stocking
Founder
Prairie Sky Group
Hobart@prairiekygroup.com
651-357-0110 (C)

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Many CEOs, presidents, and owners of small and medium sized B2B businesses believe Brand is something that only large consumer businesses like Target need to think about. They have lots of other pressing investments, and Brand has the connotation of being expensive, with lots of glitz, advertising, and PR, but without a good or measurable ROI. I don’t agree with this assessment, and I believe there’s another way to think about Brand.

Your Brand is important, especially in an Internet connected commodity oriented world. There isn’t anything your customers can’t buy from someone else for less. One of the things that distinguishes you is your Brand, and you have a Brand whether you think you do or not.

Brand is the value people are willing to pay you over the intrinsic value of your product or service because of it’s perceived value.

Brand is determined, not by what you say about yourself, but by what customers and prospects think about you based on their interactions with your company, products, and services.

So you may sell reliable products, but if you are hard to do business with, your Brand of “Reliable,” may be derailed by a competitor whose Brand is “Reliable with Great Service.” It doesn’t matter if you say you have great service if that’s not the customer experience. The customer will think of your company and think, “Reliable, Crappy Service,” and pay you what they think that’s worth.

How do you know what your Brand is? It’s simple. Ask your customers. There are lots of ways to do this, but it means making a small investment in figuring out what your customers think. If you are not doing this, then how can you get better, compete, and grow? You’re simple guessing or trying to convince with your messaging. Our recommendation is to get the data that defines your Brand.

But just as Brand is determined from outside your company, and not dependent on what you say about yourself, there is one major factor for Brand that is determined from the inside out. Since Brand is created in every interaction with your company, whether on the web, or how you answer the phones, or how you service you products, the one common denominator is your people.

Your people, whether in billing, or service, or delivery, or sales, create the Brand for your company.

So here’s an easy way to get started. It’s the formula at the top of this post. The most important thing a CEO can do is to hire the right people. If you hire for Values (V) and do a good job, the Values of an individual determine their Attitude (A). The Attitudes of a group of employees determine the Culture (C) of a company.  Culture and execution trump everything in the SMB space. Culture determines how employees interact with prospects and customers, and this determines your Brand. Hire for Values, reinforce them with a strong mission statement, and you will find that your Brand will follow. Fail to do this and your Brand will evolve haphazardly, and you’ll find yourself wasting money on marketing messages that fail, and not getting paid what you think you should.

So now as a test, without looking them up, list out the values of your company. Let us know how you did, and whether you want to find out if your customers agree.

Do Great Things

L. Hobart Stocking
Chief Provocateur
Prairie Sky Group
651-357-0110

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NASA has released a video of The Earth at Night, which is stunningly beautiful.

Click on Image to See Video

I have a desktop screen saver on my Mac that I like of the famous Blue Marble photo of earth taken in daylight.  It reminds me that the earth is both bigger and smaller than we can imagine.  But the earth at night sequence has been haunting me because of one main difference.  In the daytime photo, we can see deserts, and oceans and clouds, but the earth looks devoid of life.  In the Earth at Night, we can see lights.  And I imagine the billions of people who live on earth who use these lights.  And even those that don’t.  We are well-populated planet.

What has this got to do with business, marketing, and sales?

I think it has to do with perspective.  We all tend to have the limited perspective of the current clients or prospects we serve.  We live in our current businesses just like we live in houses, or apartments, or neighborhoods and cities that we know.  And while we know there is a whole world out there, in some corner of our minds, the world ends at our front door, our neighborhood, or our current set of clients and prospects.  But there are 7 billion of us on the planet.

We are all connected now… by the Internet, and by the limits of the planet.  We are connected by our need for food, water, air, light, and our common humanity, as well as by our differences.  Our limited perspective often amplifies these differences.  Our imaginations end at our neighborhoods, both literal and metaphoric.

If we are going to be great entrepreneurs, business people, marketers and sales people, we are going to need to broaden our perspectives.  Because there is huge potential in meeting the needs of 7 billion people.  I also believe we don’t have much of a choice.

When I look at The Earth at Night I can’t help but think.  All those lights.  All those people.  They must consume a lot of power.  Today most of that power comes from fossil fuels that exhaust into our atmosphere and are warming our earth.  That thin glow at the edge of the earth is our atmosphere… the thickness of a coat of shellac on a basketball.  Maybe the sky doesn’t go on forever?  The problems of climate, food, water, and power represent challenges that require a change in perspective.  They will require imagination.  They will require business to change perspective.

Peace on earth begins with a broadened perspective.  Have a successful and prosperous new year.

Do Great Things!

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

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I recently had a meeting with the CEO of a small $3M company.  He wanted to increase sales.  When I asked him what was keeping him from increasing his sales he mentioned that he was limited by his inventory, or rather matching the right inventory to the right customer.  I asked him how much he thought he could increase his sales if he wasn’t restricted.  He said he thought he could add $250-300K easily.

I didn’t really know much about his business, but since I wasn’t restricted in my thinking by his experience, I was able to give him a simple solution, and it didn’t cost him a thing. His business was regionally based.  So I asked him if he knew his competitors in the surrounding states.  He did.  I then asked him if he’d ever gone to a car dealer that didn’t have the model or color he wanted.  He said yes.  What did they do for him?  They called a neighboring dealer and ordered the model in the color he wanted.  I suggested he could do the same by setting up a cooperative inventory-sharing program with competitors outside of his area.  They would have similar inventory issues and could even buy from him.

Why couldn’t he think of this?  It’s hard to say.  We all get tunnel vision.  We get busy doing the linear things that keep the business afloat.  Or maybe we don’t have a process for identifying and solving issues.  So they just continue to get in our way.

That’s the reason it’s valuable to network and expose yourself to outside thinking. Make it a habit to get an outside opinion.

Do Great Things!

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

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The tagline for Agile Marketing is the phrase “Do, Learn, Adapt.”  It allows for speed because it relies on getting customer feedback quickly, learning from that feedback, and then adapting so you aren’t wasting time or effort on things that are not important to the customer.  Like many new business approaches it can be implemented poorly.

One common mistake is to believe that simply implementing something quickly is Agile Marketing.  It depends.

Implementing the wrong thing doesn’t help anyone.  There’s a great body of marketing knowledge on what works and what doesn’t for each particular situation.  Many CEOs fall into the trap of implementing the wrong thing quickly.   This is because their conception of marketing may be naively  “Advertising or PR,” and they want results.  So for example, if you are a small B2B company, advertising isn’t usually productive, and it doesn’t matter how fast you implement an advertising campaign.  All you will wind up with is an expensive bill.

So the modification to Agile Marketing is “Ask, Do, Learn, Adapt.”  First get some idea whether you are even in the ballpark.   Ask others what works in similar situations (see next post).  The Do, Learn, Adapt motto is better as a refinement for proven techniques such as inbound marketing.   Because motion without purpose or direction isn’t progress, it’s just a waste of energy.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell24x7)

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Doing great things doesn’t come naturally.  It requires an internal drive and often it also requires some external demand.

Several years ago I had the privilege of watching a senior executive challenge a small team intent on developing a new business.  They were entering a new market, one that didn’t exist.  It was expected that many competitors would enter the market at the same time.  Their plan was a little tentative since there was no history in the new market.  They predicted that their market share would be ten percent after a year.  He then asked a very critical question, “What would it take to get to twenty five percent market share?”

The team had limited themselves and their thinking.  So they went away, regrouped and came back with a plan they thought would achieve that goal.  A year later they had twenty three percent of the market and were becoming the dominant player.  It took a lot of hard work, but it also took thinking differently about how they would approach the market.

During strategic planning sessions, it is easy to set your goals too low because you know too much about constraints.  You know about a lack of resources, potential competition, and other limitations.  So you tend to average down.  There is nothing worse than a group that begins to re-enforce itself on what can’t be done.  The lesson is that you don’t have too.  Separate opportunity from limitations then figure out how to overcome the limitations. Challenge yourselves.

Do Great Things!

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

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Because this is election season, and because I am an advocate of 1:1 marketing, I masochistically thought I would sign up for the campaigns of both parties to see how they are using email marketing to reach their constituents.   I now receive over forty emails a day asking for money.  How stupid of me.  I suppose I also now know that Obama is a Muslim talking the country down a socialist radical agenda, and that Romney is a Mormon and likely to attack Iran with nuclear arms.

The tragedy of political emails in the age of 1:1 Marketing is that they are so not 1:1.  There appears to be no feedback loop or evaluation of any interaction with the email.  It is entirely batch and blast.

Wouldn’t it make sense if I opened an email on an environmental issue that my next email might not be on the Keystone pipeline? (I’m making this up.)  Or if I contributed just this morning, that another solicitation at noon doesn’t really work, and merely pisses me off? (I’m not making this up.)

The second tragedy is that it seems they’ve sold or donated my email address and broken my trust.  There is a subtle proliferation of email senders in each party.   Not just the names of the sender, but the organizations.  Just because I responded to your immigration email, doesn’t automatically mean I want to receive emails from the NRA.

But surprise!  I did receive an email the other day that said… “Thank you for your contribution last month of $19.29.  We used that money to run a campaign for the left-handed speckled grebe.  It was a successful campaign and we figure we saved twelve grebes.  Now, we know things are tight, but we wanted to ask if you could help us with the right-handed grebe?  Etc.”

How much more effective could these campaigns be if they followed the basic principles of good email marketing?  Then again, as they say, maybe we would only encourage the bastards.

Do Great Things!

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

http://www.ratepublic.com

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In case you missed it, Microsoft recently changed their corporate logo.  I thought I would wait until the excitement died down before commenting.  You can almost always tell a company is in trouble when they change their logo.

Of course it’s easy to jump on the Microsoft bashing bandwagon, and they have been in trouble for quite a while.  I’m simply using them as an example.  From the other end of the size spectrum, I could use either of my son-in-law’s two businesses.  Both are under $1M in sales.  Both have recently redone their logos.

Redoing your logo or identity for even a small company will cost you both time and money.   In my son-in-law’s businesses, over $5K when you add up signage, website, literature, business cards, ad infinitum.   It rarely improves the top line or brings in new business.  I have to ask why?

I imagine it’s because one’s ego and business identity get confused.  In small entrepreneurial companies, the owner is often “the company.”  As a result, his or her ego is also “the company.”  Therefore the identity is connected to the owner’s ego.  The other reason is that it’s often easier to address something visible like identity than working on tougher problems.

If the focus was on your brand, or your brand promise or brand loyalty it would make more sense.  But because it has become easy to create a new identity, because it’s visible, because we believe it reflects on us, we wind up tinkering with the identity.  Don’t.  It’s a waste of time for 98% of small and medium businesses.  We’ll remember you for the brand you develop by working on the hard stuff.  When you get to the size of Microsoft then you can tinker.

Success is about relentlessly implementing a great plan, not about the binder the plan is kept in.  So when your VP of Sales and Marketing comes to you and says he thinks you need to change the logo… you need to make another decision.

Do Great Things!
Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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