Work the HowA blog of examples, insights and frameworks for establishing, leading and optimising an
operating model for enterprise B2B marketing,
including strategy, sales, go-to-market, positioning, messaging and metrics.
“To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier.
Execution is worth millions.”
Want the full picture in 60 seconds? Read the TLDR.
What do all great marketing teams have in common? Why do some organisations seem to continue delivering great, impactful, memorable marketing time after time? And how do they seem to continuously, confidently understand what value they are creating, how they are creating it, and how it can be improved? Great teams all prioritise the same four ways of working. The sum of successfully executing these is an operating model for the Marketing function. An intentional, consistent, effective way for how the Marketing team delivers marketing and how it creates business value.
For years the goal of enterprise marketing has been the same: perfect segmentation, personalisation and activation at scale. Many of the imperfections of the marketing world can be explained by the importance of demonstrating value. Marketing is, after all, a commercial environment. It is easier to get promoted by complementing the Emperor than by pointing out he has no clothes.
Sales and Marketing teams are like siblings – they need each other, but they may not choose each other as friends and they sometimes argue. Marketing is a Brand and Sales efficiency engine. Marketing needs to be out ahead of Sales building brand, creating markets, defining position and creating opportunities and working alongside Sales to accelerate and close them at scale. If Marketing teams cannot see how they are driving organisational efficiency for Sales, they should question their long-term value.
In the aftermath of World War 2, few could have predicted the powerhouse that Japanese manufacturing would become. To compete, Japanese industry needed to operate differently and within its own strengths and constraints. The constraints of low cash, low demand and low space for large factories were recalibrated, and by investing in process value rather than volume Toyota were able to develop an entirely lean operating model. Take a sideways look at the Toyota forms of waste and you’ll see the same types of waste that most marketing organisations accept every day.
If you want to know why marketing that works, works, and why so much doesn’t here’s the answer: because it spends time on its ‘why’ and its ‘how’ rather than just on its ‘what’. It understands that success is inception aligned to the customer’s purchase process and the sales methodology, and because it operationalises delivery of that as one marketing organisation at scale. Not because it can come up with creative concepts or uses cool technology.
Influencing decision making is the basis of all Marketing and Sales. If there is an art to marketing, this section is it. Inception is the method of making someone think, feel or do something without telling them directly what to think, feel or do. It is giving them an idea without letting them know the idea came from you.
Inception is just an idea in a film, right? A plot device to support a nearly billon-dollar-creating piece of entertainment and art. You can’t actually do it, though? Not so. Inception is the art and science of getting someone or some people to create an idea of their own volition. The hard part is the last element – you’re trying to get someone to come up with an idea themselves. Our ideas our powerful.
The hardest part of communicating an idea is that everyone starts from a different place. There is no common grounding. The knowledge and experience of the communicator is different from the audience and the knowledge within audience differs from person to person. There is no standard of experience. Information is interpreted differently by everyone, and so the impact also differs from person to person. This is variance of baseline understanding is called the Context Gap.
Ideas resonate because they tap into core programming of the human brain. The centres of decision making are black box machines that through learning and experience take inputs, rapidly apply an emotional and logical algorithm and arrive at a conclusion. Stories – when they are simple, tangible, unexpected, and emotional – have the power to resonate near indefinitely.
If you’ve ever worked with a great leader you’ll know that they motivate the people around them to aspire to similar levels of greatness. They may provide clear directions, but they also make people want to follow those directions. They create clarity and a vision that resonates, and then they inspire a team to follow them to the ends of the earth to achieve the mission. People want to follow great leaders. They have to follow average leaders.
Sales is not always about selling a product or service. Sales is about selling ideas, next steps and risk. Marketing is not all about creating qualified leads. Marketing is about influencing and nurturing opportunities from pre-pipeline, as they progress and into post-sale. Sales and Marketing have a common end goal, but operate over different timelines and objectives.
Every interaction and step of the sales process should create an idea in the minds of the audience that aligns to an outcome you want to engineer. Any marketing or sales campaign that does not address all three of these requirements will miss its potential. The goal is to create inception in the mind of the audience for an idea that ticks three needs.
Effective teams always pull in the same direction. They may have diverse skills, experiences, specialities or outlooks, but they always align in the areas that it matters in. No tug-of-war team has ever won where half the squad is pulling against the rest of the team. Marketing is a Sales efficiency engine and yet too often these organisations have too little understanding of each other’s challenges, constraints and value to be able to see the common linkages between their worlds.
An organisation’s revenue can be said to primarily come from four sources: landing new customers, retaining those existing customers, upselling additional services to them and cross-selling to new buyers within a customer ecosystem. Understanding those objectives and intentional, strategic planning at scale is the foundation of integrated marketing.
Enterprise B2B purchases are often described as ‘complex sales’ because they have many moving parts and take time to complete. An impulse purchase in a store requires only you, the buyer, to make a decision. In a complex sale, many stakeholders will have inputs and criteria that need to be met meaning that purchasing decisions are commonly made by a buying group. Too often buyer persona analysis focuses on the individuals within a decision rather than trying to understand the dynamic of the group.
When it comes to hitting a revenue target there are four levers at Sales’ disposal: increase the volume of deals you win, increase the value of deals you win, increase the win-rate of your deals, decrease the time it takes to win deals. These four levers can be worked individually or collectively by both Sales and Marketing and systematic joint planning of interactions, initiatives and incentives can support moving the needle. What’s important is to be clear on your goal.
To be an effective tool, sales funnels require clear definitions against which opportunities can be classified. Sales stages are used to calculate weighted pipeline for forecasting, and when sales data is accurately classified it can be analysed to identify bottlenecks, issues or opportunities. Predictable revenue and new business is foundational to business planning and reporting.
Targets motivate behaviour. Rarely is there a greater expression of targets driving behaviour than in a Sales function. Sales teams are different in every organisation, but in general Sales prioritise their effort based upon the same basic criteria. They are an excellent example of prioritisation and should be applauded for their simplicity and focus but can also lead to unplanned consequences and misaligned activity.
Buyer journeys are non-linear. They never have been. The idea that because purchases are now more complex – which we shouldn’t doubt – necessitates a more complex model is to misunderstand the customer journey model’s purpose. Customer journey frameworks are models of reality. They’re maps of how customers can get from A to B that remove the extraneous information that makes them impractical to implement and use.
The funnel is a practical way to show the flow of a large number of early stage opportunities at the top, some leakage as deals are lost, down to a smaller number of closed business opportunities at the bottom. The leakiness of the funnel is a measure of the efficiency of converting early opportunities to revenue; a high percentage reduction through the funnel could be a product of an ineffective sales methodology, an uncompetitive solution or a poor quality of initial opportunities.
A customer journey framework is not how a customer buys. The customer journey framework is a model of a simplified, standardised customer journey that represents an holistic view of the major steps that all customers will go through so that usable customer journey maps can be built to create great experiences.
The first rule of sales says that you cannot sell to a customer that cannot buy. You also cannot sell to a customer that has not identified a need to buy. You can, however, take a customer through the process of understanding their need, even if they weren’t previously aware of it. All customers, whether they’re net new, you’re cross selling to new buying centres or you’re upselling within an existing buying centres will go through the same states of a customer journey.
The role of sales and marketing is not just to meet customers at their present journey state and leave them there. The objective of buyer enablement is to move customers through their purchase experience. Every sales and marketing touchpoint should have a clear objective behind it to enable buyers to move from state A to state B.
Data needs to tell a story, be it to a prospective customer, an internal marketing decision maker or to a board member. But maximising impact and minimising waste requires a mindset shift away from micro-KPIs and one-off examples to macro impacts against bigger objectives.
Average numbers can hide many sins. An average of 200 downloads per piece of content could sound great until you realise that can be generated by four assets with 25 downloads and one with 900. People like averages when it allows them to tell a simple story in one number. They’re concise and, particularly when the number is good, memorable. But its always worth recognising that an average is not the same as a reality.
Many marketing organisations are full of opinions and experience but find data and statistical analysis in short supply. What actually drives marketing value? And how much does that value cost? The role of a marketing leader is to invest resources to create value (i.e. buy impact). Budgets can only be spent once. Cut out the low value and see what happens. Reinvest in the high-value. Follow the data, not the way things have always been done.
Underlying trends can be conveniently easy to ignore when it is advantageous and usefully notable when they solve a problem. The only way to understand if activity is actually driving action is to abstract trends from impact. Of course, this requires an understanding of the trends themselves, which can be difficult when you don’t recognise that a trend exists.
To drive continual improvement at the macro level, to understand if you are actually creating inception at scale as you intend and to build a customer journey that reliably and repeatedly advances customers on their purchase lifecycle you need to have access to consistent data. Only when value and performance are measured consistently over time against a benchmark of cost or some other factor can understanding of relative improvement be established. Spending more to get more is not improving performance.
Marketing teams create outputs. The Marketing team, delivers impact. The marketing experience that a customer receives is the product of a marketing function. A company brand. A social media presence. Digital advertising. Promotions. Events. Digital advertising from promotions. Social media for events. In the company brand. They are all the outputs of marketing teams. All elements are interconnected and all connections invoke dependencies.
Prioritisation is one of the key outputs you should aim for from any strategic planning exercise. Too easily strategic planning can devolve to list building of all the things that need be done rather than removing items from the list and ordering those that remain. Tactically planning a detailed activity and touchpoint plan for the next 12 months is not the same as strategy, and to confuse the two can be a huge drain on productivity.
The purpose of planning is to get alignment on how to execute your strategy. To align on how you will deliver work to meet your goals and objectives. Integrated planning is the process of driving that alignment as one marketing organisation. The purpose of integrated planning is to make sure relevant information rolls upwards, downwards and sideways in an organisation so that teams work together, rather than in parallel with each other.
Robert Greenleaf, often called the father of the servant leadership movement, said of decision making “on an important decision one rarely has 100% of the information needed for a good decision no matter how much one spends or how long one waits. And, if one waits too long, he has a different problem and has to start all over. This is the terrible dilemma of the hesitant decision maker.” Now ask yourself, how does a team make decisions?
How you speak informs how you are understood, be that to internal teams or external audiences. Leads, goals, objectives, campaigns, programs activities, awareness, discovery, consideration – a common language makes communication, analysis and collaboration easier, faster and more effective. And with customers, the more consistently you articulate the value of your solutions, the more those messages will resonate and the greater the impact they’ll deliver.
How a team operates is more than the sum of its processes and hierarchies. Principles and culture, what you centralise for scale vs devolve to regions or teams, how you use internal communications and enablement and culture and leadership are all essential to driving operational excellence.
All commercially-driven enterprises including for-profit organisations, non-profits, membership clubs and sole traders have an operating model for connecting customer value to a financial arrangement that will sustain future operations. Marketing is no different in this aspect, it just may not look at itself so often in this light.
Innovation is directly correlated to risk. You try something with the intent to see what happens. If it doesn’t work as you planned, you try something else. If it does work you can decide whether to keep doing it, to build on it with other things that work or to ignore it and move on. And finally you get something special.
Measurements and KPIs drive behaviour. Set them correctly and they can drive collaboration and significant business value. Set them poorly and they can put you on a path that’s difficult to retreat from. Set them unfairly and they will rapidly demotivate a team. Set them effectively and they galvanise action and empower people to success.