The room is dingy and poorly lit. A single light-bulb hangs from a wire in the ceiling. There are no windows and the paint on the walls is peeling. The interrogator is clearly a “professional." It’s not a matter of if the man in the chair will give up his secrets, it’s a matter of when. The man being interrogated, a marketing executive, looks nervous. His mind is working fast to see if there is some plausible response that might make the questioning stop – but doesn’t reveal too much.
The questions come again: What are your greatest fears? What keeps you up at night?
After a little bit of thought, the marketing executive finally decides to spill his guts and confess his greatest fears.............
I know I am wasting 50% of my marketing budget, but I’m not sure which 50% . I brought industry best practices from my last company to my current job, but I have no idea which marketing programs are working and which ones aren't. When it comes to plan next quarter's marketing initiatives, I am dreading the guess work that comes with the prioritization exercise.
I get a pit in my stomach every Sunday night in anticipation of the Monday morning staff meeting . The VP of sales shows up with great reports automatically spun of his CRM system and is getting relatively good at predicting the outcome of this quarter and even next quarter "despite" complaining of a lack of qualified leads every week. I stay up late Sunday night putting together PowerPoint slides about my lead generation activities, but there is a flimsy feeling in the air when I present these slides every week.
Every now and then, I want to punch the VP of Sales in the face . Every time I get together with the VP of Sales and my boss, the VP of Sales says that all of deals that are closing originated with a "relationship" that one of his sales reps had or a cold call they made. I am pretty sure that he's full of shiitake, but I can’t prove it. My bonus is starting to reflect my bosses perception of these little meetings.
The playbook from my last marketing job is no longer working . At my last job, I filled the top of my funnel using email marketing, telemarketing, seminars, and trade shows. I am getting the nagging feeling that the effectiveness of marketing methods I built my career around are getting less and less effective every day. There were tumbleweeds blowing through my booth at the last trade show and I had to hire a full-time person to help me put "butts in seats" for the seminar series we held.
The fact that I spend a third of my marketing budget on telemarketing is disconcerting when I do not answer my own phone for fear its a telemarketing call . I have a similar fear around my email marketing campaigns – but at least they don’t cost as much. I’ve heard of the Internet and even read blogs, but I am a web immigrant, not a web native. I’m not exactly sure what to do about it. My boss keeps chirping about starting a blog, but I am having a hard time figuring out the value (ROI). My younger employees are forever forwarding interesting blog articles to me and seem to always be a step ahead of me in terms of industry knowledge.
If some of this sounds familiar, the good news is that you are not alone. This is a summary of the feelings of most marketing executives I talk to.
From those of you carrying around pits in your stomach, am I missing anything interesting or humorous?
-- Brian Halligan
Inbound Marketing Blog Feed
Andrew Jackson 1:43 PM on February 26, 2007
Ah yes, blog advertising at its finest... "You need this... It will help ... Really!" Marketing the marketers... Pure comedy.
Prashant Kaw 2:12 PM on February 26, 2007
Brian, I am one of the younger web natives you talked about. However I must admit that I am facing a similar crisis at my company. I would love to employ some of the sexier marketing tactics of today such as podcasts, viral youtube videos, blogs and the such. But the fact of the matter is the audience I'm targeting is not that web savvy, or at the very least do not sit in front of a computer all day like I do. Now, we do not have an evil pointy haired VP of Sales, but we still have a hard time determining who brought in the sale. We try everything from direct mailers with links, to SEO, to email and microsites. We can track anything on the web. But what happens if the not so savvy audience member just decides to pick up the phone and call us because that's easiest for them? The sales guy taking the call forgets to ask the pivotal question that helps marketing improve, "how did you hear about us?" Also let's say our lead system "forces" our sales rep to choose some option for lead source. How do we know he or she is choosing the correct option? Could be laziness, could be wanting to take credit for the sale. I think the reality is that for a industries where the audience is less tech-savvy, the lines between marketing and sales are very blurred. And in the process Marketing gets hurt because there is no direct way of corelating marketing activity to the bottom line. There are two ways I can think of to help tackle this issue: 1. Complete alignment with Sales and Marketing. In this scenario all that matters is over a given a period of time marketing has been able to demonstrate some activity that touched the audience member. You cannot track things like the QVC channel where number of calls or orders over the duration of the show demonstrates the ROI. Here a combination of sales and marketing touches led to the sale. 2. Keep marketing tactics black and white: If you are e-marketing, then the only way for the audience to respond or contact you is through and e-medium that can be tracked. If you are direct mailing, provide only a phone number with trackable phone extensions. Our instinct is to usually try to cover all our bases and provide as many methods possible for the customer to respond to us (links, emails, phone, website). I guess one should not do that. Continue to communicate with existing customers, do not give in to sales requests to remove so and so from email lists. Prevent them from trying to monopolize who gets "credit" for a sale. I think keeping things like this may provide some insight into how effective marketing really is. Sorry for rambling. I'm hoping to learn other ways of doing this from other readers. Prashant Gung-ho Marketer
Anonymous 3:08 PM on February 26, 2007
Prashant: Thanks for your detailed and thoughtful response. Indeed, seems we have hit a nerve. One thing I'd posit is that the inherent tension between sales and marketing (some healthy, but some not) should not negatively impact the customer. So, mailers should have the website address, email sent out should have a phone number, etc. I'm a believer in making things easy for the customer. Though it would be nice to corelate marketing activity to sales activity, this should not come at the cost of the customer itself (the reason for both sales and marketing to exist in the first place).
Daniel Cibo 4:34 PM on February 26, 2007
Christ...*this* is what some people do for a living?
Find something productive to do with your lives.