Your CEO: Brand Asset or Liability?

Having experienced four CEO "universes" within the last six months, I couldn't resist but to compare different CEO styles and their impacts on employees.

The CEO impact doesn't stop with the employees though! It extends further, shaping how companies deal with their customers, partners, and other parties.

This seems to be a pretty hot topic for quite a few people, at least in Silicon Valley. After numerous conversations on this very subject, I decided to write this blog, attempting to break down some key CEO characteristics and their impacts. 

Industry Experience and Vision. One of the most important CEO assets is an

in-depth understanding of the industry. This is especially critical for small- and medium-sized companies. Industry experience allows a CEO to avoid extremely costly strategic mistakes. 

The CEO with a strategic vision grounded in industry knowledge can unify and energize his or her employees and quickly earn their confidence and respect.

"Professional” CEOs often lack an understanding of and passion for the industry. They substitute this for "professionalism" and a consultative approach, which  inevitably completely de-energizes companies and can drive them into irrelevance or extinction.

A somewhat viable alternative is having a co-founder or a product executive that is knowledgeable AND passionate about the space.  But the CEO has to be able to own and publicly convey the vision and the strategy.

Huge corporations with multiple unrelated product lines are clearly an exception to this principle. 

Openness of Communications. 
One of the most fatal flaws of a CEO is lack of transparency with executive staff and the rest of the company. This results in employees second-guessing the CEO's intentions as well as their colleagues' relationships and intentions with the CEO.

It breeds mistrust and creates uncertainty at all levels, and it creates unnecessary politics in the executive ranks, which translates into poison for the rest of the company. If untreated, it often becomes a cancer that slowly eats away at the company. The valuable energy is spent inwards instead of outwards. 

Open communications by the CEO, on the other hand, encourage executives to emulate the style and makes the company a better place to work in. It translates into honest and consistent external communications, turning the company into a trustworthy partner, for both partners  and customers.

Actions vs. Words. Some CEOs use actions; some use words. Obviously, it is easier to come up with words. Words like "vision and mission" seem to be favorites with CEOs with management consultant backgrounds. Word-driven CEOs can even convince and temporarily energize companies by using just words.

However, the inconsistency between their words and actions eventually catches up with them and disillusions their employees. It sends a message that double standards are OK and that promises can be broken. 

This disconnect affects external communications, leading to lost sales, lost customers, and brand damage.

Micromanagement and No-management. Micromanagement is my pet peeve. It sends a message to employees that they are not trusted. It breeds fear and kills innovation, and most talented employees end up leaving and growth stalls.

The other extreme is lack of control and accountability, which encourages random or no decisions and breeds politics.

There is a golden middle that I have learned from an executive I worked for early in my career: hire the right people and provide them with the freedom to innovate, but have a clearly defined system of accountability, execution, and metrics.

As a side note, one of the micromanagement (and manipulative) techniques that grates on me is the assigning of ambitious (yet meaningless) tasks with aggressive deadlines that get everybody so wrapped up in them and stressed that they have no time to question the direction and see the bigger picture.

Crisis Management. Crises happen. They are a reality of life in any company. A crisis can be either external or internal. It can be a result of be a competitive move, a product failure, a lawsuit, dealing with the board or investors, employee issues, or so much more.

The way in which a CEO handles these issues sends a message to the rest of the company and industry. Does the CEO panic or become aggressive or play the blame game? Or does the CEO handle the crisis calmly and rationally? Other factors that count when handling a crisis include speed, confidence level, decisiveness, and communications.

Inexperience and lack of confidence in dealing with crises can very quickly turn disastrous both for employee morale and the company brand.

The Kitchen Sink. Then there are obvious virtues that some CEOs bring to the table, such as honesty, fairness, truthfulness, and transparency, and their counterparts: dishonesty, cheating, lying, and manipulation. But these, and many more, are too obvious to write about.

What are your favorite CEO assets and pet peeves? 

5 Characters You Meet In Successful Modern Marketing Teams

What does a winning marketing team look like nowadays?

How different is it from 5 years ago?

There are many new challenges we face today.  There are also traditional marketing challenges that never went away.

- Create differentiated positioning
- Create & update messaging
- Establish thought leadership
- Establish a repeatable and scalable lead generation program
- Improve lead conversion rates  
- Decrease customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- Gain social and search visibility
- Support sales
- Build meaningful and accurate metrics 
- Collect and report daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly numbers  

Add all different programs, communication channels and angles that need to be built and maintained:
- SEO
- SEM
- Email nurturing
- Social media
- Industry communities
- Customer boards
- Gamification
- Blogs
- PR
- Analysts
... and much more

The process of addressing these challenges starts with an effective marketing team.  To build it, CMOs often have to reconstruct their existing teams.  Some skills are unchanged and are still in demand.  Others may not be needed anymore or may have morphed into new ones.  For example, marketing communications skill has transformed into product journalism and corporate reporting.  There are also brand new skills, like SEO Analytics & Messaging Manager.

Below are top 5 essential skills for today's marketing teams:

(NEW) Product Marketing++.  This skill is relatively unchanged. You still need somebody on your team that can develop in-depth product, customer and marketplace understanding.

This person has to be able to come up with clear product messaging, top differentiators -- things that none of your competitors can do and things that matter most to your customers.

This person will have to stay connected to your development team, as well as keep abreast of the market and competitive changes in order to update the core message as necessary.

The skill upgrade (the "++" component) comes in the ability to utilize the web, social media, hashtags, communities, SEO and other web tools to proactively conduct competitive research, industry trends analysis, message A/B testing, etc.


(NEW) Product Journalism and Corporate Reporting.  (f.k.a. Marketing Communications).

Yes, MarComm is dead.  The time of fluffy and meaningless collateral materials is gone.  In today's world, unique and engaging content is the king!   

In my previous blog entry I talked about the heroes and zeroes of content marketing.  You definitely want to be looking for a hero -- somebody that has a very creative way of telling your story.  This person will break down the higher-level message into many engaging, shareable and (when possible) viral product, customer and industry stories.

Once developed, these stories will have to be further modified, enhanced and formatted to fit well into different channels, e.g. blog entries, press releases, TTL+description, social media blurbs, community posts, emails (or series of emails), etc.

In an essence, each story becomes a mini-launch of content that drives your SEO, improves your thought leadership position, engages your prospects and customers, and generates high quality leads.

It took me a while to figure out the core skill set requirements and find the right fit for this position.  I interviewed lots of candidates with marketing communications and product marketing backgrounds, but none of them fit the bill. However, I had a really good luck with finding and hiring people with journalistic experience that have been writing to the audience we are marketing to.


(NEW) SEO Analytics & Messaging.

For many CMOs SEO remains a black box.  Yet, there is no dark magic in using SEO to maximize results and generate revenue.  No shady practice of buying links.  No figuring out how many times a certain keyword has to appear on a page.

There are essentially two important skills here:

1.  Ability to find & utilize tools to find relevant information, like numbers, keywords, content utilization, etc.

2.  Making sense out of these numbers in order to identify trends, provide actionable suggestions on keywords, landing pages, content needs, inbound lead generation opportunities and lead hacks.

The ideal SEO analytics person will have both analytical and creative skills.  There is an increasing number of marketing tools that generate lots of interesting data.  But it takes a skill to translate numbers into actionable suggestions.  For example, Google Analytics gives you tons of data on site visits.  Yet, most of it is buried and is accessible only through custom reporting.  A good SEO analytics person will figure out how to make sense out of this data and find relevant and meaningful trends that could show the flow of most valuable visitors, pages and assets, as well as how they change overtime.

A great SEO analytics person will work with your SEO agency to research the latest trends, explore different tools to give you an edge against competition in defining the most valuable keywords, reference sites, competitive moves, link building and PR opportunities (that your PR team / agency has most likely missed).

Ultimately, 80% of your inbound marketing success depends on the right messaging and whether or not you are focusing on the right keywords.  Use shortcuts here and you can spend millions on your inbound efforts and not get any meaningful results.




Marketing Automation & SFDC Black Belt.  

Marketing automation tools have been around for a while. There are many ways you can use them - from a rudimentary bulk email sending to sophisticated lead scoring, establishing and capturing new types of leads, customer flows, and generating in-depth metrics and powerful dashboards.

Every single one of these areas can get really complex, really quickly.  Yet, it can make a huge difference in your bottom line results.

For example, email marketing is a seemingly simple concept, but it has quite a few complexities that can generate results anywhere from no leads to hundreds of leads.

Some of these factors include the ability to create mobile-friendly content, come up with effective subject lines, pick conversion-friendly calls to action, A/B test 5-10 variables, decide on HTML vs. Text vs. Video, pick the most optimal colors, frequency, days of week and times of the day, figure out how to categorize and break down your database, etc.

There is also lots of data that exists in sales and marketing automation tools.  It is important to understand and establish a regular flow of critical metrics, such as conversion rates (lead to oppty; oppty to deal), conversion times, numbers of touches, lead sources breakdown, lead lifecycles, etc.

It will bring a complete transparency to marketing activities, as well as a clear understanding of which marketing campaigns do work and which don't.  It will allow to shift priorities and marketing budgets to the programs with the best ROI.

For this role, you may want to find a person that has strong skills in analytics, data visualization, presentation, multi-tasking and project management.



Employee vs. Outsourcing.  Project Management.  

Use contractors in as many areas as possible.  Avoid the team bloat and racking up costs that unnecessarily increase your CAC .

However, blindly outsourcing can be a mistake as well.  The key thing is finding a working balance for each of critical marketing micro-skills.

For example, SEO and PPC have a very technical component, as well as creative one.

For the technical component, it is almost impossible to match the depth of a good SEO or PPC agency that spends 100% of their time on learning technical details as well as keeping up with the latest trends and changes from Google.  It is clearly a good idea to outsource that part.

However, no agency is ever going to develop an intimate understanding of your customer base and your industry.  They will never be able to completely nail down your keywords.  You may want to have your SEO and content person (people) working closely with the SEO agency for the best results.

That approach works well with other areas too, such as content creation, graphics design, landing page coding, etc.

Needless to say, the more contractors you have, the harder it is to manage them.  So it is important to have a team member with strong project management skills to keep all the trains moving and on track.  Since the marketing automation person has to be a good project manager too, you may want to combine these two roles in one.


Not a Recipe.  Naturally, each company and industry is different.  There is no one size fits all recipe for building a winning marketing team.  While the skills above are critical and often essential, you will have to assess your specific needs and scale requirements.  That may call for adding other skills and team members, e.g. channel marketing, event coordination, lead qualification, etc.

SMX West 2013: Where are the Big Cheeses?

Here is to another great SMX conference!  This time in San Jose, CA.

For me, SMX is a great venue to get up to speed with the latest inbound marketing developments  -- from SEO to Content Marketing to PPC.

This is my second SMX after the one in NY.  In both cases, I left with interesting new ideas, strategies and techniques.  Some of these have made a difference for us, helping to get an unfair advantage against much bigger competitors in terms of high quality leads and as a result, in a higher  number of closed deals.


Here are some of my key observations from SMX 2013:

1. Morphing Inbound marketing .  Once upon a time, it was as simple as just having good content and a decent landing page. With more and more companies generating lots of content (both good and bad), effective inbound marketing is getting really complex and demands more and more resources.  At this point, it requires pretty sophisticated SEO, dedicated content marketing, SEO-optimized, PR, metrics, tools, graphics designers and web coders.

Each element is a science to itself.  And many of them are morphing and merging, opening new opportunities and creating new complexities.

For example, traditional PR is becoming an SEO-optimized PR that is turbocharged with smart content marketing, delivered using social and community marketing, using social network-fueled journalist and blogger targeting and "help a reporter" tools.

Sounds complicated?  It really is.  It requires the right talent, experience and budgets to succeed.

Does it work?  Absolutely.  Done right, it is a high quality lead generation machine.



2.  SEM- what is the right balance?  

Are you still managing PPC yourself without an agency help?  PPC is getting more sophisticated and complex every month.  If you are in an industry with many competitors, you have to pay lots of attention on technical things like bidding, grouping, segmenting, mobile vs. desktop, etc.

You have to manage other things as well, e.g. messaging, ad writing, designing / coding / updating landing pages, A/B testing, competitive analysis, etc.

Can in it be done in-house?  Yes, if you have a sizable, dedicated and experienced team.

For most of us...- get a good agency!  ... And have team member that will focus on messaging, copy, A/B testing, design, etc.

Why?  Because the agency doesn't know your industry.  It may waste lots of time and money with no results, if you outsource that part.


3.  Where are the the Big Cheeses?  With the way marketing is evolving, one would think more CMOs and Vice Presidents would come to SMX to learn about the inbound / content / web / search engine marketing.  Yet, there were very few executives.

The good news is that there were many bright and innovative junior and mid-level marketing professionals.  I think these folks are shaping their future, obtaining and perfecting skills that would make them really successful as next-generation marketing executives.  

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing: 7 Decision Factors

How do you find the right mix between inbound and outbound marketing.  I have seen the wrong model  bring down marketing efforts, jobs and even entire companies.

Here are a few examples:

Example 1:  Two years ago I was having a lunch with a CMO of a small company claiming to generate 90% of leads of his company from trade shows.  They were working at 2-3 trade shows a week.  It is obvious why that model didn't scale - CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) was way too high. It required too many resources and time-to-revenue was too long.  A year later, that CMO was gone and now the company is almost dead.

Example 2:  A company called Intronis decides on the outbound-driven lead generation model.  It hires lots of cold callers and does tons of trade shows.  The lead generation model fails.  The whole company has to go through painful layoffs.  Here is a quote from an article that appeared yesterday:  "Marketing is non existent…..sales team gets axed…engineer in the drivers seat. Sounds and smells like a sellout…Keep the barebones to support the product but not the partners…not so channel focused anymore. "


Example 3:  On the opposite side of the spectrum, another small company I knew was generating most of their sales from blog entries.  The CEO was a Blog Black Belt.  It worked really well for a while.  Good news - his company got acquired.  The larger company added some outbound efforts.  Not so good news - they are currently having hard times with the number of leads, quality and customer acquisition costs - not being able to scale neither of models.

So, how do you find the right answer?

Before giving up to inbound marketing zealots or caving in to outbound lead generation agencies, you may want to take several factors into consideration:

1.  Your target buyer's persona.
    - Who are the decision makers for your product / service?
    - Who are the influencers?
     - What are their job titles?
     - What are the key challenges they are trying to address?

2.  Where do they fit on the innovation curve?
Are your target buyers innovators, early adopters, or laggards?  This will define to a large degree how to approach them.

Example: If you are marketing a revolutionary new product to innovators, you may want to start with an outbound networking-type campaign through your industry contacts to recruit your first customers.  Later, you can integrate a targeted social media-driven PR component, as well as an inbound campaign focused on people who are looking for relevant solutions.

3.  Channels where your customers find information and get influenced
Where do they look for information relevant to your offering?  Is it trade shows, industry forums, search engines, communities, newsletters, etc?

Example: If you are marketing to decision-makers that don't spend much time online or you are in an industry where the phone is still a more traditional communication method, an outbound model may be the appropriate one.  Conversely, if you are marketing to an audience that relies on social media and online communities for research, contracting a call center to generate leads would be an absurd idea! 

4.  The value of each sale and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
At the end of the day, marketing is an economic tool.  If a certain lead generation model is working really well, but costs too much, then it is doomed to fail.  You have to find the model that works best for you - in terms of BOTH conversion rates AND costs.

Example: We were using PPC for lead gen and it was generating high quality leads that regularly converted into sales.  But the cost of each sale (the marketing part) was about 200% over our target.  And after trying to bring it down for a few months, we had to pause it.

Outbound call center leads generated sales that costed 500% over the goal.  So, we focused on the inbound marketing leads - search engines, communities, social-driven PR, etc.  This proved to be the right model, bringing down our costs significantly -- even below the target CAC.  

Eventually, we revamped the messaging, did complete keyword map revamp, rebuilt landing pages, and changed 3 PPC agencies (before we found the right one)-- and "voila!" CAC is tracking right around the target!
  

5.  Your sales team readiness
No matter how many good leads you bring, you have to make sure your sales team and channel partners are capable of converting these lead types into sales.  I have seen a mismatch here causing many failures.

Example: At one of my previous companies, we started generating lots of inbound leads that needed a moderate amount of follow-up before they closed.  However, our sales team had only channel experience - they did not have the skills or desire to follow-up directly with the prospects.  Result = failure.  Until we upgraded the sales team.

6.  How easy is it to scale?
Some programs can be scaled easily.  Others may require a major upgrade to scale, putting CAC out of whack, at least for a while.

Example: You may be able to scale PPC.  But to substantially scale search engine-generated leads, you may need a sizable investment and patience.  However, longer term results can be huge! 

7.  Mix and change.
My final suggestion is to constantly experiment.  Marketing has been undergoing a major change over the last 3-4 years.  What works today may not work tomorrow at all .  So it is critical to always look for new lead channels.

First, create the foundation with the proven channels.  Then, experiment with 2-3 new ones at a time. By the time one of your foundational channels stops working, you will have 2 new ones that generate even better leads!

And with that... Happy Hunting!

Inbound Marketing - Lead Generation, Metrics and Growth Hacking

Marketing and Sales have been growing closer together in many areas over the past few years.  One such area is lead generation.

Lead Generation itself has recently morphed into growth hacking -- finding new sources and channels for high quality leads and nurturing lower quality ones into opportunities that indicate "near-buying" behavior.

NO MORE COLD CALLING!  Today, marketing can completely relieve the sales team from majority of lead gen tasks, such as cold calling, dialing for leads, "pounding the phones," etc.  The idea is to get prospects educated and sold online - before they even speak with a sales rep.

Unlike the interrupt-driven outbound model, by implementing inbound marketing, you are reaching a completely different type of prospects.  These prospects are more qualified, since they have a specific need and they are actively looking for a solution.  By providing them a variety of relevant tools and information, you are helping in their decision-making process.  By the time they decide to contact you, they are well educated on the product and are most likely willing to take the next step.  Contrast that with a sales rep cold calling and trying to pitch a product to people that don't have a problem they are trying to solve in the first place.

Implementation.  This approach significantly shortens sales cycles, increases conversion rates and drives down cost of each sale.  But how do you implement it?  The first step is lead classification -- understanding what are the most and least desirable leads, as well as all types in between.  Here are some recommendations:



1. Lead Types.  Find out what kind of leads are you getting today.  For example:

- Demo Requests
- Free Trials
- Phone calls
- White paper downloads
- Email contact requests

Brainstorm with your sales team to see what works for them best and worst, as well as what other types of leads you may want to be getting moving forward.

2. Analytics.  Look at your metrics for the last 12 or 24 months.  Even though you can build some very complex models, I would start with basics:
     - Conversion rates - lead to opportunity, opportunity to deal, lead to deal
     - Time to conversion - same as above
     - Costs -  per lead, per opportunity and per closed deal
     - Effort - how much time does your sales team invest in converting these leads?

3. Trends and scalability.  How did these numbers change over time?  Can you grow them easily? Would scaling costs be linear or would they require a significant investment -- to take to the next level? Can your marketing team handle the growth (team size, budgets, skills)?

4.  Pyramid Map.  Next, build a pyramid like the one on the left, as a visual representation of types of leads you are going after.

5.  Lead Inclusion / Exclusion.  Decide on which types of leads you are going to focus moving forward.  At this point, you may decide that some types of leads are too expensive.  You may find out that some low quality leads are even not worth pursuing due to the effort required. 

For example, after this type of analysis, we have decided that leads generated by an outsourced lead generation agency were too expensive and required too much effort from our sales team, making them completely ineffective in comparison with other lead types.  Instead, we shifted our focus on higher quality leads that required significantly less effort from our sales team.


6.  Planning.  Once you have the lead metrics, analysis, lead map and your sales plan, it is very easy to put together weekly, monthly and quarterly plan of how many and what type of leads you need.  Knowing the cost per lead and conversion percentages will help you accurately forecast marketing budgets - in terms of their size and timing.

7.  Metrics.  Finally, I suggest monitoring lead metrics daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually - to measure how you are executing against the plan.  Sometimes, you may need to to adjust activities - due to market changes, competitive moves, opportunities, etc.

You can add more advanced metrics later, like lead scoring, heat map, etc. But it is critical to intimately understand the effectiveness of each lead type before implementing these, otherwise lead scores are useless and the sales team will stop taking them seriously.

We have created a daily lead generation report that gets emailed to marketing, sales and relevant executives at the end of each business day.  This report covers number of leads in each category, broken down by source, type, relevant lead details, etc.  The same group of people receives a weekly lead composite report that looks not just at weekly numbers, but weekly and monthly trends in each category, enabling us to discover very interesting and useful micro and sometimes macro trends.



In my next blog entry in CMO Guide to Inbound Marketing, I will discuss the lead gen mix: outbound vs. inbound.

CMO Guide to Inbound Marketing - Overview

One of my observations from SMX 2012 was the disconnect between marketing executives and their marketing teams around the importance of online marketing and SEO.

It was interesting to see hundreds of marketing managers and directors struggle with selling the true value of SEO, PPC, rich content and inbound marketing to their executives.

Looking back at the path I traveled from brick and mortar to online / inbound marketing in the last 3-4 years, I thought it may be useful to put together a series of blogs for fellow marketing executives that are starting this journey.

Here are the key elements I will cover in my subsequent posts:

--------
1.  Inbound Marketing (vs. Outbound) 

2.  Keyword strategy

3.  Messaging

4.  Content and editorial strategy

5.  SEO

6.  PR

7.  Social and Community Marketing

8.  PPC

9.  Online Brand Building 

10.  Growth Hacking

11. Offline marketing

12.  Metrics and attribution

13.  A/B testing   

14.  Marketing team building / mix / talent acquisition 
-------

Just to give you an idea on the results so far, this approach has helped us to bring down lead and account acquisition costs by more than 70% and significantly decrease conversion times.  Today, high quality inbound leads constitute over 90% of all leads, enabling sales people to focus on converting prospects into customers instead of wasting all their time on cold calling.