WHO'S LEADING YOUR MARKETING PROGRAM?

Posted on October 09, 2009 by John Watson, One of Thousands of Entrepreneurship Coaches on Noomii.

As a business coach, marketing consultant and entrepreneur who works primarily with entrepreneur-driven companies from start-up through to mid-size enterprise. There’s one challenge that I see all the time that significantly affects a company’s earnings growth performance. The problem is defining who is responsible for sales and marketing investments?

This may seem an odd statement, since in most entrepreneur driven companies the entrepreneur is the clear leader. However, to whom does the onus of marketing leadership fall when the entrepreneur is inexperienced or just not interested in sales and marketing?

It is often difficult for entrepreneurs to get help in areas that they don’t understand. It’s often difficult to hire employees or to evaluate one supplier from another. So what do we do? We hire someone we think we can work with and hope for the best.

The problem with this approach may seem obvious, but it happens all the time. How do you know, you’re hiring the right group, until after the fact? While this problem is not unique to marketing, marketing seems to challenge more than its fair share of entrepreneurs.

To make matters worse, the vast majority of local marketing suppliers are specialists. They specialize in things like, identity development, graphic design, copywriting, advertising, websites, programming, search engine marketing, social marketing and so on. Their role is typically to expertly contribute to marketing projects lead by a director of marketing. The typical marketing professional is not setup to coach us to think through our needs, or to design and lead our earnings growth program to profitability. The result is we end up working on individual projects that are frequently out of sync with our needs.

It is not that entrepreneurs don’t realize that they need help; they are just not sure how to ask for it. Given that much of the supplier community is setup to help us with projects, this leaves us wondering who is managing the overall process. Now consider that many entrepreneurs and their suppliers don’t realize that no one is leading, until the results start coming in.

HERE’S HOW THE SITUATION PLAYS OUT.

1. I need marketing help.
I need a logo, business cards, a brochure, website, telephone directory ad, advertising campaign, tradeshow display or whatever the immediate need happens to be.

The business owner does a little research and typically engages a design firm, or a website development company to help. The typical result is a functional and attractive description of the services offered, and everyone is happy. However, when the client uses their new marketing materials, the sales results are not exceptional, and more often they are abysmal.

What happened? The materials look great, everything functions, so why the pitiful results? Upon review, and with very few exceptions, what has been produced is a good description of the business and its products and services. The problem is that there is virtually no relevance to customer need, no keyword search relevance, no discernable competitive positioning, no clear offer, no call to action, and a generally awkward purchase process. The sales and marketing fundamentals were bypassed in the interest of giving the client what they asked for.

Did the client get what they asked for? Yes.
Did the client get what they needed? No.
Is anyone happy with the results? Well you can guess for yourself.

2. My intention is to invest in marketing.
The next big misdirection I see over and over again, is the intention to sell or market instead of the intention to increase earnings. We make this mistake intentionally, meaning this is a mistake of misplaced intentions. When we set out to market or to sell, that is what we are focused on and that’s exactly what we get, sales and marketing activities. The problem is marketing activities is not what we want.

What most of us mean to say is “we are investing in earnings growth”. We want to generate sales from new clients at a profit. So why don’t we just ask for this?

My guess, if we asked our suppliers for this, most would have to admit that this is not what they do for a living. “We know how to design a logo, brochure, write copy or build websites etc., but generating sales from new clients at a profit, we don’t do that”.

In order to meet this criterion, you would have to share with your suppliers the average dollar value of a sale. You would need to know your net margin on that sale too. This would establish a maximum cost per sale that you could use to evaluate a campaign’s likelihood of success in advance. With this knowledge you might plan how to increase your chances of success, or you may need to choose different marketing channels with lower average costs of sale.

The truth is you would have to look at the system of selling and not just one of its parts at a time. Unfortunately, many of us never get past the one project at a time approach. We just get busy advertising and selling and hope for the best. Personally, I don’t care for hope as a strategy.

3. No one knows our product as well as we do, we’re going to do our own marketing.
Ever made this claim? Most of us have at one point or another. Problem is most of us are generally poor communicators. We tend to speak in non-specific and self-centered ways. We tend to be ambiguous on key points, like who our target market is for example. We oscillate on what our priorities are and we generally confuse our would-be clients. More challenging yet we communicate from our own point of view, rather than from our customers’. Try communicating from your spouse’s point of view, who you presumably know quite well. How difficult this that?

We may think we’re being clear and relevant, but most of us are quite simply confusing. Our staff and suppliers, being accustomed to ambiguous communication, most likely do not have the communication skills themselves to tell us when we are being unclear. They usually guess at what we want and edit from there. Even if they do have the communication skills, are they really going to tell you that you need to be more clear and specific? This requires them to confront you on your lack of clarity and confusing instructions. Are you going to rely on your team to do this for you? Are you open to hearing their honest feedback? Are you really?

As a result, we take our unclear ideas to the market. Our advertising essentially amplifies our confusion so more people can be bewildered by us. Thankfully most people only partially listen to marketing conversations, so we mostly occur to them as irrelevant noise. The net result is we have wasted their time, our money and have little to show for it.

4. I’m not clear how this is going to work, so I’m not going to commit the necessary resources to do this well.
Also common is a general mistrust of marketing. Our mistrust leads to under investment in sales and marketing programs. We are reluctant to commit the resources, because we lack confidence that we’ll generate a sufficient return on investment.

Typically as entrepreneurs we spend to the limits of our risk tolerance and then we stop. This is unfortunate since many potentially good businesses, stall at this point. We “The entrepreneur”, often lacking a plan worthy of outside investment are either unwilling or unable to fund our initiatives further. If we had invested in developing a workable, defensible plan and solid marketing fundamentals in the first place, we might have been able to invest what was necessary to do a good job. Having a well thought out plan in my experience is rare.

To summarize
• The blind lead the blind into high-risk marketing investments.
• We intend to engage in marketing activities, rather than investing wisely
• We occur to be self-centered, confusing, and irrelevant to clients.
• We lack the confidence to invest in earnings growth.

These factors all work together to compound costs and increase our risk of failure.

I propose an alternative scenario, with fewer knocks. I propose that the answer is to help entrepreneurs become competent directors of their own earnings growth programs.

As entrepreneurs, we need to take charge of marketing investments.

The way to ensure your marketing investments deliver a reasonable return, within a level of risk that you can live with, is to own the process yourself. I did not say for you to do it by yourself. From personal experience, I think that’s a poor idea.

I have identified well over twenty different skill sets required for even a basic marketing program. I think it is unrealistic to believe that you can do justice to even a handful of them. And why even bother, when the real desperate shortage is not for another specialist. The real need is for clear, specific, confident and committed leadership.

So how do we proceed?
Over the past eight years we developed a platform for self-directed earnings growth called Being Profitable™:The Earnings Growth Program™.

Being Profitable is designed specifically to;
• Shift your intentions from activities-based to outcomes based.
• Help you become a competent director of earnings growth.
• Help you develop documented logistic and financial plans with projections that build your confidence to support necessary investments.
• Help you structure your communication so it is relevant to clients as well as clear and specific enough for your team to implement effectively.

The program is delivered primarily through two programs. The first is called Core Essentials and the second is our Comprehensive program.

Core Essentials provides exactly what you would expect, the core essentials of the earnings growth process. This is the program most entrepreneur’s choose for evaluating business ideas, launching a new businesses or before starting any significant marketing initiative within an existing business. Depending on how clear you are about your marketing, and the effort you put in this process, can take you a few weeks to several months.

The Comprehensive program continues where the core essentials leaves off helping you to develop your communications program and design a results-focused website.

Being Profitable is available in four formats with increasing costs and decreasing timelines. We offer so many learning options because entrepreneurs have different needs, timelines and learning styles. Our goal is to turn you into a competent director of marketing in a way that works for you.

The options include;
• A self-directed program with on-call coaching and consulting support
• An in-person, or on-line structured group training program
• A structured coach supported process
• A consultant supported process with an urgent-timeline

In our experience some entrepreneurs have more time than money and want to control costs as much as possible. The opposite is also true, where time is scarce but money is available to get very personalized help.

We also find that some entrepreneurs hate the slow pace of a guided training program and would go ten times faster on their own. Other entrepreneurs appreciate the added structure and external accountability that comes with a guided process.

We also find some entrepreneurs are just not suited to guiding their own marketing programs. Yet even these people gain a new appreciation for the process and tend to use their new insights to hire someone more suited for the job. They typically become far more critical of whom they hire and what they expect from them in the role.

Whichever type of entrepreneur you are, we invite you to consider Being Profitable to help you either become or hire a competent director of earnings growth instead of a director of sales or marketing.

About John Watson
John Watson is the president of Accrue Performance Marketing Inc. and is the author of Being Profitable™: the earnings growth program™. John has been coaching and consulting since 1995. He specializes in helping entrepreneurs find direct routes to market. John was the VP Strategy at Rare Method Interactive, and President of Advanced Information Marketing Inc. John is a serial entrepreneur who lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

About Accrue Performance Marketing Inc.
Accrue is a full-service performance marketing and business coaching firm, founded in 2006. Accrue’s purpose is to lead entrepreneurs along a direct route to commercial success. At the core of our service model are Being Profitable™:the earnings growth program™ and our proprietary on-line sales lead generation process. We serve progressive leaders of small and mid-sized companies with aggressive growth objectives.

For information on John Watson, Accrue Performance Marketing or Being Profitable call (800)860-0026 or (403)512-3183 or visit www.accruemarketing.com.