Why Marketing Directors are always angry.

THE UNFAIR TRUTH:

If a product does well, it’s because of the Sales Director. If a product doesn’t do well, it’s because of the Marketing Director. The packaging was all wrong. The demographic was way off. We should have spent less on outdoor and more online. We should have spent less online and more outdoor. We should have gone with that bold font and not italicised. Etcetera.

THAT is why Marketing Directors are always angry.

That’s also why Marketing Directors get furious when marketing agencies pretend to operate in 'The Same Space’.

If you look at a senior Marketing Director’s LinkedIn page you’ll probably see a few ‘likes’ per week or month, the odd “well done team” post, and lots of recruitment stuff.

If you look at any marketing agency boss’ LinkedIn page you’ll see them variously sharing photos of the latest word they’ve been paid thousands to change the font of, or - if you’re really lucky - find some click-desperate imbecile doing push-ups, singing or recreating his favourite movie scenes in a galling attempt to get as many ‘likes’ and ‘love’ from similarly spare-time-rich agency owners.

To quote a colleague: LinkedIn has become an agency circle-jerk.

I was once told by a junior colleague that she never sent emails to marketing directors after 4:15pm on a Friday because “they’ve probably gone home”. I slapped her (I didn’t). If you think that the more senior you are, the more you can skive off and get away with doing nothing, you’re wrong.

The more senior you are, the longer the hours you work, the more conference calls with Australia or America you’re on (neither of which give a shit whether it’s 6am or 6pm for you) and the more pressure and responsibility falls on your shoulders as your knees buckle and the bags form under your eyes.

These days it’s way easier to take conference calls remotely, but back in the day you were trapped in your office, huddled around some primitive speaker phone, watching as the office emptied while you calculated just how late you’d be home for that revered lamb bhuna and two bottles of red.

When some 42-year old man-child with a backward baseball cap turns up at your office, flamboyantly parks his electric scooter and then moon-walks into your office to tell you why “Monttocks Script Font is going to be huge this year”, all you can think about is repeatedly punching his corpse while you take beasting from the Americans because THEY know how you SHOULD have launched that product in Italy last month (but, strangely, didn’t mention anything until it failed).

So, apart from the personal therapeutic value in venting my spleen, what’s the point of this?

The point - you ass clowns - is that if you want to appeal to the Marketing Directors you want to hire you, act like they do, not how your peers do. If creative agency #317 are doing ‘hilarious’ videos on LinkedIn and racking up tens of comments, take a look at how many ‘buyers’ are in that list of likes. Any Heads of Marketing in there? Any Marketing Directors looking for a new agency (and making the decision based on some middle-aged prat in an overly-patterned shirt juggling cabbages)? No. Don’t be fucking stupid. Professionals want to work with professionals. Otherwise they’d be teachers.

When you’re a proper Marketing Director your life mostly sucks. They try to compensate by paying you lots of money and letting you fly Premium Economy, but ultimately that’s not enough. Pity the Marketing Director, empathise with the Marketing Director and - for god’s sake - don’t breakdance during a pitch to a Marketing Director; we WILL kill you.

One final thought: “Monttocks”.

Built by robots

There’s a PC game I play (to an almost obsessive level) called Factorio. You could argue that it’s not really a “game” in that anyone watching me play it would struggle to ascertain how much “fun” I’m having, but I genuinely love it. I could spend hours describing the game, but the key to success within the game is automation.

You start off with nothing, punching trees to gather wood to fashion into wooden tools… to then bash against rocks to make stone furnaces (fuelled by “punch wood”) to then forge stone tools, etc. etc.

After a while (about 400 hours to be exact) you’ve levelled your way up to having solar, nuclear and steam power, all feeding itself - and the rest of your production line - via beautifully-complicated systems of robot arms and conveyor belts. It’s like Sim City meets Minecraft (which I’ve just realised I could have said initially and saved us all several paragraphs).

HOWEVER (are you still here?) once you finally reach automated self-sufficiency, you find yourself missing the simplicity of how things were 400 hours ago when you were getting your hands dirty and had a solid ‘feel’ for how things were actually going. If you can zoom out far enough from your world to 1) still have it larger than your screen and 2) be so far out that you can’t see anything anymore, you might have gone a tad too far. The same can happen in business.

In New Business Development (see - I did remember why I’m here) there are SO MANY tools on offer to ‘help’ you automate your outreach campaigns it’s staggering. Automated news alerts kick-start segmented CRM systems which are linked to macros automating your auto-personalised emails, which are linked back to your CRM, which then updates your calendar… and so on, and so forth.

It’s tempting to spend 400 (ish) hours setting up such an automated masterpiece, but be aware of the perils of ‘zooming out’ so far that in any given moment you don’t actually know where you are in your campaign(s).

Many’s the time I’ve walked away from my game only to return to some snarl-up in my automated mega city. For me that involves some panicky robot building; for your company this could mean some very embarrassing and costly errors by the very macros you delighted in creating.

Remember: It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever.*

*Unless you press the STOP button.

You're not alone. Ish.

Steve and I were recently asked to guest present on an Agency Hackers’ video training session (check them out - there are some incredible agencies in their community), talking to agency owners about smart ways to improve their own business development. As lovely as it is to be asked to do such things, the part I actually enjoy the most is the Q&A session at the end.

Apart from it being a nice opportunity to interact with the many many faces floating on the screen, it’s also always interesting for us to hear which part of ‘new biz’ trips them up the most.

The kinds of questions we got asked on this occasion included:

How big should my database be?

How should I approach our ‘dream clients’?

What email platform should I use?

As you might imagine, we had a lovely time addressing all of these questions (no, I’m not giving you the answers ‘for free’ here – you’ll have to give us a buzz for those gems) but more important/interesting is that you get to see how – with just a simple prod in the right direction – the weight lifts from some seriously-intelligent people who just happen to not know where to begin when it comes to business development.

So… you’re not alone! If you know you should be doing some/more/better business development but don’t even know how to get beyond a napkin with a few prospects scribbled down, fear not; lots of other smart people are in exactly the same boat.

It took the SpongeNB collective many years to feel confident enough to host such a video session, so there’s no way you’re going to get everything right in your first few attempts to reach out into the (never-forgiving) cold channel.

And before you ask, no, I don’t have a copy of the video to share (but I do have a VHS of Robocop if that’s any use).

Are we prospecting? Always.

During a casual chat with a competitor, I was asked when we like to prospect? I thought he meant specific hours of the day, but actually he meant months of the year. I then realised that we might be the only new business agency that prospects ALL YEAR ROUND!

Yes, August is a weird month, but that’s just a great opportunity to revisit data, stop sending emails (unless you LOVE out-of-office replies) and get everything in order before the rest of the year starts hurtling towards Christmas with the brakes off.

B2B Sales Connections recently ran a “3 Best B2B Sales Prospecting Tips” article, with one of the titular “3” looking at exactly this: “When should you prospect?” One tip I liked was to make sure you understand where every prospect is in their own buying cycle. If they’re one month into a new contract, there’s very little point setting a reminder to talk to them again in one month’s time to “see how they’re getting on”. You’re better off finding out when a review will take place and then popping up down the line as if it’s lucky timing. Such a review might take place at the halfway point or in five years’ time, but if you gather that information while you’re connected, you at least stand a chance of a more meaningful outcome when you next talk (and you’ll look smart for being switched-on enough to ask in the first place).

We challenge our own business development managers to never just accept a “try me again in six months” fob off. We’d rather say “no” as long as we then say something like: “I’d rather call back when we can have a proper conversation that moves things forward; when would that be?” Often this prompts the prospect to reveal “when the contract ends in 24 months” but at least now we know to stop wasting everyone’s time, set a realistic reminder, and to move on to the next target.

We also try to avoid arbitrarily writing off Summer… writing off Christmas… writing off the bit after Christmas… etc. Gather information and react to that rather than what the calendar says. And while you’re at it, why not research when your prospect’s next big anniversary is. Is it coming up to their first anniversary? Their 10th birthday? Their centenary even? They are BOUND to be doing something big around these events, so say hello eight months before that date, make them aware that you’ve done your homework, and ask how you can help make this momentous occasion go off with a bang.

‘Lucky timing’ is way more under your control than you realise.

Things you need before deploying New Business support (Pt1)

Many of the companies that enlist our help have either never done real cold-channel business before or think they have (but on closer inspection realise that there was always some old connection or ‘good reason’ for the contact lurking just beneath the slightly warm surface).

It’s not a criticism incidentally; understandably, everyone prefers developing existing leads and working old connections rather than cold-calling prospects off a huge wish list. What it does mean, however, is that most companies coming to us looking to gain more business from cold-channel prospecting aren’t entirely equipped to do so.

The 30-page presentation they’re used to nonchalantly auto-piloting through in front of semi-interested parties is no longer much use. Someone barely interested in switching agencies might swipe through nine tight and mobile-optimised pages on the tube home, but to expect them to care about the history of your building, your copyrighted methodology and the beauty of your carefully-waxed moustache is probably hoping for too much from a cold prospect.

So… imagine a key prospect was only going to look at the first three pages. What would you include? Still want a “hello” page? Still want a gallery of your staff’s mug shots? No, of course not. You want your best case studies that had the most impact. Ok – now imagine you have six pages, what more might you show? Perhaps all the companies that trusted you with their brands? Further case studies showing more disciplines you’re good at? Good – now you’re getting the idea.

Cold-channel prospecting is about respecting the time and (likely) attention of your prospect. If you come at them in a sensible way, they’ll give you the time of day (or at least 30 seconds of it).

NEXT TIME: More stuff. (Such a tease!)

3 interesting ways to find new business leads.

1)      The competitors of those in the trade press

The news you read about a company wanting to appoint an agency is toxic to your new business endeavours. Firstly, if it’s in the trade press, it’s old. The best case scenario is that every agency on the planet has contacted the prospect. Most commonly though, the lead is now cold. Leave them alone and focus on the competitors of the company in question. If one company in a sector is used to outsourcing, then many of its competitors will be too. They’ll also be aware of the review and might be considering their own marketing support.

 
2)      The brands your team would like to work on

When we conduct our briefing days with new clients, one of the things we do is talk to the team at the agency and talk about dream clients. Once we’ve got Apple, Innocent, Audi and Nike out of the way, some really interesting ideas often emerge. It stands to reason that brands that your team feel enthusiastic about are the ones they could help write an amazing pitch for. And if you win the business, they’ll love working on it. No downside.

 
3)      The Top 10 of everything

Walk around your office and list everything (and I mean everything). For example:

-         Phone
-         Desk
-         Radiator
-         Blinds
-         Light switches
-         Fluorescent tubes
-         Doors
-         Door furniture
-         Squash racquet (hardly used)
-         Carpets
-         Copper pipes
-         Sink
-         Bin

All of these have manufacturers. Most of them are in sectors rarely approached by agencies. Find the top 10 of each (I’m not telling you how – you’re supposed to hire us) and then consider whether they’re marketed effectively. It’s a little trivial, but it’ll get you away from having new business planning sessions where you decide that FMCG, lifestyle and food and drink are the best sectors to target because they're famous.