Achieving "Smarketing" is challenging

Have you heard of "smarketing"?  I don’t know who is credited with coming up with the term itself, but I think it's fantastic!  

It’s a term to describe the desired alignment between an Inside Sales team and a Marketing team: Sales + Marketing = Smarketing  

I always like 'branding' complex concepts and ideas with memorable names because it provides a shared vocabulary. And, unfortunately, aligning Insides Sales and Marketing teams tends to be complex and fraught with tension. It doesn’t have to be and it absolutely shouldn’t be. If there were any two teams who need to be actively collaborating and working hand-in-hand it is inside sales and marketing. 

So why does the relationship between Inside Sales and Marketing teams get tense and complex?

This Harvard Business Review blog summarizes the key drivers of the trend of companies to move more toward inside sales.  And in includes this quote that, for me, illustrates the crux of the marketing/insides sales dynamic:

Inside Sales is a transactional engagement and the focus is on opening opportunities. Outside teams are solution and relationship based...our Inside Sales...require persistence, research and back end work

This highlights two ideas that can fuel tension between marketing and inside sales teams:

a) that inside sales is transactional and

b) the work of inside sales requires persistence and research.

Here’s the thing: if Inside Sales work is transactional, then the leads delivered by Marketing must be highly, highly qualified and just moments away from a purchase decision.  And if Inside Sales requires persistence and research, then the sales rep is accountable for actively working leads delivered by Marketing; being persistent and creative about cultivation.

So Inside Sales wants Marketing to deliver them large volumes of highly transactional leads, and Marketing expects Sales to be persistent about cultivating and closing. Tension, anyone?

I’ve found true collaboration and "smarketing" can occur if the two teams align around the business metrics that need to be optimized. And by opening the kimono around the processes of each of the teams. Active dialog on both fronts helps smooth out rough edges and keeps the expectations of each team well managed.  

In an earlier post I wrote about the many benefits of getting everyone to sing off the same metrics song sheet, and a significantly more collaborative inside sales and marketing team relationship is a key benefit.

Inside Sales is a growing trend, and Marketing leaders must embrace it. Kick it off on the right foot and actively collaborate with your sales lead. Own the process to ensure both teams are aligned on priorities and have a common view of the metrics for business success.  This will help smooth out the rough patches on your way toward true “smarketing”.

I'd love to hear from you. What are you doing to achieve “smarketing” in your organization? Any tips to share?

Data, collaboration and singing off the same song sheet

I often hear "data-driven decision making" cited as a desired tenet of a company's culture. And we all also know that every person on today's marketing teams need to know their way around a spreadsheet (What kind of marketer are you?).

But how do you make being data driven a reality? First, everyone needs to be singing off the same song sheet. Literally.

One song sheet builds a common vocabulary
Ok, I don't mean the team is literally singing, but I do mean using one common dashboard. At minimum, a weekly document tracking the critical business metrics plus the associated driver metrics. And where all sources are clearly articulated and calculated or derived values are clearly defined.

Having one "song sheet" that everyone uses insures that a common vocabulary is used across the business. This is essential for needed alignment across cross functional teams comprising finance, marketing, product, sales and support team members.

Whenever I start a new assignment, this is one of the first things I tackle. And having done this a number of times now, I am no longer surprised when the effort inevitably uncovers a misalignment. It can be as small as a misunderstanding over the definition of a conversion rate or as large as inaccurate source data. In my experience, it has even highlighted executive dissonance around what precisely is the most important business metric: new sales growth, profitability, revenue or acquisition costs?

And, always, there are team members who privately admit to me that they had not previously known what the critical business metrics were nor understood how metrics were sourced, calculated or forecast. Employee engagement increases when individuals understand and can articulate how what they do contributes to the overall success of the business. Creating a common metric dashboard is worth the effort just for the impact to increased engagement alone.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? practice, practice, practice
It's not enough to simply have a common song sheet, everyone has to know how to sing off it. And that takes practice. It will take multiple repetitions and review before your entire team is consistently fluent with the data, its trends and how this knowledge and insight applies to the work they do and decisions they make each day.

I like to establish a regular time each week with the team to review the metrics, current trends, share insights and any planned actions. The regularity and repetition helps the entire team start to understand and internalize the rhythm of the business. And as programs and products launch and/or optimizations are tested, the impact is seen in the metrics. And through regular conversations around this cause and effect, the team learns the activities that positively impact the critical metrics and begin to apply that knowledge in their day-to-day prioritization and decision making.

It's a process, not an event
Create a "song sheet" and "sing" off it doesn't sound like rocket science and it isn't. But you may be surprised about how many organizations say they want to be data driven, but don't take the steps to enable team leads and team members with the tools they need. And a key element of success is repetition and creating a routine around the review of the metrics. Building a data driven competency is process, not an event. And it's well worth the time invested.

Maximize impact from thought-leadership

We've all heard variants of the expression, "you can have it fast, good or cheap; pick two."

I am reminded of this saying every time I read yet another content marketing article telling me to "just" create great content your audience finds relevant. Well, duh. A recent Ragan post termed these generic exhortations "annoying" and I 100% agree.

So if it pleases the content marketing court, I'd like to stipulate that every marketing leader shares the goal of creating content that is both "great" and "relevant" in the eyes of their target audience. This is a never-ending quest, and we will not rest until that magic formula is found.

In general, I find it more actionable to share ideas around distributing, amplifying and repackaging the content you do create. Today, let's explore one idea for getting the most mileage from contributed, thought leadership articles. This needs to be one of the programs in every marketers toolkit, especially all my growth hacker marketers out there trying to build awareness and achieve cost effective scale.

My strategy for maximizing contributed content has three elements: Place it, Family it and Bring it Home.

Place it.
Contributed content can include bylined articles, recurring columns, guest blogs etc. With so many publishers on the lookout for quality content, you are sure to find appropriate outlets for your articles. Even when you do not have an executive or founder whose name can secure top-tier placements out the gate, you can still find ways to contribute content. Getting your messages out there, in any appropriate outlet, will have a positive impact on customer acquisition.

It's important to remember that while you are authoring articles to benefit your product, the articles themselves are not branded. The article needs to be helpful and relevant to the publishers' readers so there is no call to action to visit your website. Your objective with contributed content is to introduce the key thought leadership ideas within your desired themes that help educate and inform your target audience. Thought leadership can stimulate need identification in your audience plus help them understand how to best differentiate among different offerings in the category. Once your content is published, the next two elements can be immediately activated.

Family it.
'Family' in this context is my shorthand for the blogs and social marketing efforts of related products and brands. If you are marketing a product within a large organization, this could include blogs and social personas of other products and services as well as the corporate brand itself. Of course, not every marketer is lucky enough to have this setup. But even if you don't have a ready-made family, you still have the opportunity create your own 'family' of products and brands that can co-operate together and support this content amplification strategy.

First, your 'family' can and should amplify the contributed placement itself. This typically takes the form of a tweet or Facebook post sharing the published article link with their audience. But the impact can be extended when you repackage to make it relevant for the Family blog and social audiences.

When you repackage for Family, bring the themes and ideas introduced in the original, unbranded contributed content one step closer to both products/brands. Relate the features and benefits of the specific products and brands to the broader themes introduced in the contributed content. You want to find relevant ways to talk about both your product and the Family product. Many times this falls into a "better together" story where you can also feature a customer story to help illustrate the benefits. Again, you will link to the contributed article as you reference the themes, but you will also link to relevant conversion pages on your own and/or your Family's sites.

Bring it home.
Finally, you need to bring it home. In this step, you take the thought leadership ideas introduced in the contributed content and draw big, bright lines directly to your product and brand. Like with 'Family it', you first amplify the published contributed article itself through your blog and social channels. And then you can, on an on-going basis, reference the themes in thought leadership and point readers directly to conversion paths for your product and brand that highlight those themes.

Because your thought leadership content was identified from the core positioning and differentiation of your product - and these are fleshed out on your site - there will be many opportunities for your social team to reference the theme (and link to the published article) while also pointing readers to an optimized conversion path on your site.

All together now.
While the strategy may appear simple, its execution is more complex because, generally, different teams are responsible for the different elements. Contributed content often sits in communications and public relations, while Family sits in other organizations all together, often product and corporate marketing. Bring it home comprises website, content and social teams that have to work in concert. Articulating the strategy in this way helps align diverse and dispersed team so each understands their role in maximizing the benefits of contributed content.

Good Leaders Get Out of Their Own Heads

A recent Harvard Business Review blog about team members who derail meetings, reminded me of Whitman's famous quote, "Be curious, not judgmental." Over the past few months I have shared this quote quite a bit. 

My current role has me working closely with a team in Copenhagen. Since I live near San Francisco, that's not very "close". In fact, it's over 5,000 miles, an 11 hour plane ride and a nine hour time difference. So in a typical workweek there are only about 10 hours of overlap "working" time - and that's only because I start my days with meetings at 6:30 or 7 am.

Yes, we use video conferencing and of course we use social business collaboration tools for managing team workflows and communications. Technology is how we can make it work. But it's absolutely not easy.

This experience has brought home for me just how easy it is for people to be influenced by 'group think' and subtle biases. In psychology it's called ultimate attribution error and it can be summed up as "when members of our group make a mistake, its an accident or an anomaly, but when members of another group do so, it's typical of them." 

Ultimate attribution error is apparent among people who interact every day, and it gets exponentially amplified when distance limits personal interactions and communications are primarily written and asynchronous.

In my situation, the two groups in question could not be more different. One group is the acquired start-up: a less than 20-person team, mostly co-located in one office in Copenhagen. And the other group is the acquiring multi-billion dollar company with thousands of team members in a division spanning multiple locations in California and around the world.

Even for seasoned leaders like myself who have gone through required hours of "diversity training" and have earned some self-awareness through the school-of-hard-knocks -- in the moment, I can and do get frustrated. It is difficult to always assume positive intent and to be authentically curious about the other team member's actions and point of view all day long, every day.

So multiple times each week I remind myself - and my team members in both locations - to stay mindful of this reality. I find it is especially important to take a moment in those emotionally charged times when you perceive the other person as "derailing a meeting” or “going too slow” or “doing something stupid”.   The HBR blog post says it best: you must “suspend your assumption that you understand the situation and others don’t.”

It takes strong leaders in both “groups” to be mindful of the potentially dysfunctional tendencies and biases that exist between geographically dispersed teams. Leaders must actively self-regulate their own attitudes and behaviors while also proactively address developing these important ‘soft’ skills in all team members.

I think I will post that Walt Whitman quote on my monitor to help me keep out of my own head.  What will you do?

Process is Not a Dirty Word

I am unabashedly a Harvard Business Review (HBR) blog fan and a recent HBR blog post from Sarah Green called Making Process Planning Cool Again really struck a chord.

As Green mentions, just the simple utterance of the word 'process' tends to elicit shudders of horror from Millenials and paints the speaker as an out of touch, anal retentive school-marmish librarian -- ouch!

While Green's post focuses on the work of the Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC) - a non-profit within the auto company, process isn't just beneficial for manufacturing.  It's also necessary for effective marketing.

As any marketing leader will tell you, it's the execution of that amazing, integrated marketing strategy that moves your business metrics! And that execution means keeping many different balls in the air - from brand management, to search keyword optimization, to banner and/or print creative development, to social media posts, to media planning, to event planning, to promotions, to website A/B testing, to metric dashboard development - and the list goes on and on.

Each ball with its own discipline, specializations, tools, strengths and weaknesses.  Each element needing to pull its weight driving cost effective awareness, adoption, trial, purchase and retention while also consistently reinforcing the brand and addressing customer needs and pain points. If this juggling act doesn't scream for process, I do not know what does.

Here's why I believe process is cool. It's because for my marketing teams, process doesn't constrain, it liberates.  Process allows the blocking and tackling of coordination and optimization to be part of the "routine" -- daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly -- thus allowing us the mental freedom to invest time/energy in exploring new ideas and new tests.  It is the fact that there is a process that allows us to be creative and out of the box while also not dropping any of the many balls in the air.

So, to 'borrow' a sentiment from A Few Good Men (let's say it together with your best Nicholson impression), "somewhere, deep down inside in a place you don't talk about at parties, you want a good process, you need a good process!"