The big picture: being a marketing manager

Just when I need encouragement, I got it from the Big Picture Guy. True to his name, his comments to my post "Turn on the Juice" looked at the 'big picture' of what it means to be a marketing manager--what the expectations of upper management would be. I've read and re-read his comments, and I hope you do, to.

- Marketers are the champions of change. They spearhead change. They are thus, by definition, leaders. As leaders, they are called upon to demonstrate vision, drive, courage, persistence. There is no question of motivating themselves; the important thing is to motivate others, to build excitement in others, including sales reps and customers.

- Selling is tactical. Marketing is both strategic and tactical. Marketing sees the big picture and manages the small details.

Up to now, most of what I've done has been tactical marketing. Its an important job, which is why I started this blog--if you can't take care of the details, your marketing efforts are useless. BPG shows me where the new part of my job is---leadership of strategy. It will be a task to prove myself, especially since this job hadn't existed before. Thanks man!

Read more from the Big Picture Guy.

What it takes to place an order

Sometimes I have to wonder what takes so long to get an order these days. About half of the items on my May forecast haven't closed because the order is trapped in red-tape. You'd think technology would make getting an order easier these days.

Here's an email from a Fortune-50 customer of ours that is just amazing, sharing what she has to go thru to buy a $15,000 test unit:

I finally completed the paperwork, meetings, signatures (it took a total of 14!), to get approval to buy this equipment, then sent it all to someone in India who will hopefully send an AR number to me tomorrow. Then I can write the order. Of course, if your company is a new vendor for XXX, then they have to have paperwork done in Mexico to add a vendor to our system, and that takes 2 to 10 days. I know it doesn't seem it, but we really do want to get our equipment as soon as possible, particularly because the old junky one we were using broke down last week.

Turn on the juice

How does one sustain the energy to do your job sometimes? For all my years of being a salesperson, I've found that the surprise of the next incoming call can drive my energy. Even if in a slump, a phone call causes me to automatically 'turn on'...its a reactionary type of energy.

Now I will be a self-directed marketing manager, and my biggest fear is a loss of energy and excitement. If I start looking for external sources, I'm going to end up annoying co-workers and managers. I have a 'to do' list started to help keep me focused, but is it enoug?

Here are some posts I've run across lately that help me realize how to not only suvive, but thrive.

Where I've been: The lazy salesperson as described by Jim Logan
"Some sales people are afraid to ask for an order. I understand many of their reasons; none are acceptable."
Reaction: More call-to-actions in all my marketing materials. Help get to the important questions that Jim says need to be asked. They are important questions, regardless of the answers.

Where I am afraid I'll go: The Curse of the Yawn as warned by Sean Woodruff
"Curse the yawn with something different, imaginative, outstanding in the eyes of your prospect."
Reaction: We can't settle for 'good enough' customer service or marketing. Turn on the juice and show you care about your customers.

Here's the full monty with ideas to thrive: Are you fully engaged? from Michael McLaughlin at the new Revenue Roundtable blog:
"3. To achieve full engagement, you have to train yourself in the same deliberate way that elite athletes do.
4. Full engagement is not achieved by conscious will and discipline, but by the use of positive rituals."
Reaction: Deliberate? Train myself? Wow, can I do that consistantly? Create positive rituals? Yea, I guess I will have to learn how do to this, just like a pro athlete.

Actually, the advice at the Revenue Roundtable sounds a lot like cognitive behavior therapy...you can't directly control your emotions, but you can control your behavior...then the emotions will adjust.

Do you have behaviors or rituals that help keep you juiced up?

When does winning sole-source work

Salespeople love winning 'sole source' business because they don't have to compete. For their company, and even their customer, it may not be the best thing.

Here's an outtake from a buyer's perspective at ThomasNet's Industrial Market Trends blog/newsletter (bold highlights are mine, as well as the collective 'vendor' reaction):

Single Sourcing: Pros & Cons:
Buyer's Pros:
1. Having a single source means less work to qualify the source and probably less administrative effort in dealing with only one supplier. This is a real advantage in a highly technical product where significant engineering effort is required to qualify or use a product.
Vendor: Yay, less work for the salesperson, but with a risk of complacency.

2. Since all of your volume is given to one source, the buyer has maximized his leverage based on total quantity. The buyer should make sure that this point is emphasized during the negotiations concerning price, delivery, etc.
Vendor: Be prepared for repeated requests for discounts because the buyer has no alternative way to save money.

3. The supplier should feel a special obligation to help the buyer in terms of availability, etc. Again, in the process of awarding this business to the supplier, the fact that the buyerÂ?s company is relying on the supplier for material availability should be made clear.
Vendor: Are you willing to accept this special obligation? In sickness and in health?

Cons:
1. It is more difficult for the buyer to be sure that he is keeping his company competitive if there is only one source.
Vendor: We once had a long-distance salesperson who kept our business by repeatedly visiting to see how she could save us money. You should plan to do something similar.

2. In periods of tight supply, the buyer may be at a disadvantage in being able to ask other suppliers to accept orders.
Vendor: Can you prove your company's flexibility, so the buyer is confident you can handle their orders?

3. Other suppliers may lose interest in trying to compete for the business if they see that a sole source situation is likely to persist.
Vendor: Yay for us.

4. There is a real risk if the single source has a catastrophic event, gets bought by your competitor, has financial problems, etc.
Vendor: What if something happens to the buyer's company? Can we afford to lose the business?

Reasonable customers win with reasonable follow-up.

While I've had some recent run-ins with whiney leads who don't want to be contacted, they are the exceptions. MarketingVox confirms that assumption with this post this morning: Study: Same-Day Lead Follow Up Boosts Satisfaction:

"88 percent of those contacted on the same day said they were happy, where only 70 percent said the same when contacted more than four days after initially indicating interest."

The post leads to BtoBonline, which apparently has a vague press release from KnowledgeStorm. Still its good news that most leads are happy to hear from a company promptly, and that personal response only increases the satisfaction.

I still remember filling out a 'contact us' form at a website five or six years ago, then getting a phone call from a salesperson within 15 minutes. He answered my questions and took me back to their website to show me some more product details. I was amazed at how effective it was for him to be that prompt to respond.

UPDATE: Brian Carroll has more to say about this report and the 'need for speed' when it comes to lead follow-up. Listen-up to the lead guru!

Aren't we all jealous of those guys in suits and office buildings?

Most of us marketing bloggers seem to be from small companies. Myself, I'm a cube dweller in a company of about 100. How would it be to drive a beemer to work, take an elevator to your floor, and going to your own private office?

Let me introduce you to Big Picture Guy's blog at BigPictureSmallOffice.com. He's a senior VP at a major company with a tone and style is in stark contrast to a small-company peon like me. He makes firm decisions and gets them acted on while he shrugs his shoulders at a lot of the ambiguities of petty issues. His secret identity allows him to tell stories and share his opinions about other staff, even giving them funny nicknames like Whiney Baby...A soap opera almost.

A couple specific links:
For a real contrast with us marketers, see his comments posted at Brand Autopsy recently:

Good advertising works, I know that. Good price-for-value works, I know that. But lots of this other stuff... I don't know. I haven't seen the ROI numbers yet.

His latest post Food for Thought shows how he set out to improve customer service (and a good example of what the Brand Autopsy post was about):

A few weeks ago, after my rather disquieting stroll through our Customer Care Center, I took the CCC supervisor to lunch.

Boyink says: So What?

My belly burned and cheeks flushed as I read Mike Boyink's post today, titled So What? His comments could have been written by one of my website's prospects, and it kind-of hurts:

"So I came to this website and read about your product. You've given me a product description, features and benefits, and product photos, yet after reading it I still have to ask....So what?"

After my post yesterday, I was especially sensitive to not having effective call-to-action steps on our website. Blessedly, Mike links to a article by Gerry McGovern about call-to-actions which links to a book called Call to Action. To get me confident of where to start, where to announce the call-to-action, Gerry puts it simply: "A link is a call to action..."

Links are the essential difference between web content and print content. Think carefully about your links. Are they clear and precise? Are they making the right call to action?

More about salespeople and prospects

My post on friday about some recent propects' blatant contempt for our attempts to contact them was just a reflection of my salespeople's frustration. But the comments I got brought me back to being a marketer, so thanks.

Alanmed told me its a bad message when our isn't pricing on our website. Yes, but its also a reflection of reality of our business, as we have agents around the world with different pricing and even different models. Our US model sells for less than our Asian version, but we can't be cannibalizing the Asian division's sales.

Peter Davidson followed that up by suggesting "explain in detail why you don't offer pricing information and offer next steps for prospects," which is a great idea. In fact, I am missing a whole 'call-to-action' mode on our product listings, and this may be a way to do it.

David Shaw responded on his blog with a post titled Salespeople: Shooting ourselves in the foot that ends in this also helpful suggestion: "The trick is to convince prospects that your salespeople will listen and solve problems--not push products."

In other words, I shouldn't be just marketing the product, but marketing our way of doing business. Why we don't have prices listed, that we may have salespeople call, and how we are just here to help. Great stuff for my to-do list. Thanks guys!

Is it too much to ask to talk to our salesperson?

Is this bizarre behavior or this now the norm to expect from prospects?

Case 1: We had a web-lead request for a quote on 12 of smaller product, which would total over 100K, but all he left was his email address at a university. This was certainly an attention-grabbing request, but we wanted to find out what he was up to and whether the model he picked out was the best choice--exactly what a salesperson should do. So we had the local sales rep try to contact him to find out, which he did by email. The reply he got back said only this: "I'm not sure that I trust a company that won't list prices on their web
site and also won't give prices over e-mail."

Case 2: We forwarded a web-lead to a sales rep to investigate before quoting one of our mid-range products, once again, to confirm the proper equipment for the application. After finally getting in touch with the prospect, his answer was "just quote the equipment as I described at your website." Despite our reps repeated questions to find out about the application, all he learned is that they would be selecting a vendor the next morning.

Are these prospects afraid of a starting a relationship? Do they think they are smart enough to not need a salesperson? Are they overwhelmed with vendors? Our desire is to help make sure the customer has selected the right equipment, and has it configured to suit their requirements--that's why we don't have prices on our website. Maybe its just the old-fashioned fear of salespeople aggravated by the internet.

I've talked about the sales use of email before:
Is email sabotaging your sales efforts?
Using email to follow-up with prospects
Making the most of email

Change or die: the rules

We B2B marketers have been taught that we need to give our prospects facts so they can make a rational decision. But then we wonder why they end up selecting their existing vendor anyway. How can we change their behavior? Seth Godin has been telling us in his Liar's Blog that it is an emotional decision and we need tell them a story that gives them the confidence to change.

Godin's old haunt, Fast Company, made their May lead article Change or Die about changing personal behaviors and corporate cultures, but the Ornich approach for change they talk about is equally suitable for marketing. And their use of a story about heart patients makes it compelling: "Ninety percent of patients who've had coronary bypasses don't sustain changes in the unhealthy lifestyles that... greatly threaten their lives."

Here's a good summary from a sidebar of the article: Five Myths About Changing Behavior

Oh, on a personal level, I think the article is a great resource for saving your life. You need to exercise your brain to keep it flexible for change. Makes me feel good that I picked up the harmonica a few years ago. Now, I need to effect change so I practice more.

More legalities: Taking of your company name in vain

Marketing Profs: Combating Trademark Infringement in Search: "the unscrupulous use of a competitor's trademarked terms is a murky business and contentious topic." This article specifcally addresses PPC advertising.

The three types of issues:
1. PPC ads that are triggered by your trademarks, but don't mention them.
2. PPC ads that do mention your brand.
3. PPC ads that are deceptive.

Searching for my company's brand name, I found the following on Google:

• Two companies offering used and/or rental equipment like we sell
• A business/stock info site offering info on our company
• A 'type 1' infringement for one of our less popular products
• Two directory services that I have paid/trial listings for our products, one that mentions our brand, one that doesn't.

In all, I'm not concerned about any of these. I've long-ago accepted PPC ads by used equipment vendors as legit. The ads by the directory services does tell me that I am competing with them for traffic directly, but that discussion is for another post coming soon.

Recently, one of our direct competitors was running a PPC ad that said "Looking for an alternative to X brand". My assumption is that ad was pulled by Google due to poor click-thrus. Ultimately, I think this may be the ultimate judge and protector.

Can you believe it? Customer lists are not proprietary

Recently we've been wondering what the legal issues are regarding salespeople who leave with a customer or price list. Seems that a recent legal decision in Illinois says it isn't a problem unless the information was specifically protected or communicated as confidential. Just being in a proprietary server, for example, is not enough. Here's a good summary:

Deal Attorney Blog: Password Protected Online Customer Lists Not Trade Secrets:

'In the case of Liebert Corp. v. Mazur, the Illinois Court of Appeals has held that customer lists stored online in password protected directories were not entitled to trade secret protection where employer did not adequately make employees aware of the lists' confidential nature...

The court held that '[r]estricting access to sensitive information by assigning employees passwords on a need-to-know basis is a step in the right direction.' This precaution in and of itself, however was not enough. The court was 'troubled by the failure to either require employees to sign confidentiality agreements, advise employees that its records were confidential, or label the information as confidential.'

FYI, my son's home

Actually, my son Robert has been home for a week. I just wanted to give those of you wondering some closure. Yesterday his eyes started working together! Mostly, anyway. And yesterday he and his brother turned eight.

A website that's like a five-year-old rice cake

Can you believe this website is up? I wanted to call their phone number just to see if they are still in business it sucks so bad. Would you tolerate a you company having a 'web sight'? Sheesh.

www.masterchiller.com

Websites as dry as rice cakes

When I was working on my 'e-commerce certificate' program at GVSU, I had the most fun doing website reviews. When lining up several sites from the same industry, what works and doesn't becomes very obvious. While its easy to point out what doesn't work, it is a whole lot harder to do it right.

So it made me happy to find the April Assembly Lines column by the editor of Chip Scale Review Magazine reviewing the four websites of the 'billionaire's club' of IC packaging foundries. Ron Iscoff, as a print editor, was looking mainly at overall readability and usefulness of the home pages, but as a marketer my concerns are different. So let me do a quick review of my own, in the order he ranked the sites:

1. Amkor Technology has a tiny logo that looks like an afterthought. Dead center is a graphic that doesn't mean anything with the embedded words "Total Turnkey Technology" and "Quality Solutions"--what waste of prime real estate. The all-caps menu at the top of the page is hard to read, and the fixed-width page feels cramped.
2. Stats ChipPAC site gets hit on by Ron for having just one small picture of their products (and its below the fold). As little content as is on this page, there shouldn't be a fold, but they eat up about 250 pixels at the top with nothing but a logo and menu. The graphic bar at dead center, like Amkor's, is useless. And three fuzzy buttons placed hodge-podge on the page make the page hard to quickly digest.
3. Siliconeware is handicapped by a multilingual site, but gets what they do in that critical center spot, showing large IC chips and the words "Flip Chip Packages" in large type. Now if they'd only be smart enough to make the graphic clickable. So the main content choices given to visitors is just news and about us.
4. ASE Global has a home page built in Flash, which ads no value, just glitz. Despite the glitz, the page is boring and has no central focus. The logo is tiny, and the company description takes three lines of text. The page has a vague cloudy graphic with names of their different companies on it, which when clicked, open that website (surprise).
   

After seeing these sites as a group, it appears that the IC Packaging industry needs websites to share info about the company, and to a lesser extent products. But don't the investors and engineers visiting want to feel like these companies care about their technology and capabilities? Amkor did the best with it's "product showcase", but overall, these home pages seemed as dry and tastless as a rice cake. And if sharing about their company is the primary purpose, why don't I get a stronger feel of branding?

Looks like this 'billionaire's club' is still using brochureware.