One of the best business books that has become a classic is ‘Good to Great’ by Jim Collins. Truly it is an excellent book that crafts together seven characteristics of companies, that enable them to transform themselves from being good companies, to being great companies.

When I first read the book, one of the things that I found astonishing was that these seven characteristics were quite simple. For example, we have the Hedgehog concept. The 3 tenets making up the concept are:
(1) What does the company have a passion for?
(2) What could the company be the best in the world at doing?
(3) What is the economic model to make money at this?

Now that is pretty simple to understand. You might even say it is quite natural and intuitive way to think. And the remaining characteristics are all equally strong in their simplicity. So how is it that these seven characteristics have had such a profound impact on the business community? How has Jim Collins created such enormous value in the principles he has presented, and created this everlasting value in the characteristics themselves?

Well, I would have to say that Mr. Collins has created an undisputed level of authority. This was no simple presentation of the seven characteristics, backed up with a few anecdotes. This book was not opinion. The book was about the facts of what the data told him and his research team.

Let me add some more perspective here. The team began this quest with 1,435 good companies. They analyzed performance over 40 years. They then identified 11 companies that made the leap, alongside a well-matched list of comparable companies. They spanned the study across different industries. They read everything about their 11 companies and comparables. They interviewed all the companies and compiled 2,000 pages of interview transcripts. And even though Jim Collins had previously written ‘Built to Last’, they assumed nothing. If the findings of ‘Good to Great’ were to conflict, so be it. And then they debated rigorously on the possible findings, relationships and conclusions. It took 5 years to get it all done.

So it is not too hard to see that the presentation of the seven characteristics is based on a solid and defensible foundation of facts. All of the objections have been taken care. When I reflect on some of the other business books which have had strong impact and sustained influence, the amount of real life proof which they establish, is clearly there. In “Good to Great”, it is the sheer amount of raw data that they used that makes it especially powerful.

And this is a level of excellence that all marketers can aspire to. It is a level of authority that every marketer needs to strive to achieve. Why? Because buyers are all looking for the proof. Why should they believe you? Whether they are willing to disclose the objection to you are not, it may be lingering and preventing the buyer from moving forward. In building your buyer behavior model, you need to ensure that there is a solid basis of proof as the buyer comes to those natural pause points in their buying journey. If you can identify and strengthen those key points along the buyer’s journey, you may put yourself on the path of good to great yourself.

I was watching an old movie from the 1960s recently where one of the scenes had a guy proposing that he would be a good sales rep. The firm owner then asks the question, “And why do you think that you would be a good sales rep”. To which the candidate replies: “I know a lot of jokes, and I can hold my liquor.” With a good chuckle, I thought that was perfect old school selling. We just need to make sure that the guy has a good Italian suit, a firm handshake, and make sure he knows the ABCs of selling. Always Be Closing.

Well, as humorous as it was to me, it made me reflect on how selling had changed …or not. What has not changed is human nature. Human nature is human nature. People are still made up of the same complex mix of emotion and reasoning, left-brain/right-brain dominance, or however you choose to describe it. And it is these human beings that make up 100% of the buyers who are out there.

But what has changed dramatically is the entire ecosystem within which the world does business. The internet has created: an enormous information source, broadcast channel, social sharing platform, and communication channel. Naturally, it has impacted the buyer’s behavior and the buying cycle. With smartphones and tablets readily available, it has become second nature to make the web the first step in almost every buying consideration that we have.

So how does that old school selling adapt to the new digital world.

The good Italian suit = The Professionally Polished Website

Yes, it is now your website that has the task of making the first impression on potential buyers. It needs to convey your mission in a way that is easy-to-understand. And the marketing message is now front and center.

Lots of Jokes = Engaging Content

Well, we mustn’t be dull and boring. Storytelling is now what it is all about. Buyers will be more drawn to what you have to say if you can relate your mission to the stories you tell. And for those who can make effective use of humor, it certainly has the desired effect on those buyer emotions.

Holding Your Liquor = Let’s Be Social

Well, if what you have to say is shareable, it will spread your message. You don’t have to be buying drinks to get conversion, but you must be striving to create engaging content that people want to share. Sharing positive experience is human nature, and buyers like stay informed with the built-in trust that tags along with the shared content.

Always Be Closing = Analytics Move the Buyer Forward

It is now our website that needs to tell us how we are doing as we move our buyers through the buying cycle. And the test close must be embedded into the online interaction that allow us to gauge our efforts.

So there you have it. Human nature prevails. But we must adjust both the marketing and sales tactics to how today’s buyer exercises their human nature.

Everything takes time to sink in. As your buyer travels down their buying journey, there are multiple points where things just have to sink in before they can proceed. Efforts to rush your buyer through these natural pause points will be like trying to run through an ever widening pond of quick sand. You may be expending great efforts in the delivery of marketing content, but if you are not addressing the context of why things are stuck, things will remain stuck. And so, as you develop your demand generation model and processes, you must seek to identify the buyer’s pause points. Your goal is to completely pull them out of that quick sand, as opposed to trying to run through it.

While recently reading the biography of Albert Einstein, I came across an illustrative example. Einstein was really stuck with an inability to accept the basis of quantum mechanics. It was 1927 and a little over 10 years after Einstein had derived the theory of general relativity, and he had already received the Nobel prize. Given that he was a genius with extraordinary reasoning skills, you would not expect that he could be stuck in the quick stand. As the story goes, the underlying principle of quantum mechanics was the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. That certain movements at the atomic level were best described by chance. Neils Bohr (also a Nobel prize winner) continually worked to prove the principle to Einstein. But with each proof, Einstein could not be appeased, and raised a different and well-constructed scientific objection. In the end, Einstein declared that God simply would not play with dice. To which Bohr responded, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do!”* And there you have it. Einstein would not truly accept the proof, would not get out of the quick sand, because he had an underlying assumption that finally surfaced. He just didn’t think that nature was meant to be this way.

And so it is with every buyer’s journey. There are some innate assumptions that must be uncovered before you can free them from the quicksand and allow them to move ahead. Even though appropriate marketing content may be provided as proof of the way forward, the movement won’t happen until the buyer’s underlying assumptions are dealt with. The time for things to sink in will vary, but it is necessary for the buyer to release false beliefs or assumptions that are causing the stall. Since we are dealing with human nature, figuring this out will be a process of heuristics. You have to start somewhere with your demand generation model, but as more buyers pass through, you must seek to understand and characterize where things are getting stuck and why. And then attempt to uncover and address different possible obstacles, through the right content.

If on the other hand, you choose to push harder through the quicksand, you may end up with a buyer who ends up as a customer, but not the customer you wanted. They will be unhappy. They may feel duped into buying your solution. They may want to return the product or back out of the deal. They may not be committed to your solution, even though they own it. Or they may just have bad things to say about it all, to anyone who will listen. Just to cite a recent high profile example, The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story about Avon’s failed implementation of SAP’s ERP system and its $125M write-off. (Avon to Halt Rollout of New Order Management System).

So there you have it, developing a marketing model for your demand generation will require you to have expectations that the model will need to evolve in an learning manner. Gather your feedback from the data analytics of what is really happening, and see what will get buyers unstuck. Don’t just rush them through, only to end up with unhappy customers at the end of the process.

 

There is a demarcation point between marketing and sales when a prospective buyer becomes a
marketing qualified lead and is handed off to sales.

From a buyer’s perspective, there are 2 major phases to the buying cycle. There is the
pre-contact stage and the contact stage. The pre-contact stage is the information
gathering stage. It is here that the buyer does research to better understand both the
issue and the potential solutions. During this stage they will qualify suppliers and narrow
things down to a short list.

And then they will move to the contact stage. At the contact stage, there will be a set of
pre-developed expectations that the buyer brings with them. Many buyers often say that they
do not want to waste the vendor’s time, if they do not see a way forward in their buying
journey. So once they feel a need to make contact with a vendor, it is with definite
purpose. It is now the information seeker who is turning into a prospective buyer. And now
the stakes become greater.

On the other side of the fence, on the vendor’s side, there is both marketing and sales
activities which are going on. During the buyer’s pre-contact stage, the marketing
resources are executing activities to furnish the information seeker with various forms of
information content to fulfill that research need. It is natural that the company’s sales
resources are held at bay. The information gathering could go for a long time, and it may
be hard to tell if the information seeker will become a prospective buyer. When the
information seeker makes meaningful contact with the vendor, marketing resources must
recognize it and identify it as a marketing qualified lead. And then they hand off this
marketing qualified lead, to the sales resources.

This hand-off becomes the demarcation point between marketing and sales. Why does this
hand-off even occur, you may ask. Well, it is all about efficiencies. Marketing must be
conducting their activities for the masses, the market as a whole. The marketing message
must go out far and wide, across different channels, with the goal of drawing out all
prospective beneficiaries to the company’s offerings. Hence, marketing’s performance needs
to be assessed based on how effective they are in developing demand. Sales, on the other
hand, must be able to focus their complete energies on qualified prospective buyers. With a
buyer at this stage, there will be uncertainties and obstacles that need to be carefully
navigated by sales. And sales performance will then be measured by different criteria than
marketing.

This is all fine in an ideal world. But, the demarcation point may not always be a clear
point. Rather it may very well be a demarcation zone. A region where the information seeker
is in fact converted to a prospective buyer. And in order to make this conversion happen,
both marketing and sales must be sure that they both have one hand holding the lead. It
means a shared ownership of the transition process. Marketing needs to stay in the picture,
while sales can strengthen their grip and establish a foundation for growing this newly
minted prospective buyer. And if it turns out that the information seeker is not really a
prospective buyer yet, then marketing must take them back with both hands.

The ability to manage all those who are responding to your marketing message is key to
maximizing your sales. But to make it work, both marketing and sales resources must be
operating as a team in the demarcation zone. Both must have a clear understanding of what
defines their prospects, and communication between them must be continuous and smooth. If
this is done right, marketing will not give low quality leads to sales, and sales will not
lose those leads which may have entered into contact with them prematurely.

Building an effective marketing system for your business requires the building of an effective data model.

But, as the saying goes, “Statistics don’t lie, but you can lie with statistics”. And this is foremost what we must be wary of as we go through our strategic decision making processes. In an internet-driven world, the amount of points of data collection is increasing at a much more rapid rate than ever before. With increased digitization and the growth of the internet of things, there are ever increasing ways to track, capture, and measure various types of activity.

To put it simply, the risk of having big data so readily available to us, is that we will get lost in it. Finding out what matters must be the driving force, as we look to harness the data, to establish meaningful models of operation for our business.

“What matters” is not something that has a definitive answer for each and every business. Indeed, if we are all striving to differentiate ourselves, then there must be differences in what matters to each of us. So if it is not definitive, then it is a model that must be derived to fit our specific situation. The starting point to develop an effective marketing model for your business is start with a clear understanding of your business. Whichever approach or combination of approaches that you use (e.g. Jim Collins Fox-Hedgehog, McKinsey 7S framework, SWOT, to name a few), you must know thyself first. This is the pre-requisite: knowing your specific capabilities and your target buyer’s problems.

Once you have fulfilled your prerequisite, it becomes your guiding criteria to deriving and evolving a marketing model that embodies data that fits the model. Every piece of datum that you choose to include, must tie into the model of behavior that stems from your understanding of your business.

The key data questions are:
-Does the individual datum reflect important or meaningful activity on the buyer’s journey?
-Does the data set provide behavior information that we care about?

So it becomes important, not to get fixated on individual datum. It is not just, the pageviews, just the signups, or just the downloads. Rather it is how all the things that you identify and measure, tie together to complete the journey.

The Moneyball story is a great illustrative example. At the top level, there is a requirement for x number of runs to achieve a certain ranking. Then the breakdown begins. To get x number of runs, it is necessary to get on-base, y number of times. Then it is necessary to get around the bases (i.e. stealing bases, being advanced) with certain achievement levels. And once the model was established, the player recruitment model was re-created to work with the baseball goals.

To create and use data that is effective in advancing your marketing success, you need to focus on building and evolving a marketing model, whose purpose is to deliver the results that you seek. It will no doubt be an iterative process, driven by the questions you ask, and the answers you seek. Keeping your focus on the big picture will allow you to evolve a model that gathers the right data to support itself.