For The Future Indicative, Ep 2 Part 1
Transcript
ALEX EFFGEN
Welcome back to the Future Indicative. I’m Alex Effgen, and in Part 2 of our look at Marketing, we’ll continue to explore the four-category framework that we define as the Four S in the word business. SECURE: What can disrupt marketing? And SCALE: How do we expand our market?
MEGAN HEUER
“...when you start to see a loss of interest, you need to do something about it. The problem is: it’s actually just the tip of the iceberg, right? The loss of interest has been happening over years. And now we’re going to have to kind of rebuild to the things that really matter.”
ALEX EFFGEN
That was Megan Heuer, Principal at Heuer Advisors and my Chief Market Officer. She’s been instrumental to my understanding that marketing is not the sum of its tools and dashboards, but an investment in relating the trends, technologies, and personalities of business into a captivating narrative. And that’s what I’m all about. But it quickly goes away the second you can’t relate.
There’s a line in an episode of The Simpsons, where Grandpa says:
“I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary to me. It’ll happen to you!”
No doubt it will happen to all of us. But how do we delay the inevitable?
MEGAN HEUER
“When you make decisions, you have to leave your assumptions behind. And you have to go at it with the idea of, Is my mind taking a fresh, clear look at the facts about a situation? About a market? About a customer? About my product? And am I using information that I believe to be accurate and true to make decisions about what marketing should be doing and how marketing should be doing it?
And oftentimes, especially I think those of us that are later in our careers—but you see this with early career professionals as well—you can develop a lot of unconscious bias about the way things are and how people think. And it’s very, very easy to get caught up in assumptions that are just plain wrong.
You and I are both fans of Mark Twain, and I always loved the saying from Mark Twain about, it’s not what you don’t know that can hurt you, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
And I think those are absolutely words to live by when we think about the disruptions that are happening in the market today—the things that could get in the way of progress in terms of not paying attention to the big and the small changes, and making assumptions that aren’t correct that could send you in an expensive and unhelpful direction for a long time.”
ALEX EFFGEN
There is another quote, attributed to Mark Twain, but in fact he was quoting the British statesman, Benjamin Disraeli, and it goes: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Over 100 years later and the world is more overwhelmed by data and the conclusions that get built by how we filter that data. When marketing is only built with an eye towards the metrics, those metrics might only serve to justify the marketing.
MEGAN HEUER
“The things that marketing cares about: How many clicks did I get? How many marketing qualified leads did I send? Did the campaign perform? What was our open rate? How many people viewed that video? How many people showed up for the event?…In the end, those are vanity metrics. Really a kind of a means on the way to the end of: Did we help the company achieve its revenue and profitability objectives?”
ALEX EFFGEN
So how do we find the correct metrics? The answer comes from friends in other business functions.
MEGAN HEUER
“Finance is really, really good at helping you cut through the clutter of the metrics that don’t really point you in the direction of, Did I help or didn’t I? And helping you to think about, How could I break down the things that we do into what connects up to revenue objectives? And what shows our influence on those revenue objectives?
And finance also will be very rational about thinking that through. So they’re not gonna say, irrationally, Hey, you got to be able to tell me how much every single white paper is worth? You know, that old example from the bad old days of first touch or last touch attribution. Finance will really help you think through, How do you connect all the different ways that you impact the buyer’s journey? And what will be credible and repeatable numbers that you can pull as a marketing leader to show your progress and to show your impact?
So make friends with your CFO, make friends with the people on the Finance team who do the analysis. Tell them the challenge that you have and the problem that you’re trying to solve for, and sit with them as you work through the way they think about it with their tool set of numbers and analytics and logical connections of cause and effect from activity to income. They’re literally invaluable. Get to know the money people.”
ALEX EFFGEN
People pay money for the product. The bottom line requires the product to be worth the bottom dollar.
MEGAN HEUER
“A rotten product or a product that doesn’t live up to its promise, and a product that routinely does not meet the expectations that have been set by sales and marketing and ignoring when customers are not getting impact. That gets found out. Sometimes it takes a long time. Really great marketing, and really great selling, and bells and whistles in the product itself can sometimes cover up for things that are just plain not good. But people figure it out. Buyers are smart. Customers who are using your stuff have to remember that they need to show a return on that investment at some point. So they’re going to do their level best to make sure they get that. If they can’t, that’s a problem.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Now let’s take that customer who needs to show a return on investment, and let’s multiply that by the factor of SCALE.
MEGAN HEUER
“Even for the best sort of ‘under the radar’ products. People don’t want their product to stay under the radar most of the time. They don’t want their service to go unnoticed, and only acquired by the few. There’s this drive to always make things bigger and sell more of them.
So in the process of wanting things to be bigger and more and faster, marketing really then becomes an unavoidable part of that equation. It just means though that marketing has to be prepared to play the role that the market needs it to play, and the market will allow it to play. And I think that’s where some of the challenges we have for marketing are right now is we’ve got a disconnect between the tools of marketing and marketing’s undeniable role in the commercial world.”
ALEX EFFGEN
We also have lost sight of the direction because of where we focus our marketing. If we view marketing as ephemeral, as a cost center we can cut when times get lean, then it explains why we only think of marketing as a funnel to procure new leads.
MEGAN HEUER
“I think one of the problems we see with marketing is they’re usually only called upon to try to find more people who are more new customers, more people who don’t buy from you today. When the mathematical reality of most companies is that—especially companies of any size with multiple products in their portfolio—is that your highest potential next buyer is the one that you’re already selling to today that doesn’t have everything they could buy from you.
And I think marketing doesn’t get involved as much in that group of customers because it’s really really hard to point to a generated lead when an existing customer. They’re already your customer. Therefore, you can’t really get a new lead out of them.
So our metrics hold us back, but allowing marketing to play a bigger role in making sure that those existing customers know what else they could be buying from you, what that path to a more complete product set from you could look like, and why they should care.
Marketing can do all those things, and learning about the challenges your customers have and feeding that back to Sales,...if only we let them play that role in a subset of our customers that won’t generate a new lead. So if we can get past that part, marketing can play I think an even bigger role in scaling than just finding more new customers.”
ALEX EFFGEN
But at the end of the day, we are at an impasse if we differ in our definitions of marketing. If we do not see it tied to stewarding the value of the product then we’ll only get what we put into it. Huh, I guess I am a marketer after all, and anyone tied to the product and delivering on its value to the customer should be as well.
In these artificial times, we often see platforms replace people. But instead of one or the other, why don’t we organize to use the best of what’s around. Meg, what does it take to scale marketing?
MEGAN HEUER
“The easy answer would be, ‘Well, gosh, you just need more people and more money.’ But that answer is not a great answer in today’s market. Most marketing leaders will tell you they’re not being given more people. You need to assume you’re going to have to do more with less.
And I think this is where technology really is our friend right now. There are some incredible advances happening that are helping us to get rid of the routine tasks that nobody ever liked doing. That until the last year or two, probably actually did need a human to manage them, but now they don’t.
But that’s the foundation of getting more out of the people and the resources that you have. Saying, What things doesn’t a human need to do? And then the job to produce more and better is to recast those roles into things that only people can do. To bring the creativity, the critical thinking, the vision that allows us to create that outstanding content, those things that will bring our story to life for prospective buyers and customers. Let the humans do that.
And then that way even with the exact same team, you’re going to have the tasks that need to be done but not by a human done in the most cost-effective and timely manner possible while improving the job satisfaction of the people on your team because you’re putting them on tasks that really require them to use their whole brain and to be creative.
And that to me is a positive opportunity to produce more with the same or less. But we do have to be comfortable embracing the role of technology in that.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Thank you for joining us on The Future Indicative, a podcast produced by me, Alex Effgen, and Indicate Marketing. Our mission is to show what great narratives accomplish for your industry. As mentioned before, the views expressed here are solely our own, but we love to share them, and we love you to share them too. So visit us at IndicateMarketing.com and help in the sharing. Let’s explore how our humanity can help drive your business growth and market positioning. We appreciate your patronage, and continued support.
