Thursday, November 12, 2009
http://twitter.com/ - it is getting there as an application - follow me, for I am lost too, perhaps a little less than you, who knows? - Mike Pilcher - http://twitter.com/mikepilcher
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Finding the right talent just got much harder
In today’s turbulent markets we still need to hire to replace our professionals. No matter what is happening to our business professionals still move and create openings, these openings need to be filled and in today’s ultra-competitive business environment where everyone is aggressively chasing the same customer budget, you have to have the best of the best in your organisation.
However we are deluged with candidates as business upon business reduces workforces and put more professionals into the burgeoning talent pool. The task of finding the right person, for the right role, in the right place did not get easier, it just got much harder. Your hiring managers and your HR professionals are deluged with professional candidates all trying to position their experience as the right experience for your role. If you are to be successful you have to find a way to sift through these people to find the right person. Inevitably the costs to achieve this increased significantly with the additional pool of people. Now your hiring is going to take longer, cost more and the chance you have someone who is not the perfect candidate increased significantly. This is a dreadful situation given the current environment where every single penny counts.
The solution requires a series of systematic and connected steps that ensure you attract the optimal candidates for your role. First is to put yourself in the right place. If you want to sell a Mercedes Benz then putting your cars in the local supermarket is going to mean you are waiting a very long time for the right person to show up. Therefore you must put yourself in the place where people who are looking to buy cars are. In the situation of hiring professionals, that may have been Universities, Professional bodies, Trade press and other places the types of professionals you are looking for were congregating. The problem with this is it was like hunting for a needle in a haystack. This cost lots of money as you had to be in all the different places your candidates might be. In today’s interconnected world that has become much simpler. People are connected in online communities, using tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. People are talking to each other, sharing experiences and networking for both personal and professional improvement. They are spending their time on line as they want to make their life better. Like any place where people gather they are all different. Some are for fun, some for learning and some for business. You need to put your business in the place where professionals go to improve their professional lives.
Now you put your dealership in the right place to sell the car, you have to make certain you attract qualified candidates for your wares. Targeting who those people are and then getting their attention is the key to accelerating the process of finding the right person for the key role you are trying to fill. This is no simple process. The candidate you are looking for may be ready to make a move, and very possibly, the best candidate you want is working and may well not be looking to move. You have to attract that person with a string call to action. Targeting messaging to them based upon the criteria you know you care about that professional means you can find that precise person you want. If the person you want has a certain type of experience, with specific companies in their background, and has other experiences you value, you want to be able to target them and attract them to your company. Failure to do so is going to take you back to randomly spending money on multiple channels and possibly finding the right person. If you want to bring someone to your Mercedes dealership, someone who in the past has bought a BMW is likely to be the sort of person you are looking for.
The solution is to place your brand in the place where professionals are looking. With a combination of targeted messaging, direct outreach and a personalised experience, you can attract the candidates you want. Attracting and refining the business professionals you need to hire the right professional. Without this approach you are doomed to expensive, slow results with limited success. By leveraging networks you will get the right person.
However we are deluged with candidates as business upon business reduces workforces and put more professionals into the burgeoning talent pool. The task of finding the right person, for the right role, in the right place did not get easier, it just got much harder. Your hiring managers and your HR professionals are deluged with professional candidates all trying to position their experience as the right experience for your role. If you are to be successful you have to find a way to sift through these people to find the right person. Inevitably the costs to achieve this increased significantly with the additional pool of people. Now your hiring is going to take longer, cost more and the chance you have someone who is not the perfect candidate increased significantly. This is a dreadful situation given the current environment where every single penny counts.
The solution requires a series of systematic and connected steps that ensure you attract the optimal candidates for your role. First is to put yourself in the right place. If you want to sell a Mercedes Benz then putting your cars in the local supermarket is going to mean you are waiting a very long time for the right person to show up. Therefore you must put yourself in the place where people who are looking to buy cars are. In the situation of hiring professionals, that may have been Universities, Professional bodies, Trade press and other places the types of professionals you are looking for were congregating. The problem with this is it was like hunting for a needle in a haystack. This cost lots of money as you had to be in all the different places your candidates might be. In today’s interconnected world that has become much simpler. People are connected in online communities, using tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. People are talking to each other, sharing experiences and networking for both personal and professional improvement. They are spending their time on line as they want to make their life better. Like any place where people gather they are all different. Some are for fun, some for learning and some for business. You need to put your business in the place where professionals go to improve their professional lives.
Now you put your dealership in the right place to sell the car, you have to make certain you attract qualified candidates for your wares. Targeting who those people are and then getting their attention is the key to accelerating the process of finding the right person for the key role you are trying to fill. This is no simple process. The candidate you are looking for may be ready to make a move, and very possibly, the best candidate you want is working and may well not be looking to move. You have to attract that person with a string call to action. Targeting messaging to them based upon the criteria you know you care about that professional means you can find that precise person you want. If the person you want has a certain type of experience, with specific companies in their background, and has other experiences you value, you want to be able to target them and attract them to your company. Failure to do so is going to take you back to randomly spending money on multiple channels and possibly finding the right person. If you want to bring someone to your Mercedes dealership, someone who in the past has bought a BMW is likely to be the sort of person you are looking for.
The solution is to place your brand in the place where professionals are looking. With a combination of targeted messaging, direct outreach and a personalised experience, you can attract the candidates you want. Attracting and refining the business professionals you need to hire the right professional. Without this approach you are doomed to expensive, slow results with limited success. By leveraging networks you will get the right person.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
How to collect a paycheck while sitting on the beach
Given the dire state of our 401K’s, savings, pensions and the price of our houses, retirement which once seemed a long way off has ridden off into the sunset on a stolen horse. While many have been worrying, I have been continuing to plan for my early departure from the work farce however this time I plan to do it while still collecting a pay check.
Now we have entered the age of Obama, or the Obamaera, I have decided like all good Obamerites to lay out a multi-step plan for success. It will sound simple, while at the same time be so incomprehensibly detailed your employer will never be able to see through it. I call this Geithneromics. Due to my current focus I will start by helping marketers join me in this quest, I may help sales people in the future, thought I will be selective. Those that helped themselves for the last decade, riding high in corporate jets, collecting fat bonuses and generally living it up will have to help themselves as all the additional thought I have had to put was wearing.
The secret to success is to do more with less but not be seen to be doing anything differently.
Rule #1 – Be in when you are out.
Buy the following items to leave in your office.
Identical Blackberry to your regular one – you don’t need a plan, just a phone (please see Rule #4)
3 spare jackets
Laptop
You must leave the Blackberry and your laptop plugged in at all times, leave your jacket on the back of the chair. This way when anyone comes by your office (OK, I know. That is so last century. When they come by your open plan, open topped, not-a-cube more of a “zone”; it will appear you have just run out. Who leaves their Blackberry behind or without their jacket? You will need to move the items whenever you are in the office and occasionally swap out the jacket. This not only allows you to appear as if you are in the office, in addition you appear to work early and late.
Rule #2 – Say you are triaging leads old school but don’t.
Print out lots of leads from your salesfarce automation system. Get a magic marker and randomly write “A”, “B”, “C”, in the upper right hand corner of the first 20 or so in the pile. If you want to do well at our next HR review, come up with a color code, red for “A”, orange for “B”, etc. You will appear really efficient; color-coding? This person’s a genius, give them a bonus. Now the good news is people expect this process to take forever and be a full time job so if you automate it using a tool like Marketbright you can tell people you are manually updating your salesfarce automation system while it actually happens automatically while you are sitting on the beach.
Rule #3 – Re-use content mercilessly
Use a marketing automation system that is template-centric and provides for re-use of content. When you are creating nurture emails, re-use and re-purpose the same content. You know less than 2% of the people are reading it, they aren’t going to notice if it is the same content they didn’t read last time. Those people who are reading them are only reading the subject lines anyway. This is a tremendous time-saver and if your vendor has the world’s best HTML editor and a template-based approach, you can even edit the content a little and do what used to take your agency months in a few minutes.
Rule #4 – Get a Blackberry
I am sure it is true of iPhone’s too in terms of functionality, but in terms of looking like you mean business a Blackberry is invaluable. The key to the success for this plan I propose is looking like you live, breathe and mean business. Putting TwitterBerry, Facebook, LinkedIn and all other social media applications on a Blackberry couldn’t be simpler. All you have to do now is take the content you post on one, and re-post it everywhere else. Personally I recommend setting up a work alias for all these accounts and just having these logins on your “post-work still-paycheck” Blackberry. Then you don’t run the risk of Twittering, “Just dropped my Blackberry as my hands are greasy with sun lotion.”
Rule #5 – Funding the project
We all know marketing has the most fungible budget of virtually any department. Always amuses me that sales has zero budget but all the headcount, and marketing has all the budget but relatively little headcount. This is a huge asset to you in your attempt to be on the beach while collecting a paycheck. (By the way, you don’t actually need to go to the beach, this is just an idea. You may want to walk in the park, go to a quilting festival, or run naked through the woods. It is not really important, other than the last one as a) you don’t have anywhere to easily put your Blackberry; which is a critical part of appearing to be perma-on-line and b) if you are going to do this please let me know in advance and whether you are attractive or not as that will dictate whether I avoid said woods or not.) The fungibility (Ahh, you have to love it when marketing makes up new words.) of your budget means you can implement a system to deliver Rules #2, #3 and #4, and so long as you put it under “Trade Show” or “Agency” in your budget, no-one will ever know.
I hope you find this helpful. I certainly have found it to be so. I am currently on a beach in Barbados, though if you check in my office I think I may have just popped out for lunch.
Now we have entered the age of Obama, or the Obamaera, I have decided like all good Obamerites to lay out a multi-step plan for success. It will sound simple, while at the same time be so incomprehensibly detailed your employer will never be able to see through it. I call this Geithneromics. Due to my current focus I will start by helping marketers join me in this quest, I may help sales people in the future, thought I will be selective. Those that helped themselves for the last decade, riding high in corporate jets, collecting fat bonuses and generally living it up will have to help themselves as all the additional thought I have had to put was wearing.
The secret to success is to do more with less but not be seen to be doing anything differently.
Rule #1 – Be in when you are out.
Buy the following items to leave in your office.
Identical Blackberry to your regular one – you don’t need a plan, just a phone (please see Rule #4)
3 spare jackets
Laptop
You must leave the Blackberry and your laptop plugged in at all times, leave your jacket on the back of the chair. This way when anyone comes by your office (OK, I know. That is so last century. When they come by your open plan, open topped, not-a-cube more of a “zone”; it will appear you have just run out. Who leaves their Blackberry behind or without their jacket? You will need to move the items whenever you are in the office and occasionally swap out the jacket. This not only allows you to appear as if you are in the office, in addition you appear to work early and late.
Rule #2 – Say you are triaging leads old school but don’t.
Print out lots of leads from your salesfarce automation system. Get a magic marker and randomly write “A”, “B”, “C”, in the upper right hand corner of the first 20 or so in the pile. If you want to do well at our next HR review, come up with a color code, red for “A”, orange for “B”, etc. You will appear really efficient; color-coding? This person’s a genius, give them a bonus. Now the good news is people expect this process to take forever and be a full time job so if you automate it using a tool like Marketbright you can tell people you are manually updating your salesfarce automation system while it actually happens automatically while you are sitting on the beach.
Rule #3 – Re-use content mercilessly
Use a marketing automation system that is template-centric and provides for re-use of content. When you are creating nurture emails, re-use and re-purpose the same content. You know less than 2% of the people are reading it, they aren’t going to notice if it is the same content they didn’t read last time. Those people who are reading them are only reading the subject lines anyway. This is a tremendous time-saver and if your vendor has the world’s best HTML editor and a template-based approach, you can even edit the content a little and do what used to take your agency months in a few minutes.
Rule #4 – Get a Blackberry
I am sure it is true of iPhone’s too in terms of functionality, but in terms of looking like you mean business a Blackberry is invaluable. The key to the success for this plan I propose is looking like you live, breathe and mean business. Putting TwitterBerry, Facebook, LinkedIn and all other social media applications on a Blackberry couldn’t be simpler. All you have to do now is take the content you post on one, and re-post it everywhere else. Personally I recommend setting up a work alias for all these accounts and just having these logins on your “post-work still-paycheck” Blackberry. Then you don’t run the risk of Twittering, “Just dropped my Blackberry as my hands are greasy with sun lotion.”
Rule #5 – Funding the project
We all know marketing has the most fungible budget of virtually any department. Always amuses me that sales has zero budget but all the headcount, and marketing has all the budget but relatively little headcount. This is a huge asset to you in your attempt to be on the beach while collecting a paycheck. (By the way, you don’t actually need to go to the beach, this is just an idea. You may want to walk in the park, go to a quilting festival, or run naked through the woods. It is not really important, other than the last one as a) you don’t have anywhere to easily put your Blackberry; which is a critical part of appearing to be perma-on-line and b) if you are going to do this please let me know in advance and whether you are attractive or not as that will dictate whether I avoid said woods or not.) The fungibility (Ahh, you have to love it when marketing makes up new words.) of your budget means you can implement a system to deliver Rules #2, #3 and #4, and so long as you put it under “Trade Show” or “Agency” in your budget, no-one will ever know.
I hope you find this helpful. I certainly have found it to be so. I am currently on a beach in Barbados, though if you check in my office I think I may have just popped out for lunch.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Sell Sell Sell - It is all about Sales - Automated Nurturing #4
Sell
All this Marketing Automation and we still need to sell? How dull. Yes, it is all about revenue. Not about really cool messages, not about lead volume, not about even qualified leads, it is all about revenue. If Marketing is truly to usurp the power base of sales, the way Prosultative selling predicts, then Marketing has to understand this key point. Any marketer that tries to claim success by ever mentioning the number of leads they have created without being able to track how much revenue they delivered just handed the power back to sales. If marketing can prove what they do actually delivers revenue then the power base shifts. People don’t want to talk about this so I see the political elephant in the room getting larger and leaving its unique smell and presents there for all to enjoy.
There’s an elephant. Here it is. Someone is going to own this prosultative process. It used to be sales because the revenue was easily seen to be associated with them. If marketing is to take control of the process, they must prove the work they are doing is directly responsible for the revenue. Sales becomes a closing machine for marketing, into a lead generation department for sales. Prosultative selling becomes the future of B2B sales. Why is no-one telling you this? Well sales aren’t sharing as they don’t want to lose their power base. Marketing doesn’t have the data to prove this and so it just goes unsaid. Marketbright delivers the integration for sales and marketing to work together and see every aspect of the sales and marketing process and understand the ROI. Who wins this battle is down to you, that it is happening is irrefutable.
"S" number 3 for Automated Nurturing - Standards
Standards
What was it that used to make Marketing people insane with salespeople? OK well other than the long list we can all rattle off, let’s start with taking the creative, ripping it up and sending out what they liked. What was the problem with this? Nothing when it worked and everything when it went wrong. We didn’t know what was working or why other than who went to Club Trip. It seems that every Club Trip/President’s Club I went on it was always the same folk. Yet I never had anyone ask us what we were doing right. I can tell you we were all doing very much the same thing. We were taking the best of our messaging and positioning and we would share with each other (not while on Club Trip but I think you get the point)
If we are to be consistently successful across the organization, we have to be consistent. Consistency requires standards. Prosultative selling takes the best of what the best sales people are doing; marketing then creates personalized messaging for the prospect in a structured, standardized format. This standardization is not about restricting salespeople, it is about empowering the organization to leverage branding standards and messaging that is consistent and effective.
The 4 S's of Automated Nurturing
It was Marie Antoinette who said "There is nothing new except what has been forgotten". Everywhere I go I hear Nurturing as if it is some new concept that we have never heard of before. Sales people have been nurturing prospects for years. There is a word that is missing. Automated.
My issue is if you ask a Marketer how automated it is to target a segment,
identify a message, craft some creative and then time its delivery, especially one who is using one of our competitor’s tools and is knee deep in HTML I think they will tell you, "Yeah. Not so much". I see a lot of our competition trying to make this sound complex. I think for them it may be. If you only ever worked in Marketing, then you don’t know what sales did and vice versa. Our team is a blend of Sales and Marketing professionals and with a view from end to end we see the world somewhat differently.
If we are to maximize the returns from the multi-channel, automated nurturing that Marketbright does we have to understand what nurturing actually is. This is not new, ask any B2B sales person from the mini-computing days. Ask any poor soul who tried to manage their day and prospects with a Time Management System – anyone remember those? It is not a Black Art. There are four key attributes to Prospect Nurturing.
SegmentedIf you are selling more than one product, at more than one price point, across more than one vertical, and more than one geography, you better be targeting your message down to the most personal segment. Think about what every senior sales person has had to learn and should have a copy of in their bookmarks http://www.vitoselling.com/. Tony Parinello coined the phrase selling to the VITO – the very important top officer. What was the core element? Making the messaging targeted to that person. What is today’s equivalent when you get marketing to deliver this messaging? Segmentation. Take your products, your price points, how you plan to promote them and identify how best to promote them based upon your prospects. Email marketing is great if you have single products, single price point, single vertical products. If you want to be more personal than that you need to identify the best promotional tool to deliver your message. If you are Dior you want to get stars to wear your product. If your target is a C Level executive they are not going to respond to an impersonal generalized email.
Unless there is only one decision person influencing the choice of your product you need to build a systematic plan for Nurturing patter to the organization you are targeting and then to the people within it. Some will respond to email, some to SEO/SEM, some to direct mail, some to dimensional mailers, some to telesales, partners, analysts, etc all go to create the pattern you are going to create. Precisely the way sales people used to do this, you now automate the process using marketing, segmentation and personalized messaging. Not simply personalized emails, personalized promotions dependent on the prospect. This is at the core of prosultative selling, the transfer of tasks, activities and actions from sales to marketing and in the process their automation. Segmenting your messaging to the right person, to deliver the right content, at the right place using the right medium is a key part of Automated Nurturing.
My issue is if you ask a Marketer how automated it is to target a segment,
identify a message, craft some creative and then time its delivery, especially one who is using one of our competitor’s tools and is knee deep in HTML I think they will tell you, "Yeah. Not so much". I see a lot of our competition trying to make this sound complex. I think for them it may be. If you only ever worked in Marketing, then you don’t know what sales did and vice versa. Our team is a blend of Sales and Marketing professionals and with a view from end to end we see the world somewhat differently.
If we are to maximize the returns from the multi-channel, automated nurturing that Marketbright does we have to understand what nurturing actually is. This is not new, ask any B2B sales person from the mini-computing days. Ask any poor soul who tried to manage their day and prospects with a Time Management System – anyone remember those? It is not a Black Art. There are four key attributes to Prospect Nurturing.
SegmentedIf you are selling more than one product, at more than one price point, across more than one vertical, and more than one geography, you better be targeting your message down to the most personal segment. Think about what every senior sales person has had to learn and should have a copy of in their bookmarks http://www.vitoselling.com/. Tony Parinello coined the phrase selling to the VITO – the very important top officer. What was the core element? Making the messaging targeted to that person. What is today’s equivalent when you get marketing to deliver this messaging? Segmentation. Take your products, your price points, how you plan to promote them and identify how best to promote them based upon your prospects. Email marketing is great if you have single products, single price point, single vertical products. If you want to be more personal than that you need to identify the best promotional tool to deliver your message. If you are Dior you want to get stars to wear your product. If your target is a C Level executive they are not going to respond to an impersonal generalized email.
Unless there is only one decision person influencing the choice of your product you need to build a systematic plan for Nurturing patter to the organization you are targeting and then to the people within it. Some will respond to email, some to SEO/SEM, some to direct mail, some to dimensional mailers, some to telesales, partners, analysts, etc all go to create the pattern you are going to create. Precisely the way sales people used to do this, you now automate the process using marketing, segmentation and personalized messaging. Not simply personalized emails, personalized promotions dependent on the prospect. This is at the core of prosultative selling, the transfer of tasks, activities and actions from sales to marketing and in the process their automation. Segmenting your messaging to the right person, to deliver the right content, at the right place using the right medium is a key part of Automated Nurturing.
The Second "S" of Automated Nurturing - Systematic
Systematic
As any successful salesperson used to do every Sunday night, the optimistic ones ironing 5 shirts at the same time, they would sit and plan their week. What meetings did they have and what could they do with the rest of their time. Who could they call, who would they send a VITO letter to, which partner would they work with? When I was at Oracle one of my most successful partnerships was with the HP sales team. We were targeting a prospect base that was almost 100% IBM. IBM saw no benefit in working with me, HP wanted to break in. I would spend time understanding which salespeople to work with at HP, and doing joint account planning. We knew if we called someone last week and they told us to call them back in six months, we would touch base with them in three months. We would look out for trade shows where we knew we may meet someone. Salespeople systematically sat down and worked out how to balance their time. What was wrong with this? Good ones were good at doing this and bad ones? Yep, they were bad at it.
Now in a prosultative selling environment with marketing automating this process must be systematic and process-oriented. We will take the best practices of the best sales people and replicate them across every account. If we do this we find a way to systemically replicate best sales practices to every prospect dramatically increasing our chance of success. You need a tool like Marketbright to deliver this across all channels and all segments. However, the concept is not new and if your marketing vendor actually involved sales people in the design of their tools, you would have something useful, like Marketbright. You need Marketing to understand who to target, how to message, when to do it, you need sales to help understand what best practices have worked in the past.
As any successful salesperson used to do every Sunday night, the optimistic ones ironing 5 shirts at the same time, they would sit and plan their week. What meetings did they have and what could they do with the rest of their time. Who could they call, who would they send a VITO letter to, which partner would they work with? When I was at Oracle one of my most successful partnerships was with the HP sales team. We were targeting a prospect base that was almost 100% IBM. IBM saw no benefit in working with me, HP wanted to break in. I would spend time understanding which salespeople to work with at HP, and doing joint account planning. We knew if we called someone last week and they told us to call them back in six months, we would touch base with them in three months. We would look out for trade shows where we knew we may meet someone. Salespeople systematically sat down and worked out how to balance their time. What was wrong with this? Good ones were good at doing this and bad ones? Yep, they were bad at it.
Now in a prosultative selling environment with marketing automating this process must be systematic and process-oriented. We will take the best practices of the best sales people and replicate them across every account. If we do this we find a way to systemically replicate best sales practices to every prospect dramatically increasing our chance of success. You need a tool like Marketbright to deliver this across all channels and all segments. However, the concept is not new and if your marketing vendor actually involved sales people in the design of their tools, you would have something useful, like Marketbright. You need Marketing to understand who to target, how to message, when to do it, you need sales to help understand what best practices have worked in the past.
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