Getting Lucky in B2B Marketing

After a long break, I'm back! Getting a new job, new work responsibilities, getting prepared to get married and moving into a new house just took up way more time than I expected :) Ok now that the applause has died down [I wish], lets get down to business...

Has anyone wondered why the people in Online Marketing and SEO working for software services get their kicks on pathetic lead/prospect numbers? You know what I'm talking about - "We got a new lead today!" or "Oh look a whole *8* people clicked on our website today" or "Gee did you see that new trend in our web stats? We seem to have got 80% more visitors this week - that's 20 people more than last week!" or "Whoa! 40 people unsubscribed to our newsletter! That's bad!"

I've actually heard very similar statements in the recent past, and it has never failed to amaze me - I mean the guys who have "normal" consumer websites ranking in the 100,000 visits/subscribers range must be laughing their heads off at those puny figures. But then something happens, and people get luck, and it so happens that one individual of those 5 visitors actually ends up giving us a contract. And this led me to start questioning my belief in 100% rational marketing techniques. If you do everything right and you still don't get what you expect, then obviosly something's wrong with what you consider "right". This led me to a document on Tom Peter's website, called "The Pursuit of Luck" which has a list of 50 strategies to get lucky. It made fascinating reading...

Innovation is a low-odds business and luck sure helps. (Its jolly well helped me!) If you believe that success does owe a lot to luck, and that luck in turn owes a lot to getting in the way of unexpected opportunities, you need not throw up your hands in despair. There are strategies you can pursue to get a little nuttiness into your life, and perhaps, then, egg on good luck. (By contrast, if you believe that orderly plans and getting up an hour earlier are the answer, then by all means arise before the rooster and start planning.)

Want to get lucky? Try following these 50 (!) strategies:

1. At-bats. More times at the plate, more hits.
2. Try it. Cut the baloney and get on with something.
3. Ready. Fire. Aim. (Instead of Ready. Aim. Aim. Aim. ...)
4. If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.G.K. Chesterton. Youve gotta start somewhere.
5. Read odd stuff. Look anywhere for ideas.
6. Visit odd places. Want to see speed? Visit CNN.
7. Make odd friends.
8. Hire odd people. Boring folks, boring ideas.
9. Cultivate odd hobbies. Raise orchids. Race yaks.
10. Work with odd partners.
11. Ask dumb questions. How come computer commands all come from keyboards? Somebody asked that one first; hence, the mouse.
12. Empower. The more folks feel theyre running their own show, the more at-bats, etc.
13. Train without limits. Pick up the tab for training unrelated to workkeep everyone engaged, period.
14. Dont back away from passion. Dispassionate innovator is an oxymoron.
15. Pursue failure. Failure is successs only launching pad. (The bigger the goof, the better!)
16. Take anti-NIH pills. Dont let not invented here keep you from ripping off nifty ideas.
17. Constantly reorganize. Mix, match, try different combinations to shake things up.
18. Listen to everyone. Ideas come from anywhere.
19. Dont listen to anyone. Trust your inner ear.
20. Get fired. If youre not pushing hard enough to get fired, youre not pushing hard enough. (More than once is okay.)
21. Nurture intuition. If you can find an interesting market idea that came from a rational plan, I'll eat all my hats. (I have quite a collection.)
22. Dont hang out with all the rest. Forget the same tired trade association meetings, talking with the same tired people about the same tired things.
23. Decentralize. At-bats are proportional to the amount of decentralization.
24. Decentralize again.
25. Smash all functional barriers. Unfettered contact among people from different disciplines is magic.
26. Destroy hierarchies.
27. Open the books. Make everyone a businessperson, with access to all the financials.
28. Start an information deluge. The more real-time, unedited information people close to the action have, the more that neat stuff happens.
29. Take sabbaticals.
30. Repot yourself every 10 years. (This was the advice of former Stanford Business School dean Arjay Miller meaning change careers each decade.)
31. Spend 50 percent of your time with outsiders. Distributors and vendors will give you more ideas in five minutes than another five-hour committee meeting.
32. Spend 50 percent of your outsider time with wacko outsiders.
33. Pursue alternative rhythms. Spend a year on a farm, six months working in a factory or burger shop.
34. Spread confusion in your wake. Keep people off balance, dont let the ruts get deeper than they already are.
35. Disorganize. Bureaucracy takes care of itself. The boss should be chief dis-organizer, Quad/Graphics CEO Harry Quadracci told us.
36. Dis-equilibrate ... Create instability, even chaos. Good advice to real leaders from Professor Warren Bennis.
37. Stir curiosity. Igniting youthful, dormant curiosity in followers is the lead dogs top task, according to Sony chairman Akio Morita.
38. Start a Corporate Traitors Hall of Fame. Renegades are not enough. You need people who despise what you stand for.
39. Give out Culture Scud Awards. Your best friend is the person who attacks your corporate culture head-on. Wish her well.
40. Vary your pattern. Eat a different breakfast cereal. Take a different route to work.
41. Take off your coat.
42. Take off your tie.
43. Roll up your sleeves.
44. Take off your shoes.
45. Get out of your office. Tell me, honestly, the last time something inspiring or clever happened at that big table in your office?!
46. Get rid of your office.
47. Spend a workday each week at home.
48. Nurture peripheral vision. The interesting stuff usually is going on beyond the margins of the professionals ever-narrowing line of sight.
49. Dont help. Let the people who work for you slip, trip, falland grow and learn on their own.
50. Avoid moderation in all things. Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess, according to Edwin Land, Polaroids founder.

Now write down the opposite of each of the 50. Which set comes closer to your profile?*

In short, loosen up!

Notice that a lot of the points contradict each other? In many ways, this list does reflect things I haven't been doing - so now I'm off to court lady luck :)

Five Suggestions: Part 2: For Clients

Ever worked with a vendor/advertising agency or outsourced a share of your work to another company? For people new to doing this or experienced in doing this, here's a list of 5 things you should do to ensure you get the best service, get loyalty and nurture a high level of trust in your relationship.

1. Clarity is Paramount
   Do you know your organization's goals for the year? Your budgets? Do you have a plan for what you want to achieve in the coming quarter? If you don't have the answers to these questions, you need to get them ASAP! If you do know the answers, the most important question here is: Does your agency know all this too? If they don't have the big picture, if they don't get the answers to their questions and if they see you as a client who needs to be constantly prodded for information and clarity, how can they serve you with the kind of efficiency and professionalism you expect? They'll respect you and your organization more if you confide and explain things to them in the most verbose possible way.
   
   Don't have a close relationship with your agency? Do you treat them as just suppliers of a commodity? Then you need to do one of two things: either take them into confidence and share all the information you have with them, or fire them and hire someone you can trust. The middle ground here is just too inefficient.
   


2. Plan in Advance
   Always on the edge when it comes to demanding tight deadlines for deliverables? That's probably why the output from your agency is low quality - they haven't had the time to digest the situation and come up with better ideas. Remember, you are not the only client they have - everyone else is also demanding their time with unreasonable deadlines and its usually a case of too many things to do for too few people. Planning the bulk of your activities in advance helps everyone - forces you to make rational plans of what you want to achieve and why in the short term, and notifies your agency of the kind of work they can expect from you in the coming months so they can plan their resource allocation. At the end of the year, your plans will have changed significantly, but at least your agency will not have been completely clueless about what you wanted to achieve.
   


3. Giving a good brief is an art form
   Well ok maybe it's not exactly "art" but you get my drift; you need to spend a lot of time on your briefs, explaining everything from the core reasons why you want something done to what you aim to achieve from it. The more you explain, your agency gets a better idea of what to do and what will help the most. Of course, there are some that argue that "My agency knows our organization so well, only a one line brief is enough". Well, in my opinion, even if an agency knows your organization well, you still need to give them a slightly verbose brief. It need not have a huge amount of detail, but simple objectives and reasons need to be there. Also, if you have any preferences for colors, logo sizes, shapes, database structure, code style or typography, please leave them out of your brief - leave that stuff to the agency, which is what my next point talks about.
   


4. Why keep a Dog and Bark Yourself?
   Ogilvy's famous words say it all: You're hiring your agency/vendor to do something that's not your organizations core competence, they are probably the ones who've given a lot more thought to your communication/marketing activities, so why can't you trust their judgement? Sure, theres a fair amount of learning that has to happen if you've engaged a new agency or are at a very young stage in your relationship - but that doesn't necessarily mean that you need to direct everything they do. Making decisions through a "committee" is another thing that will induce high blood pressure for your agency's people. The more opinions they get on their work, the harder it is to maintain the original intended integrity of the message. I've seen several instances where agencies have distanced themselves from work they've done because the final output was completely different from the original idea. (bigger logo! change the typeface! change headline! change visual! um.. ok, now I'm happy - lets see what the sales team have to say.) You'll have agencies dumping your account the moment this seems to happen too often - however much money you're paying them. If you want so much control, why hire an agency? You might as well do it yourself.
   


5. Nurture the relationship
   If you are satisfied with the approach your agency takes in their work and if they seem like the right kind of people you want to work with, don't just show your appreciation by praising them. Give them more work. After all, this is a business, and if their work is satisfactory and you're compfortable with them, what's preventing you from growing the relationship too? They have people, just like your organization does. they probably have targets, just like your organization's peolple do - The best way you can show your appreciation for good work is to give them more work, trust them more and start giving them access to various people in your organization so that they can know your company better. If all goes well, this can only help increase the quality of the work delivered to you, as people who respect you will always do their best for you. Also, remember another of David Ogilvy's famous lines: Pay Peanuts and you'll get monkeys. Be open to expanding the scope of your relationship slowly, and demanding higher quality work and interaction for it.
   

At the end of the day, you need to achieve your organization's objectives in some way - working with an agency or a vendor usually means a long term committment to the relationship - and like all relationships, you need to invest time and patience to make it a happy one.