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Jennifer Foster Marketing

business to business marketing

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From the inside out: How do you truly create a market-driven company?

One of the most common goals I hear from would-be clients, is their desire to be more “market-driven.” As with most topics you can spend a lot of time and money to completely over-engineer this into a task so big and daunting that it becomes impossible to implement.

I’m sure there are complicated models you can use to prove to yourself, or your investors, that you’re successfully adopting some highly-tested principles. There are consultants who will charge you way more than I would — gotta pay for all that overthinking I guess.

I think a much more efficient approach is to find a few tricks that help good companies be great companies.

When you create good processes, your clients and customers will have good experiences, and in the end, your business will grow.

So let’s talk about a few of those things that can get you going in the right direction!

  1. Customer Service Team: Make your customer-facing employees into your best information gatherers. Whether you’re a small business with a single appointment setter or a large healthcare company with teams of dedicated customer representatives, these people interface with your customers every day. Your CSRs know what makes customers happy, and they for sure hear about what you do that drives them crazy. CSRs also know what they wish a product or service could do. Create a way for them to feed that information into the decision makers. In a small business that may just be getting the info back to you, in a larger, more complicated organization, it may require a process to synthesize and prioritize the feedback. Either way, this is FREE market research if you can harness it.
  2. Product Development: We love our products. We think they are great. We know their weaknesses. Or do we? Your product development pipeline likely includes a host of enhancements that you either can’t afford or don’t have time for. That’s the nature of product development. However, before you launch your next product enhancement, your development leaders should also be asking your marketing teams about competitive information. What are your competitors doing that you aren’t? That doesn’t mean you chase everything they do, but it may warrant some critical understanding of your longer term priorities.
  3. Finances. Everyone’s Market-driven- When you create good processes, your clients and customers will have good experiences, and in the end your business will grow.favorite topic: the money. Being a market-driven company, your finance leaders should understand the value, cost, COGS and markup on your products. One of my recent clients is currently running over budget on their print costs. Makes sense that their money guys and gals are all up in their potato chips about over-spending, right? The reality is they are over budget because the company has far exceeded their membership numbers. They’re sending more enrollment kits than they ever planned to, but that’s because they’re killing it on their enrollments. So while the budget is soaring, so is the income, and therefore the ROI should be strong. Your finance folks need to understand more than the budget’s bottom line.
  4. Sales. Your sales team is not automatically market savvy. It’s no secret that combining your sales and marketing is a recipe for disaster in my book. Generally, if you do it, you will end up with a “sales” and “sales support” team, not a marketing team. With that agreement under our virtual belts, hopefully, you’ll follow me when I say that that your sales team needs to intimately know your top competitor products. That’s a great first step. But how well versed are they on the consequence of doing nothing? Do your sales leads understand the industry well enough to know what the cost of saving the money your product costs? If not, they’re not fully market-driven — they should understand the market they’re operating in.
  5. Your marketing peeps. What do you mean all marketing people are not market-driven? No. They are not. Not even most marketing professionals are market-driven — because they don’t measure things. They likely have no idea if their activities are successful at influencing your target market or not. Marketing leaders must work cross-functionally to help their colleagues know better and perform better. Do they get to boss people around? Yes. I mean no. I’m kidding. Sorta. Marketing-driven doesn’t mean that marketing drives everything. It means that as market research and best practices become available it is shared, discussed and assessed.

Tell me some of your successes (or struggles) with being market-driven?

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When Your Marketing is Too Successful: Overcoming Bad Operational Processes

When starting to write this blog I thought about a couple different titles:

DRAFT TITLE 1: When good marketing goes bad!
But trying to get the scary music to coincide with you reading the title was too much trouble.

DRAFT TITLE 2: Admit it, your support processes suck.
Um, probably the most accurate, but probably a bit too blunt. Even for me.

One of my current clients is realizing this the hard way. And even worse correcting it is proving to be a brutal task for all of us.

It's okay to admit it if your support processes are costing you clients.
It’s okay to admit it if your support processes are costing you clients.

Here’s the situation: We overhauled their website and launched some social media and their sales process is working great. (Yes, I’m really good. I’m also humble.) They’ve added a couple of outbound call campaigns to highly targeted lists that are generating results. That’s what we all hope for right? Generating and qualifying leads is generally considered the crux of marketing and sales projects.

Here’s where things break down: without giving too much away (I’m good, but no one wants to work with a gabby marketing consultant) this is a high-touch category, so while they’re generating multiple leads, their operational processes simply aren’t built to pull the leads thru the closing and support pipeline, which will cost them on the retention end.

My client realizes that the hardest part isn’t finding and qualifying leads but delivering on the services promised during the sales process.

Shortsighted marketing efforts would call the lead generation a success, but truly agile marketing measures the process all the way through and builds in constant process improvement. Here are some common places where your processes may be failing:

  1. Getting leads but failing to close deals. There honestly could be several reasons for this, but we’ll focus on making sure that your leads get handed off cleanly. If you’ve got someone making initial contact, like my client, and someone else who actually presents and closes the deal you have to make sure this is seamless. It also is a good time to make sure you have the right marketing and communication materials to support whatever your process is. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.
  2. Closing deals but failing to retain customers. This one will go hand in hand with number 3 where I’ll talk about angry customers (which will quickly lead to number 4.) For this one, think about those customers that just quietly fade away. You may not even realize it for a year, or two, or more. Probably because they believe they didn’t matter to you and if you didn’t notice they were gone, they were probably right.
  3. Spending costly amounts of time addressing customer service issues. Angry customers cost you a lot of money. They take up your team’s valuable time on the phone ranting about how upset they are. To assuage them you give them something free which costs money or resources. Sure, you can’t make everyone happy, and I’m a firm believer in firing a customer if needed, but if you see trends in your customer service issues, there’s probably an underlying operational process that needs to be tightened up.
  4. Battling your reputation in the eyes of customers. When an upset customer leaves, they normally don’t do it quietly. Everyone I know can name at least three companies that they will never, ever, ever do business with again (SWA I’m looking at you.) They then proceed to tell anyone who will listen exactly why. Now instead of getting the valuable referral, you’ve lost a potential customer that you never even had contact with.

The way to fix this isn’t overly complicated, but it does require regular oversight and consistent process improvement. Put measurements in at every milestone. When customers fall out of the lead generation process, you should try to find out why. When they fail to renew or become repeat customers, you want to do what you can to either bring them back but to keep other customers from following them out the door.

 

 

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DIY MEDIA RELATIONS: Because The Media isn’t sitting around waiting for you

I won’t name any names or share any images, but I saw a post on FB this week that said essentially ” We’ve got a great new product. We’re looking to launch next week. Does anyone have any media connections to help us?” 

Now, I’m not a native southerner, but I couldn’t help but think “Awww… bless your heart.”

In my 20 or so years in the south, I’ve learned that when a southerner says “Bless your heart” — it’s not good. It’s actually really, really bad.

Probably worse.

Southerners use that phrase when there is so much wrong with someone or something that they can’t even begin to put it to words.

Media planning requires just that: Planning.

Whether you call it public relations, media planning or media relations, the most important word is NOT media or public. It is the planning and the relations that take the effort. Expecting news media, even media dedicated to your niche industry or business, to be waiting around for you to be ready to talk to them will not work. (Or shall we say “That dog won’t hunt.”)

I listened to a great podcast last week on StartUp Dallas that featured Michelle Lamont (@lamontPR) who did a phenomenal job of explaining how she’s made a career out of effectively promoting and  managing the images of some pretty significant companies (including her own start up.) A key point she makes is that media relations takes time: the first time the media hears from you should not be when you want something from them. She tells a funny story about running an advertisement in a national publication and then patiently waiting by the phone. And waiting. And waiting some more.*

So how should a young company start engaging the media before launch? 

Create Meaningful Public Relations
Create Meaningful Public Relations

One of my current clients has a solid client-base, but they’re looking to implement some new marketing for the first time, going heavier on the social media/PR to gain some growth. Here’s a quick sketch of how we’re putting a plan together.

1. Find your fans — Your first step should be to go connect on social media with EVERYONE you know — this is especially helpful if you’ve been active in the DFW or local start up scene or, if you, like my client have an existing base. Connect with those you know already like you.

2. Make new fans — Social media makes it easy to find people who talk your talk, whatever that talk is. Go find them. Use your hashtags, use your search, use Google search and find social media connections from web sites. Just build your connections and include your media targets. Start introducing yourself to them NOW!

3. Share useful content — I did a post a few months ago about how to develop social media content  (if you missed it read it here.)  For the first month or so of my jumping into Twitter I didn’t have ANY original content (because I didn’t know I needed it, but that’s another story). I simply shared and retweeted and used my web site content. Guess what? It worked. It won’t work forever, but while you’re finding and making your fans, it’s great.

4. Build offline relationships — It’s so important to make yourself known. Take time to attend events where media (and media connections) will be. In Dallas a simple trip to the Launch DFW website will give you a host of events. If you’re in a specific niche, like architecture or accounting, find groups who meet. Meet Up is great and while some of the key events won’t be there, attending a few of them will clue you in on where else you need to be.  Convert your offline relationships into fans and get them to follow your social media and read your blogs. (Don’t neglect LinkedIn here — it’s a great way to meet industry peers.)

5. Volunteer — There are so many events that need volunteers and guess what — you get in for free! I volunteered for a Dallas Business Journal event late last year and made several connections with other volunteers, but, also during lunch, I got to go sit in the audience and network. The place was crawling with media guru’s who are dying to become fans of your product! #dying

6. Do your research — Once you’ve identified the media coverage you want, you need to READ THEM. More importantly, engage with them. From the comfort of your couch you can reply to their tweets, comment on their blogs, share their FB posts. I’d also recommend that you attend events they sponsor or attend, engage in live and virtual conversation with them, but be careful not to be overly self-promoting. Bonus: this also helps you know if the content you’re sharing is meaningful.

During prelaunch, very few companies have budget dollars for outsourced public and media relations and that’s okay, you can likely have a lot of success with a simple DIY model. Learning and understanding that the media you’re looking to reach aren’t thumbing through press releases to actively reach out to every new company. If you learn what they are looking for and where and how they talk about it, then, when you’re ready you’ll have strong connections of your own to leverage.

Tweet me your successes or questions (or failures?) at @jrfoster75231. And go listen to that podcast!

Best,

Jennifer

* (She also talks about being so dedicated to her business that she slept in the bakery because she couldn’t pay electricity at both home and the bakery. It really is a great podcast!)