In one of my past posts, I wrote about the broken advertising agency model. In my previous rant I wrote about clients that hire agencies for more sales but manage the agency as a cost center instead of a revenue center. As a result, agencies default to what they know. The Tribble Agency compares agencies to diapers and recommends that clients change them often until they understand the concept of ROI, stop the drug addiction to flash, and try to help the client rather than hurt them in costs.
A few weeks back, I emailed Pete Burgeson at Crowdspring and asked him to share his thoughts about what the agency of the future would look like. As background, CrowdSpring crowd sources graphic design. Companies put graphic design jobs out for bid on Crowdspring then graphic designers submit their ideas. The company picks a favorite, the designer gets paid. As you can imagine, this model threatens the livelyhood of some agencies. But some forward looking agencies are starting to explore crowdsourcing as a possible opportunity to reduce cost, better manage freelancers and possibly reinvent the way they engage with clients.
According to Pete, the agency model is going to be changing in a number of ways. “One of the more interesting and relevant to us is going to be how I think agencies will interact with clients. What we’re seeing is more and more shops crop up that have little to no interest in supplying the creative work in-house. Sure, there will always be those shops - but they’re called creative shops and they’re very different. The more ‘traditional’ shops are all trying to figure out how they can use more freelancers or (maybe one day) crowdsourcing to come up with ideation phase of the project. From there, they can sort through the ideas and bring their true expertise to the table - strategy - and then hone in on a winner, perfect it and execute the shit out of it.”
As a small business, I’m always interested in cool new technologies. Lately, I’ve been looking at hosted file servers/backup solutions that would let me keep my data off site and safe. I found a cool vendor called JungleDisk.
JungleDisk uses Amazon’s web services and allows easy transfer of files to and from our local machines to a file server in the cloud. It is simple to use. I simply map a remote folder to my local Z: drive and can save files or even access my files from Panera.
The price is right. 1GB can be stored for just $0.15 cents per month. The hardest part is signing up for Amazon’s S3 service. The sign-up is confusing and since I am not a developer I had to read some of the instructions. I prefer not having to read instructions and like sign-ups that are more intuitive.
A good friend and former partner at Andersen, Ed Wertzberger, and his firm RevNew Group are conducting a survey to understand the drivers that create client loyalty for professional services firms. I took the survey and can’t wait to get the results. All survey participants receive a copy of the results. If you have any interest in creating loyalty for your firm, take the survey.
Here’s the link:
http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB228MLT9WUY8
Just a fantastic article from Brian Solis on TechCrunch. Here’s a quick para…
However, over time, productive guidance has mutated into a glut of negative forecasts and grim predictions that pillage precious and vital airtime from contributing to the resolution of our financial predicament. Simply said, fear, and the dissemination of distress, slowly erodes hope, vision, and ambition, ultimately killing businesses instead of guiding them.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/21/fear-kills-businesses-dead/
I met Dux Raymond Sy a year or two ago while doing some work for Bamboo Solutions. Dux is an expert in leveraging technology to enhance project management. He is the author of SharePoint for Project Management.
What is SharePoint? For those of you living in a cave, SharePoint allows individuals within an organization to quickly and easily create and manage their own collaboration websites. Once SharePoint is part of your organization, there is no need to ever call IT for support or to set up permissions. Individuals are empowered to define and manage access to specific information. SharePoint is pretty slick and it is often overlooked as a project management tool.
I read the book because I believe most marketing failures can be traced back to failures of project management. I wanted to see how SharePoint could be used to quickly manage marketing projects and help my clients avoid marketing project failure.
Don’t get me wrong. There is no shortage of great project management tools. ProjectCompanion. Microsoft Project Server. Primavera. Basecamp. ProjectTurf. But many people don’t know that they probably already have SharePoint running somewhere within their organization. When budgets are tight, leveraging technology that you already have can help stretch a strained budget.
I emailed Dux to get a better understanding of some of the essential capabilities marketing managers should look for when evaluating project management tools. His response was succinct:
· Supports the generation of a project charter, schedule and budget
· Facilitates communication and feedback
· Monitors project activities
· Controls project changes
· Analyzes and forecasts project performance
· Disseminates project status to relevant stakeholders
· Provides real time information essential for initiating, planning, executing, controlling and closing a project
In response to my question: “When should a marketing manager start thinking about using a project management tool,” he responded:
1) No standardized systems for integrating project goals: project schedule, cost and quality objectives are individual silos. For example, financial information in Excel is not automatically recalculated anytime the project schedule is adjusted. Making manual updates takes time away from other project activities.
2) Inefficient document management: project documents are not stored in a central location. Tracking, undoing changes, and the ability to roll-back to prior versions are limited. Additionally, varying levels of access permissions are unavailable. IT/IS can only do so much in supporting information access requirements.
3) Lack of appropriate tools to facilitate team collaboration: Project information is not accessible anytime, anywhere. In addition, the team is incapable of developing or working with information at the same time.
4) Inability to report accurate and timely status of the project: project status information is only available whenever the project manager makes it available. How do you deal with project sponsors who want to view real time project status information?
5) Not achieving organizational strategic goals: lacking a standardized tool to facilitate consistent project management processes throughout an organization can limit the ability to effectively support strategic goals.
Any marketing manager should quickly realize that these five issues alone more than justify the need for investment in reliable project management tools. Dux’s book gives a deep dive for any marketing manager investigating how to use SharePoint to better manage his or her department. Pick it up at Amazon.
One of my clients taught me a great lesson about selling, branding and marketing. Sometimes, in our quest to find revenue, we forget something more important and more lasting - trust.
Your goal as an organization is to deliver on your commitments reliably and predictably. By doing so, you build the trust needed to sustain a healthy relationship with your customer for many years. The sum of these healthy relationships is a strong brand. In professional services, a strong brand is evidenced by happy customers.
At Macon Raine, we put skin in the game and invest in our client’s sales, marketing and business development process. If we are going to put our money where out mouth is with the promise of revenue, and if we are going to bet on the successful outcome and consistently meet client expectations, we can’t sign-up for bad deals. In fact, if we sense that the client can’t deliver on their side of the agreement, we need to back off fast.
Good deals put you and your customer on the same page. They are structured as win/wins. Bad deals cost too much. No matter who is at fault, bad revenue costs everyone dearly in reputation and pain.
By copying one of our clients, we have implemented our own “No Stupid Deals” policy. It makes a lot of sense. No one wants to be in a “stupid deal.” Very quickly, the “No Stupid Deals” policy has yielded immediate benefits for our clients and for our business.
In fact, our quality of life improved because we were no longer spending too much time putting out fires. When we are aligned with the customer, customer satisfaction goes up. Our ability to manage expectations and deliver on our promises grew rapidly.
Clients don’t want stupid deals either. Step into the client’s shoes. Imagine you are picking a new vendor. A new vendor is a big time investment. Finding the right vendor is a big deal. Finding a vendor that can help move the needle is a big deal. Your clients want long-term, trusted relationships as much as you do. If they don’t, they are probably not worth the investment.
But it takes a leap of faith to say no. It is hard to walk away from dollars. In this economy, why would anyone turn down a deal? But if you can’t establish a dialogue with the client and modify the project into a win/win, it is probably not worth doing.
Over the past few months, we’ve spoken to dozens of managing partners in professional services firms about ways they find new business. Every person interviewed said that a vast majority of new business was generated via their “networks and trusted relationships.”
Trust is a shared belief that you can depend on one another to achieve an objective. Trust is built through interaction, integrity, success/failure, transparency and consistency.
The business development challenge for most professional services firms is identifying ways to scale the process for demonstrating trustworthiness to prospects.
How do your firm’s current marketing activities strengthen the personal networks of the managing partners or help build trusted relationships?
If you have a vague feeling of marketing malaise, it may be due to the growing recognition that modern marketing-think is steadily transforming itself into sales-think. In sales-think, the conversations, the relationships, the personal network and persuasion have always been the de facto currency.
Your unease may stem from the fact that the marketing function as we know it is changing dramatically. This may be due to audience fragmentation or the shift of power from the seller to the buyer or hundreds of other equally valid reasons.
For those practice managers and managing directors interested in more efficiently finding new business it begins by aligning marketing with the task of increasing the number of highly-qualified trusted relationships in the portfolio, not closing a deal. For marketing, it is important to recognize that new business development as a disciplined activity is steadily morphing into an exercise in “personal branding.”
If you are uncomfortable with the term “personal branding” because it minimizes the power of the corporate brand, welcome to the club. But if people buy from people and if a brand is really the sum total of a customer’s interaction with a company, then it follows that in professional services, the personal brand is really all that matters.
Traditional marketing-think such as intrusion, hard-sell tactics, product-push, branding and controlling-the-message activities just don’t resonate anymore. Marketing-as-control has been undermined by customer access to information, networks and experience far beyond the marketing department’s ability to control and manage. The marketing department is being forced to accept that authentic, inclusive, people to people-driven information is becoming the dominant method for inviting prospects into relationship that can be nourished into customer relationships.
This is even more complicated by the fact that the isolated points of encounter between a company representative and a prospect aren’t just sales encounters, but social encounters as well. These social and network encounters don’t lend themselves the traditional linear progression of a sales pipeline diagram.
There are some stand-out marketing organizations that have embraced this truth. Yet there are others who are just not capable of authenticity because they are so far removed from the customer.
This is why some professional services organizations are delegating the function of authenticity to the managing partners and practice managers. The managing partners, responsible for thought leadership are now also responsible for promoting and demonstrating that same leadership through their actions.
Today, the cost of content production and distribution has shrunk dramatically, the information freely available has grown to include not just sellers but buyers eager to share their own needs, challenges and experiences; and reaching interested people with relevant offerings is a much more fractured challenge. The challenge is aligning personal relationships with the sales funnel in a way that supports meaningful and valuable discussion as well as trust building.
Email newsletters are common method of selling and communicating with customers.
But often overlooked is the idea of using rules-based automation inside the traditional and transactional email exchanges common to the sales process.
Sales people and the marketers that support them can creatively use rules-based email automation to put simple events such as customer birthdays and event confirmations into cruise control. More complex rules such as a timed sequence of emails after downloading a whitepaper, for example, can move passive prospects into the sales pipeline without a major investment of a sales person’s time. These messages create opportunities for cross-sells, upsells or delivery of additional education that might have been overlooked during the early sales process. Automation email transactions builds rapport because the email transaction assumes an existing relationship with a prospect or a customer.
While these emails fall into the gray area just outside of the CAN-SPAM, it is still important to respect the time of the receiving prospect or customer. A poorly thought out email or an message that does not respect the customer can offend and possibly cost you a customer.
There are other benefits to automation of low-level email transactions. Most important is the level of customization available through tools such as Marketo, SwiftPage and LeadGenesys. Where bulk email newsletters are sent to people who may or may not be active readers, transactional email is much more closely linked to offline relationships. Further, transactional emails are customized to each reader – which means the reader is more likely to read and respond to the content within.
Scott Adams does it better than anyone.
http://i36.tinypic.com/11jq5nm.jpg
