One of the most common social media questions we hear is “How do I build global capabilities?”  The challenge is that each market has a unique manifestation of social media (different platforms, levels of uptake, user habits), while each marketing team has different strengths and weaknesses.  With such varied needs and opportunities, attempting to standardize capabilities globally simply doesn’t work.

The best companies embrace heterogeneity instead of aiming for global consistency.  They assess each region’s individual needs in order to tailor capability goals and training accordingly. Read More »

Marketers are awash in data.  Digital, social and (increasingly) mobile marketing are spinning off data streams faster than we can humanly manage.  Analysis-paralysis ensues, and for some of us, data drowning shortly thereafter.

Few marketing organizations today have the analytical chops and creativity to squeeze gamebreaking insight from these increasingly rich data streams (see this prior post on coping with information richness).   Most marketing leaders will settle for a life preserver—they’ll outsource analytics to vendors or shunt it off to an analytics team buried inside of market research.

By contrast, sage marketing leaders will build surfboards to ride the data waves.  How? Read More »

Ah, the sweet smell of redemption on a Thursday morning. Last week, I wrote about whether executives could tag companies as ‘innovative’ if they failed to deliver revenue growth (and implicitly, fail to meet customer needs). BCG’s listing of the top 50 innovative companies said yea; I, nay. And this week, I think I’ve got 23 companies to back me up: Fortune’s list of 23 companies that achieved double-digit revenue growth despite the turbulent economy in 2009. Perhaps not innovative, but doing a great job of exceeding shareholder expectations.

Discerning a common thread among those on the Fortune list isn’t easy, especially since most would rarely appear on an ‘innovative company’ list. You could certainly argue that value positioning helped tremendously, i.e., the right economic proposition to capitalize on retrenched consumer spending. Companies like Dollar General, Dollar Tree, and Ross Stores certainly fit the bill. Yet, there are plenty of ‘value’ retailers that noticeably didn’t make the cut, from Family Dollar to the granddaddy of them all, Walmart. There isn’t an easy industry lens to the list either – in what was generally another poor year for financial services, USAA, Wells Fargo, and Erie Insurance beat the odds handily. Even with oil prices up across 2009, there isn’t an energy company to be found. Read More »

The case for better Sales and Marketing alignment is pretty obvious to most Marketers—selling and marketing in concert stands to yield much better results than doing them each independently.  Unfortunately, what actually leads to good Sales and Marketing alignment has eluded most of us for a long time.  We’ve been collecting data on the topic for a few months now, and have come across a couple of admittedly simple but thought provoking findings: Read More »

By Whitney Satin

Sales and marketing leaders constantly look for ways to build greater alignment between their two functions.  But efforts to enact joint planning or sync activities across the purchase funnel stall right out of the gates if the two functions don’t first develop a shared view of the customer.

This may sound like an obvious first step but, more often than not, Sales and Marketing aren’t on the same page when it comes to having a common understanding of customer needs.  We often hear tales of Sales accusing Marketing of being notoriously slow and impractical when analyzing customer needs, while marketers argue that Sales “manages by anecdote” and misses broader trends across segments. This tension ultimately hampers the organization’s ability to truly meet customer needs and capture new opportunities as they appear in the marketplace. Read More »

A recently released report by Gallup underscores how difficult it is for marketers today to know where to focus their efforts.  The report, which is based on a survey of US consumers’ retail shopping behavior (and includes some really interesting data on the engagement premium), at first suggests that success lies in the quality of customer service efforts and ease of shopping—both very functional aspects of the retail experience.  But three paragraphs later, the authors argue that retailers’ most effective strategy is to build an emotionally engaging experience. 

Well, which is it?  Of course, we’d all like to have an experience that is as good as can be, both functionally and emotionally.  However, we as marketers have limited time and financial resources.  We appreciate advice that steers us on how to prioritize. 

So, here is MLC’s take on how to make those tradeoffs.  Read More »

My previous summaries of the Sales Executive Council’s rep success work (The Five Profiles of Sales Reps and Unpacking the Winning Sales Rep) explained how the most successful sales rep profile (the Challenger) wins by doing three things well:  Teaching, Tailoring and Asserting Control.

But who should be on the hook for encouraging successful behaviors when it comes to these activities?  Should it be left up to the individual rep?  …the sales manager?  …a central training group?  …how about Marketing?

Common sense not only tells us that it is a critical combination of all of the above, but dictates that Marketing needs to play a critical role in just about all of the competencies for them to be successful.  Here’s our take: Read More »

By Whitney Satin

Sales and Marketing leaders don’t typically agree on a whole lot, but they’re certainly on the same page when it comes to messaging: it matters, and we’re not doing a great job at getting it right.  When there’s little message consistency across the different interactions with the company, customers lack a clear understanding of why they should choose one company’s products or services over another’s.

Read More »

We are deep into my favorite time of the year – the NCAA tournament – “March Madness.”  Every year we’re treated to the drama of David vs. Goliath matchups and the promise of an upset around every turn (sorry Kansas…).  While I’m eagerly awaiting my beloved Syracuse to steamroll their way to a championship – I also enjoy the egalitarian nature of the tournament that gives all of its entrants the chance to walk away with the trophy at the end.

What do these teams have in common?  Thousands of hours of practice and significant investments from many different sources that got them to the tournament in the first place.  Coaches, families, schools, and the drive of the athletes themselves, are all integral parts  of getting a team to the level needed to compete in the NCAA tournament.  Malcolm Gladwell puts the number of hours training to reach a level of mastery at 10,000.  In real terms, that’s about 10 years of practice. Read More »

Einstein proffered that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results is the very definition of insanity.

Then I must ask the rhetorical question: how close do marketers come to that definition when it comes to marketing planning? The search term ‘marketing planning’ has appeared in the top five search terms on the MLC website for 24 months running. Our annual executive survey has reported ‘planning’ as a top-five area of improvement nearly every year since the poll’s inception.

Sincerely now, what do marketers keep doing year after year that keeps yielding the same underwhelming results?

Read More »