Question: ‘How’s it going?’ Answer: ‘53’.
If you’re team doesn’t speak like this, enter MSU. Make stuff up (metrics, content or processes).
Someone says: ‘It’s really hard to measure awareness or know what the response rate will be or to know how many references we need or know how much time it will take or how much it will cost or how successful we will be…….’
If you hear this, I guarantee that you are failing. You run a business, you need to get people to make business decisions and be accountable for those decisions.
The business scorecard is numbers, and sometimes only dollars. If the management team doesn’t believe that the marketing metrics are tied and causal to the business metrics, you have a problem. It’s your problem, not theirs. It will cost you, and probably the company, dearly.
Enough said about measurement, as much has been written on this topic. What I’ll try to do here is make it more actionable.
Question: ‘Will you help me?’ Answer: ‘sure’. Call foul immediately on this! These two people have no idea what they just said to each other.
Q: ‘Can I get 4 hours to design 4 graphics’ A: ‘yes for $400’. Hug those two folks, they get it.
I always say that all good sentences have 3 numbers. What I mean is that we are in the business of trading time and programs dollars for work-in-progress that may turn into profit. If I ask someone in the hallway ‘how’s it going’ and they say ‘good’, I ask them ‘how do you know that?’. They usually get nervous at that point, and if they really reflect, they probably get more nervous.
Those that have worked with me for a while, know how to start the conversation; ‘Reminder, the goal is 10 deals in tier2 financial accounts over next 18 months where we’re spending 80K on this project to get 800 top of funnel and 90 qualified leads by March 1st. To date we’re at 500 top and 5 bottom so we’re tracking 20% ahead of plan with one deal already identified as $50K size, and I’m requesting 10 more hours of inside sales time and 10 more hours of SE time which Bobby-Joe and Billy-Sue are pushing back on. Can we discuss as I think we risk >100K without this support?’ I love this colleague! They have goals, status, dependencies, results and risks quantified as best as possible. Now I can have a conversation…..
It takes about a year to get everyone on board but once they’re on board, it’s fun to watch folks shake their heads at the newbie and then say ‘we can’t hear you without numbers’. It’s also fun to have what was a long conversation and super-long organizational process get collapsed into 2 minutes and 2 emails. I love saying ‘yes’ to which the response in the beginning is ‘really? are you going to make that happen?’ to which I respond ‘yes and please make your numbers as I trust you, if you need my help, let me know’.
Someone complains: ‘The partner guy isn’t following up’ You respond: ‘what do you want him to do?’ They respond ‘blah blah blah’. You help them out ‘how many client visits in next 30 days do you need’ They respond ‘I really don’t know’ You respond ‘MSU…is it 1, 10, 100–make a solid, reasonable, conservative guess, we can always add more’.
You get the idea and it has a powerful effect on both the output and the company’s understanding of marketing.
By simply measuring PR better and establishing more aggressive goals while streamlining our cumbersome approval process, we doubled output two years in a row with the same agency, same manager, same news level and same budget. As we set our goals higher, we got more creative and better but it didn’t really take us more time.
The old adage of if you measure it, it will get done is true and should be applied to all the interim building blocks so that you can see resource conflicts and process problems quickly. Without this discipline, people are accidently kidding you and you are kidding yourself.
You’re number one job as a marketer is to kill, stomp-out and forever ban the phrase ‘it depends’. No kidding it depends. Depends on how much of what, when, where and how delivered?
Q: ‘Will this $1M investment in programs budget be sufficient to drive the awareness and revenue that we need?’ A: ‘With 10 references which were committed from sales, yes’. That’s the management conversation.
Q: ‘Will this work?’ A: ‘With 10 design hours, $1K, 2 hours of Bobby-Sue’s time and 100 tier2 contacts from Billy-Ray by Thursday, yes’. Q: ‘Are you sure that you’ll get those things by Monday?’ A: ‘yes’. That’s the operational conversation.
He who is closest to the money, makes the most money. That’s why sales and money managers get paid more than marketing people. If you want to make more, get closer to the money with metrics.
Sales has a saying ‘never lose a deal alone’. What that means is that transparency and predictability are critical to success. Can you value your marketing pipeline? The CFO can. If the CFO says it costs $1M and has no idea how much it’s worth, again you have a problem. Get finance to be a neutral intermediary in the sales and marketing funnel evaluation process. Get marketing automation and salesforce.com and MSU. Sure you’ll be wrong, but you’ll tighten the range over time and hopefully come to be trusted in your judgment.
Bottom line: Specific expectations help build trust, committment, and accountability. Numbers enable specific expectations. Create a communication culture that uses numbers and both peformance and the faith in the marketing function will improve at minimal cost.