The New Marketing & Sales Funnel

Big data, marketing and decision-making – what is it all about?

Sofie Sandell

Big data, marketing and decision-making – what is it all about?

Last week I got asked if I know about big data and how you use it in digital marketing. Yes, of course, I do. I’ve been using big data for years when analysing numbers from websites and social media.

I’ve also been fortunate to speak at many conferences where some of the speakers are fully trained ‘big data ninjas’, and I’m lucky to know some of them personally.

Big data is complex information, and it feels as overwhelming as a huge waterfall. It’s only if you present big data in a meaningful way it helps you to make better decisions.

Big data is inconveniently big. It’s hard to handle. Impossible to overview in its raw form.

On Wikipedia, you read: “Big data is a term for data sets that are so large or complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate. Challenges include analysis, capture, data curation, search, sharing, storage, transfer, visualization, querying and information privacy.”

An acquaintance who is responsible for all digital marketing for a large hotel chain in the US told me about her struggle to start to look at numbers when making decisions. For years, they had been making most decisions based on prejudices, personal experiences, and their ‘gut feeling’.

Every hour their hotels have thousands of guests who are in touch with them, either online, over the phone or staying in one of their large hotels. The information they collect about their customers is big data.

The information they have about their guests comes in many forms. Some are internal data, and some are external. You have access to the data that you asked your guests for before their visit and during their stay, and then new random data that you collect from your guests.

Their challenge was to use all information they have about their customers in a meaningful way so they could make better marketing decisions. To kick this off, they spent several days in a large conference room trying to figure out every possible touch-point that their customers have with them. What they got was a big complex map that told stories about their customers. The map was not easy to overview, or understand. The next step was to set up data collection points that they could follow and then also improve everyone’s web analytics skills.

Analytics is a vital phase of the big data cycle. The most common tools marketers use is Google Analytics, and it tells you about your website visitors. With the help of this information, you can understand what was successful in a campaign and how many online leads it gave. You can analyse your conversion rate, and see how many visits lead to a sale or an inquiry.

It’s when the data shows you meaningful pattern that you can do something with it. To see those patterns in an excel spreadsheet can be hard. That’s why you use visualisation software to do this, there are amazing and beautiful tools that magically help you visualise data.

To start using web analytics in a meaningful way took a while for the hotel chain. It’s not a one-month projects, but more like an on-going continual improvement project where everyone has to be open for new learning and share their knowledge.

Five examples of big data in daily life: 
1) The Panama leak was a big and complex project with 11 million documents. And to understand them better, see the pattern the journalists used big data visualisations tool. They used Neo4j and Linkurious to follow a pattern and see where the money went.
2) Eye on the Reef program – people, are helping scientists to find out what’s going on with the reef by sending them updates.
3) The Airports of the Future Project
4) NASA earth image project
5) For the health sector, there is so much to be discovered. Last time when I visited my local GP, or ‘house doctor’ as you say in Swedish, the nurse told me that they keep track on patient’s blood pressure, ‘they give us a call and share their blood pressure weekly, and we add it into the patients journal.’ Right now they collect the information manually. In the future, it will be done over a digital application on your smartphone, and you may send it to your doctor if you wish to.

We will use new personal digital technology in the future. We already have the fitness bracelet and different health apps. We will track all kind of body functions, sleep, movement, pulse, blood pressure, periods, hormones, blood, saliva, and weight. Then we will connect this with our smartphone, and start to see graphics and other visualisation tools, and share this with our doctor. There is a lot of medical issues that you can keep track of and prevent this way.

With so many new digital devices we are collecting and storing more data than ever. One question we need to ponder is how we will use it, and how it can be helpful. More tracking tools will be developed, it will give us more data, and they may help us to make better decisions.

How many people who are working in digital marketing are big data ninjas? Not that many, unfortunately. Big data is complex, and by collaborating and sharing skills you can explore what it means to your organisation.

Marketing Technology Landscape

A passion for business and leadership excellence

A passion for business and leadership excellence

 

TEC Group 422

TEC Group 422 comprises non-competitive CEOs and Presidents of both private and publicly traded organizations with a passion for business and leadership excellence.  Member companies are found listed in the top 250 companies on the 2015 ROB Top 1000, in the top 1/3 of 2015 Profit 500, in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500™ and have been finalists in Ernst Young’s “Entrepreneur of The Year Awards” for 2014 and 2015.

Joining TEC has enabled the leaders of these organizations, as a team, to share their drive and commitment to enrich each other’s ability to achieve their individual business, professional and personal goals. Members act as a private board of trusted advisors with no agendas other than helping each other share best practices, solve management issues, make better decisions and improve leadership skills.

• This group represents broad industry backgrounds and experience including construction, business services, retail, manufacturing, distribution, real estate development, finance, franchising and technology.
• Member organizations have combined revenues of over $3.0 billion and more than 4,500 employees.
• Member CEOs/Presidents lead publicly traded and private companies which operate globally with sales and marketing offices, operations, clients and suppliers in Canada, US, numerous EU countries, South Africa and Middle East.
• The group holds monthly advisory board executive sessions  during which the team processes issues and opportunities involving leadership challenges, branding and marketing , new business launches, financial re-organization, global expansion, organizational development, senior level staffing and reorganization, retail strategy, manufacturing, board strategy and management.
• Eight times a year the group benefits from workshops with experts covering a wide range of issues and topics.
• Monthly 1-2-1 private sessions are held between the Chair and each member focusing on business and personal growth.
• Members have access to an online best practices library, member conferences and a network of more than 1,100 Canadian and 20,000 global business leaders.

Members comment on how “loneliness-at-the-top” has been eradicated and how “stress reducing” it is to be part of a group of liked-minded leaders with whom they can share and discuss matters that normally they would need to deal with in relative isolation. They are experiencing the quality of their decisions, strategies and overall problem solving noticeably improving. Access to fresh thinking and challenging conversations with peers is enhancing their personal effectiveness. 

T.E.C. is not a social club. It is challenging; it is personal; it is hard work!

If joining a TEC group interests you, contact me and we can discuss if it is a fit.

• Over 1,100 Canadian business leaders have joined TEC groups
• Their companies generate $50 billion in annual revenues and employ over 100,000.
• T.E.C. Canada member companies outperform other companies in terms of CAGR by a factor of more than three to one. (Dunn & Bradstreet research).

                  Richard Peters, Chair



  
LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/richardpeters2
Direct: (416) 471-1956
E-mail: rpeters@tec-canada.com
Blog: Profit and Leadership

10 Mistakes You're Making in Building a Sales Team

Sales are the lifeblood of any business. Beating the plan yields optimism. Missing the number could mean a scramble for survival. Without sales, your business literally has nothing.

For this reason, I want sales to be scalable and predictable for our companies. And yet, “art form” is often a phrase used to describe sales. Art is neither scalable, nor predictable. Science is. When it comes to adding science to my sales team, I turn to my friend and advisor Mark Roberge, sales scientist, Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot, and author of the new book, The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to Go from $0 to $100M.

Here are the ten mistakes Mark sees many businesses make when scaling sales:

Mistake #1: Hiring salespeople with your gut

Hiring rock star sales people is the most important aspect to sales success. Yet, so many organizations “wing” the entire hiring process. Every sales context is different and, thus, every company has a different ideal hiring profile. Appreciate the uniqueness of your sales context, establish a theory of the hiring criteria that will work for you, and be disciplined about scoring every candidate against that criteria. As you bring on salespeople, this process enables you to learn from your mistakes, iterate, and hone in on the perfect hiring profile.

Mistake #2: Under-utilizing the sales compensation plan

The sales compensation plan is the most under-appreciated tool in the CEO’s toolkit. In thinking back to the major strategic re-directions we navigated at HubSpot, many of them were instigated by aligning the sales compensation plan with the desired strategic change. Whether looking to enter a new industry, gain market share with a particular product line, or expand into a new geography, the sales compensation plan will be the most effective driver of change.

Mistake #3: Mis-aligning sales and marketing

Traditionally, sales and marketing are two groups that have not gotten along. Marketing perceives sales as a bunch of over-paid spoiled brats. Sales feels marketing sits around doing arts and crafts all day. In an age with the majority of buying journey’s starting online, this dysfunctional relationship is the kiss of death for a company.

A properly aligned sales and marketing team is a pre-requisite to a healthy business. Quantify the deliverables that marketing and sales should commit to one another. At HubSpot, we call this agreement the Sales and Marketing Service Level Agreement, or SMarketing SLA. For example, marketing will deliver 1,500 leads per quarter that are contacts from Fortune 5000 companies within the retail, manufacturing, or technology industries. Sales will call these leads within 2 hours and convert 20% of them into sales pipeline within 30 days. Measure the SLA progress and share the report daily with the entire team. You are now empowered to manage your sales and marketing funnel every day!

Mistake #4: Not planning far enough in advance

It takes 2 months to hire a new sales person, 3 months to ramp them to full productivity, and a 4 month sales cycle to close a deal. This situation is not uncommon for a business. If anything, these timeframes may be on the aggressive side. Yet, even with these assumptions, it takes 9 months from the decision to hire a new salesperson to the time when they are fully productive. If you are a sales driven organization, your 2015 results are largely baked with the team on board in Q1. Most of the hiring you are doing now is driving your 2016 results. Plan ahead.

Mistake #5: Making forecasting, rather than coaching, the sales manager’s primary focus

Many sales managers spend the majority of their time managing the sales forecast and pipeline. This is a lost opportunity. Managers should spend the majority of their time coaching and developing their sales people. Effective sales coaching increases sales productivity. The best coaches diagnose the one or two skills that will make the biggest difference in a salesperson’s performance and customize a coaching plan to that skill. They use metrics to conduct the diagnosis. I call this process “metrics-driven sales coaching”.

Mistake #6: Motivating through fear rather than metrics

I always ask candidates why they want to move on from their current employer. Many of them complain about the fear-based, micro-management of their current environment. This type of militant management style does not motivate sales people, especially today’s millennial generation. Instead, automate a daily dashboard stack ranking the team on total dials, total connects, total discovery calls, total demos, total sales, etc. Send the dashboard out every day to the entire sales and marketing team and include the CEO. As a result, salespeople will be able to understand where they are gravitating from the “success blue-print” and self-diagnosis the areas in the funnel where they need work. At the end of the day, the salesperson, sales manager, and the company are on the same team. Enabling everyone with the daily metrics will provide the motivation and discipline you desire.

Mistake #7: Letting new salespeople shadow top performers

“Welcome to our company Bob. Do you remember our top salesperson, Sue? For your training, you are going to shadow her for two months.”

The shadowing approach to sales training is neither scalable nor predictable. In my experience, top salespeople are at the top for different reasons. They all bring a unique “super-power” to the table and lean into it heavily. A ride-along sales training strategy may dissuade sales people from leaning into their super-power. It may also encourage them to pick up bad habits from their peers. Instead, create a sales process. Certify salespeople by quantifying their aptitude with each stage of the sales process. Provide enough detail in the sales process to guide the salesperson but don’t make it too constraining that the salesperson cannot apply their “super-power”.

Mistake #8: Buying technology for management rather than the front-line salespeople

The majority of sales technology purchased over the last few decades has been purchased for the sales leader to conduct pipeline reviews and manage forecasts. The end result? The front-line salespeople do not use the software. Data integrity suffers and the original utility of the purchase is never realized.

In the last year, we have seen an explosion in sales technology that actually benefits the salesperson. It helps the salesperson sell faster by removing admin tasks and streamlines the processes they conduct dozens of times per day. It helps sales people sell better by illustrating the full buyer context to the salesperson at all times. Furthermore, technology that benefits salespeople is the best path toward capturing the data that sales leaders need to run the business. Try Hubspot's free product www.getsidekick.com as a starting point for your organization.

Mistake #9: Not experimenting enough

Every sales context is unique. Who do you sell your product to? How complicated is your product? How expensive is it? Is your product sold direct or through partners? Do most sales originate from inbound leads or outbound calls? Is it 1995 or 2005 or 2015? Varying answers to these questions call for varying approaches to the sale. Establish a baseline funnel. Form some theories on how the funnel can be improved. Devise and execute experiments. Iterate and improve.

Mistake #10: Relying on outdated demand generation techniques

When was the last time you bought something from a cold caller? How about from a piece of direct mail or unsolicited email?

Today’s buyer is empowered by the Internet. They are no longer receptive to outbound calls, emails, or advertising. In fact, buyers invest in technologies to keep these messages out of their lives. Today’s buyer begins their journey online, with a search in Google or question in social media. Yet, organizations continue to poor the majority of their sales and marketing budgets into outbound demand generation. Diversify your efforts with an inbound strategy.

Hire a journalist and team them up with the thought leaders and domain experts at your company. Have the journalist produce an eBook, a handful of blog articles, and a few dozen social media messages every month. Align the content with the questions your buyers have at the start of their journey. Help buyers find you.

Written by

Dave Kerpen

The Smart Way For Start-Ups to Create a Marketing Strategy

Recently, I’ve been getting asked questions directly and indirectly related to the marketing strategy for start-ups.

Here are some questions I’ve received:

• Why can’t I attract business for my tech start-up?
• How can a start-up achieve its marketing strategy goals?
• What are the most effective ways for a small business to start marketing with little or no budget?
• Is the marketing strategy for a start-up different compared to a business that is no longer a start-up?
• What should a start-up do different with its marketing strategy?

These issues are really symptoms of the same painful problem, which boils down to not clearly understanding what a marketing strategy is and how do you get one. Don’t worry … it’s a fairly common ailment.

There’s a process you can work through that will help you achieve greater clarity of your start-up marketing strategy, which leads to great clarity in your business.

This process might also help you come to understand how to turn your start-up into a success with only the necessary elements, because you’ll know exactly what attributes to take stock in before you start thinking about creating or realigning your business. 

1) Narrowly Define “You”
Understanding the characteristics, desires and behaviors of a narrowly defined target market is very hard work, but indispensable to your start-up success. Every marketing book, class or expert will tell you this, but few can give you the magic tablet that allows you to go deeply in the psyche of your prospect.

You can acquire some measure of knowledge from various research techniques, but nothing beats living, breathing, and feeling the same things your prospects do. I once heard Zig Ziglar say, “owners are closers.” You must own the product before you can sell anyone on it.

 I truly believe that the owner is the customer. Some of the surest successes in history have come from founders who created a product or service to meet a personal need and discovered a business by virtue of doing so. 

2) Connect Your Offering to an Established Market
Some entrepreneurs dream of locking themselves in their lab for a year or so and emerging with the world’s greatest innovation. Sounds romantic I know, but if your innovation solves an incredible problem people don’t yet know they have, you may wind up burning through all the money before they get it.

Better to innovate around a proven market, borrow genius from an unrelated industry, or discover an unmet need in a mature market crying for a solution. New products or services are like riders, they need a horse to go somewhere and interact with the outside world. So, if you have a terrific offering, but you can’t find a way to connect it to a medium to travel, nothing happens, there’s no activity, you end up with a static marketplace.

Steve Jobs famously said in 1996: “Picasso had a saying — ‘good artists copy; great artists steal’ — and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” 

3) Use Your Competitors Marketing and Advertising
Sometimes entrepreneurs shy away from competition. If market research shows that there’s too much competition in a given area or industry, the thinking is that the market is saturated and there’s probably no room for your start-up there.

Wrong. While it may be true that your neighborhood couldn’t possibly stand another doughnut shop, I’ve found the success of several businesses in an industry, even in the same direct community, can spell opportunity.

If people are already spending money on a product or service then two-thirds of your work is done. Use your competitors marketing and advertising to your advantage. They have educated the market so they understand and value the offering enough to whip out their wallets. All that’s left for you to do now is show them how much better you can make the experience. Few businesses really provide great service. In fact, stealing market share in mature markets is one of the easiest paths for smart start-ups to run. 

4) Simplicity is Your Innovation
Much of this article has focused on entering proven markets. While that’s absolutely the advice I’m giving here, know that you must do so with a significant point of differentiation that market easily understands and appreciates. In most cases this can be done by looking at the way most folks in the chosen market operate and find a way to simplify your offerings around breaking the mold.

For example, if people in your service business operate by proposal and bid, come up with a fixed price. If the traditional operating method is custom work, come up with a series of pre-packaged offerings that meet most people’s needs without the custom hassle.

The popular pizza franchise Little Caesars has one unique pizza on the menu that they call “Hot-N-Ready”. They make it up in big batches and serve thousands a day at $5 per pie. Their message is “No need to call ahead! No need to wait! No limit!” 

5) Nothing is in Stone
Here’s the one that can snag small business founders. If you’re in love with your bright shiny baby start-up and all that it offers, you may become blind to the reality the market suggests.

Keeping an open mind and a willingness to discover what the market really wants and adapt accordingly is one of the core advantages of your smallness – remember to use it.

Talk to your customers, talk to your competitors, talk to your employees and remember nothing is precious but what the numbers prove to be so.

About the Author: Patrick McFadden is the owner and marketing consultant at Indispensable Marketing, a strategic marketing firm based in Chesterfield, VA. We help small to midsize businesses get the strategy right so marketing tactics get results.

Written by

Patrick McFadden

What is a brand?

Brands must demand ad campaigns that create change – not just wants

Advertising as usual won't work in a changing world. Chipotle and G-Star Raw show how campaigns can respond to society's biggest challenges

 

 

Kanye West attends the Cannes Lions 2014 61st International Advertising Festival in Cannes, southern France. Photograph: Lionel Cironneau/AP

 

Last week was the most important event in the marketing calendar: the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The much-coveted prizes, the Lions, are a way for agencies to measure up and convince their clients that their steep hourly rates are justified. But why should you care about backslapping and champagne-popping by marketers, invading the Riviera to celebrate themselves?

The Festival of Creativity offers a snapshot of the marketing year 2014 and a thermometer reading of global markets. No advertising festival or awards show plays a more powerful role in the industry, receiving more than 37,000 entries and attracting more than 12,000 advertising professionals from 93 countries.

But the big question is: how was 2014? 

Epic splits or epic ignorance?
I would like to say the following to agencies: a commercial with Jean-Claude Van Damme doing what's been dubbed "the epic split" between two Volvo trucks is a bombastic dramatisation of an incremental product difference and entertaining as hell, but your clients are facing bigger challenges.

They'll soon have to welcome up to two billion new consumers to the market and most resources are already scarce. They are faced with new types of consumption where it's not about owning a car, but rather the experience or the service you get, or travelling from A to B in the smartest possible way. Collaborative models are a growing market, and digital and tech thinking has completely disrupted business as we know it, for example Airbnb challenging the hotel industry, and hitting $1.7bn (£1bn ) in sales in just six years.

Your clients (and you) are met by virtualisation, where products that were an everyday part of our lives in recent memory no longer exist. Think about paper calendars, alarm clocks or photo albums. Add to this a shift in mindset where a recent survey tell us that around 70% of people think that businesses should come up with solutions to some of society's biggest challenges, such as unemployment and climate change.

How will agencies respond to these challenges? More "epic splits"? More tomfoolery? This year's ad fest showed few examples of agencies understanding this new reality, compared to the ocean of advertising-as-usual. 

Make a mark on the world
Let's look at some of the work where brands (and agencies) dare to make a mark. In a campaign by Whybin\TBWA for ANZ Bank's sponsorship of Sydney's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, regular ATMs were turned into unique GAYTMs encrusted with rhinestones, sequins, studs, leather, denim and fur to deliver the free-spirited civil rights message of equality.

Lots of brands are leaving the closet and jumping on board the equal rights wagon and Honey Maid's This is Wholesome campaign is another well-crafted example, deserving its share of Lion statuettes. 

Less barking, more beautifying 
But there's so much more brands can do than just bring attention to important issues. Just like any ad break, the festival itself had star-studded appearances. Kanye West, for example, had his say about the state of flux in ad land: "The thing younger people are begging for is a more beautiful world where brands help people achieve things rather than simply barking at them."

Brands have a unique opportunity to play a bigger role in people's lives and to deliver on real needs rather than just creating wants. One such campaign, Speaking Exchange, was for a language school in Brazil that used Skype to facilitate dialogues between senior citizens in the US to improve their students' language skills while building a bridge over a generational gap.

Another campaign took on the food waste agenda with a clever solution preventing perfectly fine vegetables and fruit from being discarded because they didn't fit our image of what nature looks like. Supermarket chain Intermarché (Agency: Marcel, Paris) rebranded them as Inglorious fruits and vegetables. They even cut the price by 30% to make fruits and veggies more affordable for more people.

Colgate Palmolive (Agency: Red Fuse Communications, Hong Kong) made a cunning upcycling initiative, using the boxes from their products as educational materials for under-financed rural schools to educate kids about proper dental hygiene. In another upcycling initiative, Raw for the Oceans, G-Star Raw worked with Pharrell Williams (Agency: FHV BBDO Amsterdam) to turn the plastic waste in our oceans into a pair of jeans made from reclaimed plastic (33% bionic yarn). 

The power of creativity
These are examples of agencies that dare to decipher the complex reality of their clients' businesses and come up with more than a quick-fire solution to a marketing challenge that will be forgotten when the next YouTube video goes viral.

A good example of the shared value gained from this thinking is the Dove Beauty sketches (Agency: Ogilvy Brazil) that won an effectiveness award. The creative thrust of the campaign is a testament to its long-lived effectiveness. Chipotle is another brand showcasing the mileage in making a real difference with their follow-up to Back to the start (Agency: CCA, Los Angeles) called Scarecrow. As well as pushing the boundaries of advertising by launching a series of webisodes, Farmed and dangerous mixes information with entertainment.


It's amazing to see what a difference creativity can make, if it's applied to a cause beyond beefing up an agency's self-esteem. Creativity can and should do far more than dramatise incremental product differences. If applied with insight, big ideas can build resilient, trailblazing businesses, which are much more exciting in the long term than watching the muscles from Brussels doing the splits. Brands must demand more from their agency partner.

I value the strong focus on charities and worthwhile causes like Act Responsible, the Grand Prix for Good and the Cannes Chimera at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, but agencies need a guiding hand on the shoulder, rather than just a pat to make the transition from insecure, attention-seeking lion cubs to kings of the ad Savannah.

Thomas Kolster is the author of Goodvertising, and founder of the Goodvertising Agency and the collaborative communication platform dedicated to sustainability, WhereGoodGrows.

The sustainable living hub is funded by Unilever. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled advertisement feature. Find out more here.