This is the stuff of outtakes,  the stuff that was cut during the editing process and not included in the final released version, but that is nonetheless too great not to share.

A few of my favorite moments:

• Sally Hogshead describing reading in bed (and pointing out the unfortunate mishaps that sometimes happen there)
• Guy Kawasaki’s favorite FAQ about his book, Enchantment
• Practically every scene with the always-classy and (here, anyway) understated David Meerman Scott

Check out the video below, and then check out all the authors who are part of this special MarketingProfs Take 10 Author Series —which also includes NY Times bestselling author Dan Pink—here.

Our quick, actionable Take 10s are one of the many benefits of PRO membership. Upgrade to PRO at 40 percent off with the New Year’s code MOTIVATE.

When is the last time you had a crash course in online marketing and took a hard look at the pillars your marketing strategy is resting on?

From time to time, it’s helpful to brush up on the fundamentals. Even the most diligent marketing practitioners can lose sight of the basics and end up neglecting the crucial building blocks of success. To stay competitive online it’s no longer acceptable to master one or two pillars and ignore the rest.

There are five in particular that stand out and are worthy of ongoing study and practice:

1. Design
Many marketers grossly underestimate the role design plays and keep it off their list of priorities. The truth is that, with subpar design, it’s impossible to effectively communicate any type of marketing message. Without design, none of the other pillars matter. It’s irrelevant if 10 million visitors land on a page if the design looks like it was done by a sixth grader.

Wait, my website looks fine! I had it built by a professional.

The problem is that we might think our design is top notch when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. We never know because we never bother testing it. If you’ve yet to do so, try using Google’s website optimizer tool. Run tests to see how well your design converts visitors into customers or subscribers. To have efficient web design, we must learn how to take our own opinions out of the matter and let the numbers do the talking. The best design is always optimized for conversions.

2. Copywriting
The copy on your site can be a make or break factor when it comes down to a visitor deciding to leave or take the necessary action to convert, such as making a purchase or providing an email address. Solid copywriting starts with not just a grasp of basic grammar and language, but also an understanding of what motivates and entices people to take action. Simply put, good copy turns visitors into customers.

3. SEO
Learning search engine optimization (SEO) best practices is one of the smartest investments one can make when it comes to generating ongoing exposure and traffic to a site. Almost everyone uses search engines and the sites that rank higher are logically going to be visited more often. SEO isn’t a short term play; it takes patience and an ongoing commitment. Some people stop at on page SEO and neglect off-page SEO, while others focus on creating lots of content for their site, but fail to properly optimize it. SEO work is never really finished, but the payoffs can last long into the future.

4. Email
If you’re not collecting emails on your site you’re missing out on opportunities. With all the attention giving to SEO and social, we tend to forget that email marketing has been around longer and has a higher ROI than almost any other type of online marketing discipline. Collecting emails is as easy as offering up a newsletter, e-book, or other piece of content in exchange.

5. Social Media
Too many people take a “set it and forget it” type of attitude when it comes to social media and then end up wondering why they’re not seeing results. Participating in social media is more than just periodically updating Facebook and Twitter, there’s a level of awareness, transparency, and humility required unlike that of any of the other 4 pillars. Social media requires creative ways of reaching out and one on one brand to customer conversations. It’s not going away and it’s only going to get more complicated in the future. Those who don’t make a commitment towards social media will risk losing ground over those who do.

The five pillars of Internet marketing are often interconnected and thus should each be given their due diligence. Focus attention towards the weak spots and consider getting outside help with areas that are beyond your reach. Make no mistake that if you avoid any pillar for too long; you’ll eventually come to regret it.

Dan Mckee is the Senior Social Media Consultant for Sparkplug Digital, an online marketing agency that helps companies plan and execute effective SEO, PPC, and social media campaigns.

Things haven’t changed that much in the intervening years. Just this month, Forbes magazine proclaimed, “Innovation Saves the World,” and Governor Martin O’Malley of Maryland insisted, “Less regulation, more innovation key to job growth.”

Innovation has long been cloaked in an aura of hype and has, therefore, always filled me with skepticism. It caused me, under the influence of innovation myth-buster Scott Berkun, to write: “No matter how ubiquitous the invocation of innovation, actual innovations are fairly rare, and, as far as success in business is concerned, rarely necessary.”

Of course, it’s not always clear that the organizations and leaders who claim and call for innovation actually want it. As a matter of fact, if you judge them on their behavior, rather than their “messaging,” it would seem that they are more bent on preventing the emergence of the truly innovative than promoting it.

The person who has most recently highlighted this apparent conundrum is Professor David Owens of the Owen (no relation) Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. In his book, Creative People Must Be Stopped! Six Ways We Kill Innovation (Without Even Trying), he identifies six distinct categories of constraint—individual constraints, group (or cultural) constraints, organizational constraints, industry (or market) constraints, societal constraints, and technology constraints—that hamper creativity and the innovation it can spawn.

Now, Dave (as I’ve always known him) did not write this book to help individuals and organizations better constrain innovation. Instead, as we discuss in this episode of Marketing Smarts, he wanted to provide a diagnostic framework that one could use to identify the specific constraints at work when innovation appears to be stymied within an organization or when a product, which on the surface appears genuinely innovative, never takes off.

Whether you are trying to foster innovation in your organization from the top down, introduce a new idea from the bottom up, or teach an entire market how to “think different” about a particular product, it’s important to have a clear idea of the specific limitations that you will be facing.

“The world behaves as if creative people must be stopped,” Dave explains, “and if you know that, you can become strategic about it … If I have a good idea, and I know how it’s going to get killed, I can actually take evasive action!”

Coming back to the title of the book, I asked Dave if creative people should sometimes in fact be stopped. After all, company resources are often limited and focus is frequently key to success. Can you really have creative people running around and mucking things up?

Dave conceded that some types of creativity (“blind creativity that doesn’t try hard to understand the world in which [it's] intervening”) should in fact be stopped. But he added the following caveat, “If you make something, you change the world in some way; it’s really an intervention in the world. If you do that carefully, responsibly, you should not be stopped.”

I invite you to listen to my entire conversation with Dave, in which we discuss everything from the ways that NASA frustrates potential innovators to the reasons why the Segway never really took off. Here it is:

If you’d like to learn more about how to promote creativity within your own organization, you should check out our interview with Alicia Arnold on Marketing Smarts or her Take 10 on generating big ideas in small, easy steps!

What constraints on innovation or creative thinking do you often encounter?

They are the people I’ve been grateful for this past year. They enriched my life in some way. They made me laugh. Or maybe we talked or we worked together or we had dinner or I wish I saw more of them or I got to know them on social channels and I decided I liked them (and I’m a notorious people-hater.) (I’m kidding about the hating part.) Anyway—suffice it to say, it runs the gamut.

This would probably be a good time to mention that this list is far from exhaustive: In addition to the folks here, I’m also thankful for the awesome collection of individuals who make up the MarketingProfs family, as well as for my own actual family. I’m also grateful for all of you who bother to swing by here and read MarketingProfs every day. To me, business—and life, for that matter—is all about relationships.

These are all people I’d put in the general category of People Who’ve Made a Difference in My Life of Late (working title), which includes a shout out to the people below. (And Tina Fey. But I can’t find her email address. Working on that.)

So I am grateful for all of these people. And I asked the same question of them. Here are their answers, in no particular order.*

(*I’m lying. Actually, it’s in the order they responded to me.)

Ready for the sharks...

C.C. Chapman, CC-Chapman.com

“I’m thankful for you becoming such a huge part of my life and asking me to write Content Rules with you. (And I really want to see you swim with the sharks.)”

Aaron Strout, head of location-based marketing at WCG

“My list would include WCG—the agency I work for (and love), the book that I co-authored with @schneidermike, Instagram (this feels like my new baby). And all the REAL friends I’ve deepened relationships with this year—including you, Ann!”

Steve Garfield, videoblogger and photographer

“I’m thankful for the ambient intimacy that Instagram enables. It was fun to go to Paris this year and have you in my pocket, liking my photos along the the way.”

David Meerman Scott, online marketing strategist

“I am given the gift of an audience to deliver a talk to somewhere in the world nearly every week. Being able to help others achieve their goals and dreams through my writing and speaking is an honor. I am so thankful that I have been able to build a career doing what I love.”

Steve Woodruff, President, Impactiviti

“I am thankful, above lots of other things, for this.”

Ardath Albee, CEO, Marketing Interactions

“I’m grateful that I have a new concept for a book. I’m thankful that I have wonderful clients unafraid of embracing the new and sometimes crazy-sounding approaches that take them out of their comfort zones. And, my husband cooks! Really well.”

Bob Knorpp, CEO, Cool Beans Group

“As always I’m thankful for people—C.C. and you for chapter 20, Joe Jaffe for his counsel, Bill Green for his advice, Angela Natividad for being someone I can trust with anything, Trace Rutland for her help through a tough year, Alison Gianotto for prodding me to be a better person, Erica Mayer for her inspiration, Kimmy MacDaniel for being a real friend and Judy McCord for teaching me to laugh again.”

Jason Falls, CEO, SocialMediaExplorer.com

“I’m thankful for great friends (like Ann Handley) who not only ask me to help them with their business, but are willing to help me with mine. And while that has a definitive professional angle, it’s just nice to know that the relationships I’ve worked on building over the years can be both personally and professionally satisfying. It’s what networking is all about. It’s pretty special when it works.”

Brian Solis, BrianSolis.com

“I’m thankful for a vibrant and genuine community of smart and engaged people who inspire me to think and act outside of my comfort zone… each and every day. I’m also thankful for events like SXSW, Blogworld, Pivot, and all of the other conferences where everyone comes together, giving me the opportunity to deliver great big hugs as tangible ‘thank you’s.’”

Geoff Livingston, GeoffLivingston.com

“I was honored to organize and manage Give to the Max Day in Greater Washington, give2max.org an online giving day that raised $2 million for 1,200 nonprofits from almost 18,000 donors. A pinnacle moment for me professionally and spiritually. What a gift!”

Constant reminder

Scott Stratten, Unmarketing

“Two great new headshots. I got to go to India to see Gandhi’s final resting place, which inspired my tattoo (it was the quote hanging over his death bed).  I got to speak at the same conference as you. And I no longer do client work—it’s 100% speaking gigs. Booya!”

Cam Balzer, Chief Marketing Officer, Threadless

“I continue to be super grateful every day to be helping artists, designers and doodlers the world over get their weird and wonderful art seen and worn by thousands of people. As a marketer, the most you can ask for is mind-blowing products that do most of the marketing themselves. Being handed those products on a daily basis by our community is pretty humbling and inspiring. We call that ‘Make Great Together!’”

Michael Stelzner, CEO, Social Media Examiner

“I am thankful for Ann Handley. She let me speak at a MarketingProfs conference back in October of 2009. That was the start of Social Media Examiner and 2011 has been our best year ever. Thanks Ann! ”

Jay Baer, President, Convince & Convert

“I am thankful for everyone that chooses—from within a bouillabaisse of content—to read, watch, or listen to a single word I have to say. I am even more thankful that after a verifiably crazy year of travel, effort, and brand-building, I still (evidently) possess the affections of my family, who make it all possible and for whom I started down this path.”

Becky Dilworth (R)

Becky Dilworth, VP of
Digital Strategy,
Bridgeline Digital

“My husband. Why? Because while I was traveling the nation with you (and others) he was doing kindergarten math problems and reading Junie B. Jones books and playing peek-a-boo and changing diapers and trying his damnedest to do his art. And every time I came home he never looked at me with jealousy or contempt. Just joy. My new glasses. Originally I thought they were making me shorter. Turns out I can just see the ground better. A new friend. (You.)”

Mitch Joel, CEO, Twist Image

“I’m thankful for being here. Not to be all doom and gloom, but wars, strife, Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring, the death of people like Steve Jobs… hey, I’m in Marketing and it’s fun. It’s always fun (even when it’s not so fun . Being here: happy and healthy with great family and friends is what makes me thankful and keeps me grounded.”

Kipp Bodnar, Inbound Marketer, Hubspot

“So much to be thankful for in 2011, it rocked. 1. Marketing Sucking Less – Marketers everywhere made huge progress in 2011. 2. The B2B Social Media Book (Wiley 2011) – HUGE thanks to Ann for writing the forward! 3. Intstagram. Seriously, before Instagram my photos sucked.”

Jeanne Hopkins, Director of Marketing, Hubspot

“What I am thankful for: Breathing. Being Happy. Being Loved. Being Liked. Working @HubSpot. Having a great boss like Mike Volpe. Writing a book (Go Mobile) with Jamie Turner. But, most of all being part of a family with twin 13-year-old daughters that are fun to be with and still like to be with their parents.”

Mignon Fogarty, Grammar Girl

“I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to write four books this year to launch my new 101 WORDS book series, and I’m also grateful that I’m finished writing them. I’ll never agree to write four books in one year again!”

Tamsen McMahon, Personal Cartography

“Not to be too cryptic about it, but this year I’m thankful for courage—the courage to believe in the rationality of the outwardly irrational, in the value of happiness, in the promise of love, and in the reward for pursuing what’s right for me and those I love.”

Doug Haslam, Client Services Supervisor, Voce Communications

“I am thankful for the outpouring of friendship from people (you included) after my father’s passing, as well as the 130+ people who donated to my Pan-Mas Challenge ride to help fight cancer. And I don’t have Tina Fey’s email.”

Stephanie Tilton, TenTon Marketing

“Thank goodness for family, friends, and colleagues who inspire me to aim higher, remind me to keep things in perspective, and help me savor life’s unforgettable moments. And I’m so grateful to have spent precious time with our little pug, Munchkin, who left this world far too soon (rest in peace, Munchkin).”

Joe Chernov, Vice President of Content Marketing, Eloqua

“I am grateful that I completed the migration of my frontal lobe to Evernote. I have permanently shifted my long-term memory to the cloud. Here’s to remembering the password. I am also thankful for the ‘Private Session’ setting in Spotify. All of my Facebook friends don’t need to know how much I like Miranda Lambert. Oops!”

Michael Stoner, President, mStoner

“Business: This year, we celebrated a decade in business and hired some terrific staff members. I’m thrilled about two of them in particular: our new marketing manager, Mallory Wood, and our new senior strategist, Susan Evans. They bring new insights and energy to mStoner. Personal: I’m ever more grateful for the community in which I live and the people who make it up. There were some new developments this year (a new coffee shop) that only enhance life and even the destruction from Hurricane Irene pointed out how remarkably people pull together to help each other. It’s a wonderful, rich place to live.”

Maria Pergolino, Director of Marketing, Marketo

“I am thankful to be a marketer in a time when we can accurately prove and predict our impact on revenue. I’m also thankful for all the cool ideas and support from my coworkers, for the ability to work with our Marketo customers, that my boyfriend puts up with my crazy schedule, and for my Monster Beats headphones.”

Jason Falls, Ann Handley, Nick Westergaard

Nick Westergaard,
NickWestergaard.com

“Finding time, while running our small brand strategy firm, to blog and speak more. I started the year with a 52-post resolution (1 post/week) and—knock wood—I am on my way to making that happen. I’ve also been blessed with more time to speak as well. All of this takes time and that’s a challenge with a small business and a big family. I’m grateful that we’ve grown our team so that I can do more of this. That’s helped me make more time for blogging and speaking, which have been very rewarding. Goal for 2012? Submit something to MarketingProfs ”

Scott Brinker, President & CTO, ion interactive, inc.

“I’m grateful for the amazing product development team that has come together here at ion interactive this year, and the exciting growth we’ve had with our landing page management platform, LiveBall. I’m also thankful for the doubling of traffic at my blog, Chief Marketing Technologist. And, of course, a humble thank you to MarketingProfs for the opportunity to contribute articles, seminars, podcast interviews and event sessions this past year.”

Lou Imbriano, Chief Executive Officer, TrinityOne Sports

“I am so grateful for all the wonderful support and kindness I have witnessed and received during the launch of Winning the Customer. It has been humbling to experience the number of folks, that I have never met in person and only through social media, that have come to my side to spread the word about the book in various forms. I just think it is amazing that they insisted in making sure I didn’t stand alone. Thank you all.”

Ron Ploof

Ron Ploof, RonAmok

“I’m thankful that we finally, after more than three-score years, got to work together. And I must say that… ahem… we were great! ”

Deb Ng, Conference Director, BlogWorld and New Media Expo

“I’m grateful to work at a job that not only enables me to be a part of the best gosh darned team out there but one that offers me the opportunity to interact with the most incredible community of creative people. That I was also able to write and have published my first book (and sign the contract for book #2) is the gravy on the proverbial potatoes. 2011 was, without a doubt, the most important year of my career. Finally, the above wouldn’t mean a darn thing if it wasn’t for the love and support of my family and friends, and that love and support trumps everything else.”

Mack Collier, MackCollier.com

“I am grateful for good friends like you, and making tighter connections with a small circle of friends in 2011 versus trying to reach everyone on a very platonic level. In 2012 I am going to spend even more time making deeper connections in a small pool rather than trying to follow everyone loosely in a big ocean.”

Jeffrey Rohrs, VP of Marketing, ExactTarget

“I’m thankful for my wife and kids who are a constant source of love, inspiration, and entertainment. I’m also thankful for friends at work, home, and on the road who prove time and time again that the best form of social media is the face-to-face conversation (usually over drinks).”

Tom Martin, Founder, Converse Digital

Same shirt, same day: Mack Collier & Tom Martin

“TalkingWithTom—what started as a lark just to see if I could, turned out to be the opportunity of a lifetime. I got to meet folks that I’d never have met otherwise, some of whom have turned into friends or at least colleagues. I also got to strengthen relationships with so many others, like the social media sex symbol Ann Handley, because of the interviews or just the seeing each other so more often at conferences. Truly one of the best things I’ve ever dreamt up. So grateful that I did it vs. telling myself all the reasons I should do it.”

Tim Washer, Senior Marketing Manager, Cisco Systems

“I’m grateful for a few comedy gigs: a Super Bowl commercial, Onion Sports Network spot, and a corporate event in Napa Valley.”

C.B. Whittemore, Simple Marketing Now

“I am grateful for the kinship you make possible for so many through MarketingProfs and, more importantly, through you. You are an enabler of ideas and the beauty of magnificent content. Thank you for enabling brilliant yet practical ideas.”

Valeria Maltoni, Valeria Maltoni

“2011 kicked my butt (if I can say so in your post). I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to confront my enemy, Resistance. The year I had to come out from behind myself and do the real work that is my calling and contribution to the world: a new model for thinking about business. I started Conversation Agent the blog 5+ years ago, and Conversation Agent, the LLC, 3 years ago. This is the year I committed to the task.”

Nancy Duarte, Principal, Duarte Design

Nancy Duarte at the B2B Forum

“Here’s my ditty on 2011: To borrow from Dickens, 2011 was the best of times, it was the worst of times. My husband Mark has been great about getting his ‘old man appointments’ done each year and we were stunned when in June he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and #cancersucks. It’s a creepy feeling hearing the C word when diagnosed in someone you love. Hubby caught it early but it was growing very fast. We’re thankful for a skilled doctor, thankful for cool technology advancements, and for early diagnosis. Mark has been blessed with a full recovery but if we’d missed the diagnosis by even four months, the outcome would be very different. We feel like we’ve had a miracle! On August 1, we celebrated our 30 year wedding anniversary keenly aware of how fragile life is and how deep the vow was we made to love in sickness and in health.”

Sally Hogshead, HowToFascinate.com

“This year I got married, moved into a new home, and gave birth to a website at HowToFascinate.com. I’m grateful for my cocktail mix of caffeine and endorphins.”

Shashi Bellamkonda, Shashi.co

“In 2011 what a year ! Started off in January with my keynote for the Washington Women in PR. The year where many of my friends wrote books (Content Rules included) that I delightedly reviewed. Network Solutions Social Media and I were featured in over nine books. My daughter Mitali started following her footsteps and started blogging on the KikScore blog. Not be left behind, my son’s artwork at home worked its way into Becky McCray’s blog. Of course the highlight was meeting Ann Handley and CC Chapman at Content Marketing World.”

Joe Pulizzi, CEO, Content Marketing Institute

“I’m thankful that: After more than a decade, I’m now seeing marketing departments seriously transform themselves into storytelling factories. The future is now. Content Marketing World rocked the house in 2011, and coming back for more in 2012. Robert Rose helped me put together our new book, Managing Content Marketing, which is, perhaps, the first that tells marketing professionals how to start to set up a content marketing practice within the organization.”

DJ Waldow, Waldow Social

“Starting my own company, Waldow Social. I’ve always wanted to own my own company. Thanks to a phone call on July 1st, I finally got the kick that I needed to make this happen.  I’m also grateful for my new headshot.”

Marcus Nelson, Director of Social Media, Salesforce

“I am grateful for 13 years of marriage, two amazingly creative kids, a baby on the way, and a new home. Also blessed to be working with some of the smartest people in the industry doing a job I take great pride in.”

Jeffrey Cohen, B2B Social Media

“Super-excited for my job as social strategist at Radian6 that I started in 2011. Also pretty psyched about the book that Kipp Bodnar and I wrote about B2B social media.”

Tim Hayden, Chief Marketing Officer, 44Doors

“I’ve been blessed with the birth of Graeme Russell Hayden, my first, on July 10. And, of lesser incredible excitement, the birth of 44Doors, my fourth start-up and the technological realization of all my live-mobile-online visions.”

Dylan Boyd, VP of Growth, Urban Airship

“Very grateful for moving into a new job from email/agency to mobile. Back into the start-up world and loving every minute of the hustle and growth. Amazing to live in dog years and watched our business grow from 6,000 apps to over 31,000 apps using us in less than 10 months. Wild. Excited for 2012 and a vacation soon.”

Erika Napoletano, Chief Redhead, Redhead Writing

“I wake up every day thankful for the people in my life—digitally and physically. They’re the ones who make it possible for me to do what I love every day and remind me that it’s never about me. I’m so incredibly grateful for the constant reminder that it’s rarely EVER about me. My first two books which come out in February and March.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In addition to those listed above, a special Thanksgiving thank-you to people who have inspired me this past year: Lee Odden, Christina CK Kerley, Chris Baggott, Kristina Halvorson,  Amber Naslund, Tom Fishburne, Mike Hayes, Jeremiah Owyang, Matt Ridings, David Armano, Scott Monty, David B. Thomas, Brian Kardon, Shannon Vargo, John Jantsch, Todd Defren, Brian Clark, Michael Brito, Guy Kawasaki and (last but not least) Leigh Durst.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

So how about you…? What are you grateful for?

Homepage image courtesy of BigStock, Happy Child

The “Think Different” campaign—and all that it entailed—helped rescue Apple. This same message, if accepted, will be what rescues B2B marketers today.  Here are some of the lines from the commercials:

“Here’s to the Crazy Ones … The ones who see things differently … You can quote them, disagree with them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing that you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They explore. They create. They inspire.”

These words (change, invent, imagine, explore, create, inspire) encapsulate the approach and attitude that needs to be adopted and embraced by today’s B2B marketer. Marketing receives so much negative press today. We read about the marketing skills gap, our lack of visibility at the C-level, our lack of lack of alignment with sales, our in ability to justify our budget, etc. Unfortunately, much of it is true. That’s because we keep doing the same thing over and over again.

I submit that the time has come to change, to change for the better, to think different. Here are 5 things marketers can do differently:

1.   Don’t Believe What They’re Saying

A good friend of mine played professional baseball for 12 years. He was a relief pitcher—specifically, a closer (the pitcher who comes in at the end of a game to secure a win). I asked him what kind of mindset was needed to be a closer.  He said, “You can’t let yourself get too high, or too low. And don’t read the press clippings after you blow one.”

Good advice for marketers. Too many marketers are “too low,” believing what everyone tells them: that marketing is a necessary evil, providing little value. But that doesn’t have to be true. So, as the commercial says, start to “Think Different.” Rather than accepting the characterization,  begin believing that being a B2B marketer is one of the most exciting and promising careers of today. Embrace what’s in front of you. Go for it. And if you fail (and at times, you will), so what? Just keep plugging. Success over time is the goal. When you achieve it, others’ perception will begin to change.

2.  Defy Tradition

During my tenure as a marketing director for McAfee, I made the decision to move to paperless collateral. This decision was not particularly well-received by some of our veteran field sales people. In their traditional way of thinking, I was overlooking the “need” to have something to hand to customers. They told me that we would lose sales, miss out on opportunities, and that this was a bad decision. I didn’t care. Why not? Because our analysis showed that we could redirect the huge printing budget and spend it in areas that would generate a better overall ROI. Before I announced the decision, I showed our Sales Management how the extra budget would be spent on demand generation and even showed them the forecasted increase of leads. They bought in immediately.

Many traditional marketing activities (tradeshows, collateral, telemarketing, etc.) are done simply because things have always been done that way. But as Mark Twain said, “Sacred cows make the best hamburger.” So, take some initiative and do some study and analysis on what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and the return you’re getting from it.  Tradition should not be a driving factor when it comes to marketing spend.  Revenue and ROI should be.

3.  Fight for the Right Change

“We already have an in-house teleservices team.”  This is what I heard two weeks into my new position with a software company. This comment was a response to my suggestion that outsourcing our teleservices would be more efficient, effective, and economical.

In the process of making my case, I had to have meetings with the head of sales, the head of marketing operations, and the president of our division. The head of the in-house teleservices team made sure he was present at all these meetings, so he could counter my arguments.

During one of these meetings, after quite an animated plea by him to keep things in-house, I said to him, “Dave, this isn’t personal. I believe we can do better. That’s what all of us in the company should strive to be doing  … better.”  The meeting resulted in a “bake-off”:  For 45 days I gave 50% of my teleservices work to my chosen outsourced vendor, and 50% to Dave’s team to see who would win. And  45 days later, we reviewed the results, and my outsourced vendor had 100% of my work.

Was I trying to discredit Dave? No. We simply needed “better,” and I wasn’t going to stop until I got it. As for Dave, he never spoke to me again, and he went out of his way trying to make our team look bad. But our case had been made, and our success was known throughout the company.

If there is something in your organization that needs changing, don’t stop driving for it.  Although people will fight back, if it’s the right change, it will make it worthwhile.

4.  Be Realistic

I was speaking to a client a few weeks ago about our approach to implementing the Lead Management Framework^SM.  Halfway through the discussion, he asked, “Will we be able to get this all completed within three months?”  I told him, “No, that timeframe is unrealistic.” He said, “I figured as much, but I had to ask.”

Anything worth doing takes time. Yet, many B2B marketers (and their management teams) have unrealistic expectations when it comes to turning things around.  Initiatives, such as lead management processes, buyer journey mapping, sales processes, and software deployments take time, people, and resources. The change that has to occur within marketing often requires modifying behavior and culture. Studies show that such change can often take two to three years.

So, develop a plan a plan with realistic timeframes. Include milestones that will allow you to highlight the small changes along the way, but realize that the ultimate change will occur over time.

5.  Lead

In his book, Balancing the Demand Equation, Adam Needles states, “Sales managers and general managers lead, and B2B marketers do not.” This is a bold statement, but is too often true.

Colin Powell has stated the following in terms of leadership:

“You don’t know what you can get away with until you try. You know the expression, ‘it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.’ Well, it’s true.  Good leaders don’t wait for official blessing to try things out. They’re prudent, not reckless. But they also realize a fact of life in most organizations: If you ask enough people for permission, you’ll inevitably come up against someone who believes his job is to say ‘no.’  So the moral is, don’t ask.  Less-effective middle managers endorsed the sentiment, ‘If I haven’t explicitly been told yes, I can’t do it,’ whereas the good ones believed, ‘If I haven’t explicitly been told no, I can.’  There’s a world of difference between these two points of view.

It is time for marketing leaders to adopt this philosophy. Stop waiting to be told “yes” and go for it!

If B2B marketing is ever going to get out of the doldrums of being viewed as inefficient and unnecessary within the organization, they must change.  They must invent, imagine, explore, create and inspire. To put it simply, the must think different.

Lou is a colorful character with a classic (East) Boston accent and a wealth of down-to-earth advice for anyone running a business. In this podcast, we covered the following topics:

1. Teamwork

When people talk about “teamwork,” they often focus on everyone pulling together and helping out when others are struggling. Lou points out that, while helping others or picking up slack may be admirable, teamwork is actually about knowing your role, executing your role to the fullest, and making sure you take your role to the next level. If you’re the quarterback, teamwork means being the best quarterback you can be.

2. VP of Synergy

To be an effective leader and make sure that everyone is executing on their role, you need to know what everyone can do, what they’re actually doing, and where they’re running into trouble. For this reason, Lou suggests that every business needs a “VP of Synergy,” someone who understands, at ground level, what is actually happening in the business and can connect the dots so that obstacles and issues are addressed and so that the organization is continually improving and executing on its mission.

3. The Goal of Business

Everyone is in business to make money (or “dough,” as Lou calls it). But making money isn’t the goal of your business and shouldn’t be your primary focus. “It’s not about more money overall,” Lou says. “If you do your job, that will come.” Instead, Lou encourages everyone to remember that the real business you are in is helping your partners do business and helping your customers achieve their goals.

4. Positions of Power

Being in a position of power doesn’t mean that you are king of the hill and can lord it over others; it means that you have the power to get things done. If you have a good understanding of what others can do, and have put in the effort to build strong relationships with them, you can often get done with a phone call what it might take someone else weeks to do. That’s real power.

If you want to get the whole story in Lou’s own words, check out the podcast right here:

You can also download a transcript of the podcast here.

I was a tad jealous as I listened to my brother recount to me the details of their meeting. Interestingly though, the thing that made the biggest impression on my brother was that Bono was the one who asked all the questions. To quote my brother, “He didn’t break eye contact and his demeanor showed that he was genuinely interested in learning about me.”

It often comes as a surprise when we hear stories of world-famous celebrities showing so much interest in “the common man.” Why? Because we often get the impression that they have more important things to do.

This thought made me wonder how that same dynamic applies to companies and those that buy their products and services. Are buyers surprised when a company shows genuine interest in their wants and needs? Which are you, as a seller, more concerned with: being interesting or being truly interested in your buyers’ needs? While the difference in the two may be subtle, the way they come across to your buyers will make an incredible difference in how they engage with (and ultimately buy from) you.

Continuing with the theme, here are four characteristics of companies that are more focused on being interested than interesting:

1.  They Engage With Their Buyers.
Organizations that are interested in their buyers focus on engagement. What does this mean? It’s not just the new wave of brand marketing. It’s a communication process whereby they connect with their buyers, seek to understand them, and ask questions. The questions lead to answers that provide understanding; understanding leads to a better overall buyer experience; a better experience leads to a long-term relationship. This rarely begins with: “Hello, when can you view a demo? Engagement takes time and will be accomplished by patient, ongoing dialogue.

2.  They Know Who Their Buyer Is Before They Engage
Ask anyone what they are looking for in a romantic relationship, and the answer often is a list of character traits or a description of the ideal mate. Companies that are interested do the same with their buyers. They create buyer personas or ideal profiles, which allow them to better focus and target their messaging and offers.

The development of these profiles is a continual process. The more information you obtain through engagement, the more the profile of your buyer will evolve. The more you know about them (being interested), the better you’ll be able to help them achieve their goals.

3.  They Don’t Treat Everyone the Same
One of the things I like to do when I get a consumer telemarketing call at home is to see how quickly I can get the caller off script. It’s so painful to hear them reading word for word from this script, especially knowing that I’m hearing the same spiel they’re giving everyone else they call.  You know you have them thrown when you ask a question. There’s usually five seconds of silence and then they begin reading again, perhaps hoping I’ll forget I asked a question. It’s great fun.

Ineffective B2B marketing and sales organizations are acting in much the same manner. Instead of a one-on-one dialogue with each buyer, they take a scripted approach that indicates they have no understanding of the buyer. Conversely, organizations that are interested tailor communication and overall experience to each unique buyer (or buyer category).

4.  They Measure Their Engagement
I recently served on a panel which was asked, “How do you know if your content is effective?”  Other members of the panel began answering, giving elaborate answers about key indicators, and percentages of opens and clicks (obviously email focused). When my turn came, I offered up one short line: “You will know it’s effective if your buyers respond to it.” It’s pretty simple, but it’s true. If there is no response or action, your content is not working.

The only way to know this is to measure your buyer engagement, response, and (ultimately) purchase behavior. If they don’t keep coming back for more, then there’s a problem.

Interesting or interested? One gets attention, the other develops and maintains long-term buying relationships. Which one do you want to be?

The crux of a great online marketing campaign is being able to demonstrate the value to the business at the end and the success that resulted. In particular, it can be really tricky to help management or other groups that are not connected to the marketing team’s overall goals or with a web marketing background understand your success.

Today, we’ll examine two powerful methods to communicate value and benefit back up the chain to your organization and leadership. If you implement these methods as part of your weekly or monthly reporting, it will be very straightforward to show off your results without requiring too much additional work or slowing down your marketing performance. If you’ve found other methods or systems that work well for explaining the success of a marketing campaign to your management team or other groups, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

Method #1: The Killer Five-Slide Deck

Most great marketing campaigns can be cut up into a five-slide deck that concretely explains the goals, progress, and success of the work. The first important lesson to keep in mind when constructing this is that non-marketers are generally not interested in the methods or clever methods of accomplishing a goal. This can be tough to resist introducing because it represents what you are actually doing and your own inventiveness, but ultimately, people without your background and experience will not be able to digest the information appropriately, and it does not communicate your success. Especially among management, they are less interested in the methodology and specific actions, and more excited to see the results and benefit.

Slide #1: Goal proposal
Share, in high-level language, the purpose of the campaign that you’ve been working on. Are you working to generate new leads for your sales team? Is this a branding project or a new advertisement that you are running? Keep the language accessible to people who you don’t interact with on a daily basis, so that they can read this and understand what the point was. If you had an objective goal, like “Generate 500 leads,” include that here as well.

Slide #2: Overall progress towards goal
This is where you place your burndown chart, the funnel, or however you can represent the progress of your campaign. Don’t get into the details of what specifically you are doing or what steps are accomplished, unless it’s absolutely critical and can be explained in a way that will make sense to people not involved in the project. Try to keep it results focused as much as possible. Tell them how many leads have been generated!

Slide #3: How close are we to goal or past it? Any interesting detail?
Pick out an interesting or insightful detail from the campaign to show here. What surprised you? Find an interesting stat to show about how you’re accomplishing your goal faster than expected, or in a better way than expected, or some other cross-section of your project that shows interesting detail. For example, did you undertake an SEO project for your website that had an unexpected positive benefit with another project or goal? Show it off here.

Slide #4: What did we learn?
Now that you’ve shown your progress towards goal and concrete information, break down the impact this project will have. Show off any insight that you’ve had that will help this project fuel something in the future. Did you find a new website or way to promote to an audience that you didn’t know about before? Does some part of your success tie back to a new tool you are using, which is making your job much easier? If you recently purchased a tool or something else that enabled you to do your project well, give it credit here. If other people understand that the investment is really fueling growth and success, they will be very comfortable with that.

Slide #5: Wrap-up | What’s next? Next steps
Combine the details of slides 2 to 4 into your next steps for the project. Wrap it up and put a bow on it to show off how you’ve pulled this all together in a coherent fashion. You’ve hit a goal, found a useful insight for the future, and learned an interesting lesson that you can share back with your organization, and done so in a concise and colorful way that is useful to others without your background.

Method #2: The Five Sentence Summary Email

Ideally, any campaign summary email or information can be communicated in five sentences or fewer, similar to the above. By keeping it short and specific to the interest group, you’ll greatly increase their chances of both reading and comprehending the material, and give them the one sound bite to remember about the performance of the campaign. The five sentences should align with the slides that you made above, and concisely explain the progress so far and the benefit, and what is next. Remember that this is what will get forwarded around to other people who might ask or be discussing the impact of your project, so make sure that the explanations work for someone who isn’t familiar with your daily work.

The critical point to accomplish with this deck and email is to keep your goals and achievements very clear and accessible. If you are able to do that, it will be much easier to show your success and achievements off to your entire company. Have you had any other experiences or success in translating this information to your company? Let us know in the comments.

A guest post by Brian Whalley of HubSpot. HubSpot is a software company in Cambridge, Mass. that makes marketing software to help with lead generation online.

1. The Benevolent Dictator: Empower Your Employees, Build Your Business and Outwit the Competition
Have you ever wondered what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur? Starting a company seems so effortless for some people. Voilà! They build it, and people come. What’s the secret? Is there one? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps it all comes down to how you manage it. Note: While this book is written for the entrepreneur, the lessons found inside are valuable to everyone who works in business.

Michael Feuer, founder of OfficeMax, shares 40 lessons on empowering your employees, building your business, and outwitting the competition in his new book, The Benevolent Dictator.

Some of my favorite lessons:

• Lesson #2: The Best Ideas Can Come from What’s Right Under Your Nose
• Lesson #7: Don’t Underestimate the Power of Focus, Discipline, and Follow-Up
• Lesson #11: Always Be Prepared with Plan B … And Sometimes C and D
• Lesson #13: Never Be as Weak as Your Weakest Link
• Lesson #16: Managing People Is About Achieving Objectives Through Others
• Lesson #23: Don’t Drink Your Own Bathwater—You Could Choke

2. Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul
Onward is the story of Starbucks after former CEO Howard Schultz came back in 2008 to stabilize and save his beloved brand. The challenge he put forth was to refocus on core values all while fending off harsh critics and hungry competitors.

Starbucks is a customer-centric company, and this book shows how its core values allow it to be so. Themes include: Magic, Loyalty, Believe, Nimble, Innovate, Balance, Conviction, and Conscience.

How often do you hear these words in business? Not very!

3. Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization
If you’ve worked in corporate America long enough, you know one thing exists: Silos. Tribes aren’t silos. Tribes are how groups naturally form within organizations and they may be cross-functional, cross-department. With Tribal Leadership, Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright show you how to embrace the natural tribes in an organization.

Tribal Leadership can be gained through five stages:

• Stage1: On the Verge of a Meltdown (“Life Sucks”)
• Stage 2: Disconnected and Disengaged (“My Life Sucks”)
• Stage 3: The Wild, Wild West (“I’m Great”)
• Stage 4: Establishing Tribal Leadership (“We’re Great”)
• Stage 5: Toward Vital Work Communities (“Life is Great”)

What’s great about this book is that it addresses three different levels: The Main Story, Technical Notes, and Coaching Tips.

4. Social Marketing to the Business Customer: Listen to Your B2B Market, Generate Major Account Leads, and Build Client Relationships
If you’ve been investigating social media for your business, you’ll find one thing for sure: a shortage of books that address social media for B2B companies. Paul Gillin and Eric Schwartzman aim to help B2B  marketers understand today’s marketing, the need to be social and how to best allocate social media resources—resources that are often limited.

Topics include:

• The Changing Rules of B2B Marketing
• Creating a Social Organization
• Learning by Listening
• Understanding Search (SEO)
• Lead Generation
• Profiting from Communities
• Return on Investment

You may keep hearing that social media is free or there isn’t any ROI in social media, Paul and Eric debunk both of these myths and with a lot of B2B examples!

5. Measure What Matters: Online Tools For Understanding Customers, Social Media, Engagement, and Key Relationships
Katie Payne’s first book on measurement, Measuring Public Relationships: The Data-Driven Communicator’s Guide to Success, is a standard desk reference book for me. When I had the chance to read her latest book, I leaped at the chance.

The book kicks off with dispelling some ROI myths that are deeply engrained in business:

• Measurement is Expensive
• You Can’t Measure the ROI, so Why Bother?
• Measurement is Strictly Quantitative
• Measurement is Something You Do When a Program Is Over
• I Know What’s Happening: I Don’t Need Research

If you or anyone on your team has quietly thought this or muttered any of it out loud, Measure What Matters is a must read.

Key topics include: Seven Steps to Perfect Measurement; Yes, You Can Afford to Measure; How to Measure in a Social Media World; and Measuring Relationships with Your Community.

6. Reputation Rules: Strategies for Building Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset
Are you really paying attention to your reputation? Is there a core team focused on it? In Reputation Rules, Daniel Diermeyer, Ph.D. debunks some closely held values when it comes to reputation management. If you believe that a good reputation flows from good business practices or reputation management is common sense, it might be time for you and your company to rethink how you look at managing your reputation in today’s business environment. It’s simply not enough to throw any issues or crises over the fence to your public relations team.

Using business examples from Bank of America, Shell UK, Mercedes, AIG, and Walmart. Core chapters include:

• Beyond the Obvious
• The Decisive Moment and How To Miss It
• Brand Management Beyond Customers
• Perks, Scandals, and Moral Outrage
• Strategic Management of Reputational Risk
• Values, Culture, and the Teachable Moment

This book should only be read by management teams that are serious about protecting, maintaining or restoring their reputation.

7. Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers are Creators
What happens when there is too much content to get through and digest? Steven Rosenbaum leads the way in helping businesses get focused on content that provides quality and context. If you are living in the digital world already, Curation Nation is not only a must read—it’s the future.

What is curation? According to Steven, it’s two things:

“Adding value from humans who add their qualitative judgment to whatever is being gathered and organized” and it’s “amateur and professional.” A curator’s job isn’t to create more content, but to make sense of the content that others have created.

I’ve curated some of the topics included in Curation Nation for you. (Sorry! I couldn’t resist.):

• Big-Time Curators on the Rise
• Consumers, Conversations and Curation
• Content Entrepreneurs
• Tools and Techniques
• Naysayers
• Brands: Curating Your Consumer
• Networks: Writing Inside a Curated Community
• Are Content Aggregators Vampires?

Happy reading!

Let me know what you think!

Disclaimer: While I did pick each book due to their subject matter, I must note that I received them at no cost. The Benevolent Dictator, Onward, and Tribal Leadership were received from literary agent Kevin Small. Social Marketing was received from co-author Eric Schwartzman. Measure What Matters was won in a competition hosted by Zoetica. And last, but not least, Reputation Rules and Curation Nation were received from McGraw-Hill as part of their blogger outreach. Receiving these books for free in no way changes my review as they are topics that I am passionate about … and I would have bought them anyway.

As much as creative marketing and promotions can help a product, service, or company stand out, it always comes down to a simple premise: Did you solve the need that triggered the customer to act in the first place?

Said simply, did you solve the customer’s problem?

One reason that question may be difficult to answer is that marketing leaders get lost in trying to “surprise and delight” customers with the latest in technology and gadgets, or the most liberal service policies. All those additional features and options are bound to make customers happy in the moment, but if you don’t solve the problem that triggered them to act in the first place, their satisfaction–and your business performance–will fade quickly. This holds true across industries. Customers are looking for companies that can simplify their lives by providing quality service without hassle. A great Harvard Business Review article on customer service highlights two key takeaways that should remain top-of-mind for businesses:

• Delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty, but reducing the work they must do to get their problem solved does. (A win for your customers!)
• Acting deliberately on this insight can help improve customer service, reduce customer service costs, and decrease customer churn. (A win for your company’s bottom line!)

The second reason this question may be difficult to answer is that marketing often doesn’t have complete accountability for solving the customer’s problem. As the old African proverb and a former First Lady have taught us, “it takes a village.” Marketers must work across, up, and down the organization to solve customer needs. Your organization needs a shared view of the target customer experience that solves your customers’ needs, and focus in each area of the company making the right daily decisions to make that happen. Marketing typically sets this direction; everyone plays a role.

Who Is Succeeding?

If you’re looking for examples of companies that are living the mantra of solving every customer’s need, start with Amazon. The company does consistently well in customer surveys and performance rankings because of a strong, unwavering focus on fulfilling customer needs. If there is a problem, it is quickly rectified with the goal of getting the right product to the customer ASAP. Technology investments are high for Amazon, but they’re all matched to things customers’ value. When Amazon was ranked the most trusted brand in the U.S. in a recent Millward Brown study, I thought it was a great testimony to the effectiveness of its ability to use technology to solve customer needs in a personal way. The model at Amazon is simple: Create a place where customers can find or discover anything they can imagine buying online.

Other companies that rank well in terms of solving the customer’s need include:

• Apple
• Kohl’s
• Zappos
• Costco
• Lowe’s

How Does This Change the Role of Marketing?

Make no mistake about it, marketers’ roles are changing. The link between marketing performance and effective customer experience is now unquestioned. Joe Tripodi of the Coca-Cola Company is a great example of a leader that is adapting to the expectations of customers while protecting one of the most well-known brands in the world. By remaining supportive of loyal Coca-Cola brand advocates, Joe and his team are reaping the benefits of customers who fill online channels with positive messages.

The flow of information is no longer just company-to-customer. Information now flows both ways, sideways and diagonally. The marketing team has switched from measuring impressions (views or reach) and now measures expressions (a comment or other kind of action that demonstrates engagement). What Joe’s figured out at Coke is that if they can provide exceptional experiences that solve needs, then those experiences can be multiplied and shared time and again—online and off.

6 Simple Tips

By following some simple principles, most businesses can minimize the risks of negative “buzz” while ratcheting up the likelihood that positive experiences will be shared. Here are six tips to keep in mind:

1. Do what you said you would do to eliminate the customer problem. Seems simple really doesn’t it? Deliver on the promise you made to address that particular customer’s problem in the time period agreed upon. Poor customer experiences arise from a failure to deliver on that initial promise or when surprises in the process pop up that were not communicated.

2. Don’t make your customers jump through hoops. Customers are not seeking another task on their daily to-do list. The reason they reach out for help is an understanding that there is someone out there more qualified to do this job than they are. They are seeking help. The last thing they want to do beg for it.

3. Don’t try and deliver added benefits the customer doesn’t need. Keep it simple. Don’t try and oversell how wonderful you are. Bragging about those 20 new features you just added (that are more about extending your sales or helping your operation than they are about moving your customer toward a need solved) isn’t going to convince anyone to be an advocate for your brand. Keep it simple. Fix their problem. Then stop. Then solve another one.

4. Be emotional. While the tangible product or service itself (and process steps a customer follows) must directly solve a customer need, the emotional elements of the customer experience best inspire loyalty and satisfaction. The trick is balance, a focus on both in a way that solves your customer’s need better than anyone else could. Ideally, what should your customers feel at each step of their experience? Match your actions to that.

5. Be helpful. Any experience must be accessible. You’re the expert. Your customer is hiring you to solve a problem or desire. Focus on how you can be a trusted source by providing the insight, explanation, and resources needed to solve the customer need. This is one area where your website, social networks and greater peer connectivity is a tremendous asset. Another (and often overlooked) opportunity is held by leaders whose customers use their company’s products or services over time (rather than in a moment, like an ice cream cone). My use of Windows software as I type is an example. How can you design your customer’s ongoing experience to give your customers the ideas and support they need to feel good about the process and decision to hire you, buy, and use your product or service?

6. Lead the village. Think about the interactions most critical to solving your customers’ needs as customers learn about your product, try you out, buy, use your product or service to solve their need, and even evolve over time. Which departments, processes and people have the biggest impact on making those interactions successful? Marketers have a key role in defining the target–or most ideal–experience customers should have at each step, and then engaging others in the company to aim at the same target. Building alignment can turbo boost the efforts of smart, well-intended people across your organization.

Ultimately, it’s not what customers accept, it’s what they value that matters most.

All aspects of marketing, promotions, and engagement should be working toward the goal of solving the customer need. If—and how well—a need is solved is your customers’ measure of success. And it’s a key measure of performance for you, your brand, and your organization.

Note: Photo is courtesy of featureset1 via FlickR Creative Commons.

What’s more, The Associated Press reported that his group was killing too many Muslims and that was bad for business. The West was winning the public relations fight, all his old comrades were dead, and he barely knew their replacements. Poor guy.

The problem with the name Al-Qaeda, bin Laden wrote in a letter recovered from his compound in Pakistan, was that it lacked a religious element, something to convince Muslims worldwide that they are in a holy war with America … The documents portray bin Laden as a terrorist chief executive, struggling to sell holy war for a company in crisis.

Why mention this now? To make a point that marketing and branding issues are ubiquitous. Even some terrorist groups “get” branding.

So, my $64,000 question is: Why are there still so many companies and organizations that don’t “get” branding? And, I don’t just mean the name or look of the organization. I mean the entire brand impression and experience.

Whether your organization is a small, mid-sized, or large business, a nonprofit, or government agency, does it have a branding problem like Al-Qaeda’s? What would it take for your chief executive and/or board of directors to invest more in branding? (If you don’t want to share your own org story, give us some generic suggestions.)

Related Articles

• Al-Qaeda has an image problem, needs a new name, Bin Laden wrote in letter
• Osama Bin Laden, Marketing Man

There’s still time to register for the MarketingProfs B2B Forum! If you are contemplating whether to stay home or go, I say go! There are many good reasons why, but let me supply the top 5 reasons why you should attend this year’s B2B Forum.

1. Great Content & Education

If you are in B2B marketing, this is a great place to get a good dose of education. From the workshops being taught on Monday by yours truly and one of the best in B2B Ardath Albee to the sessions throughout the show, you are going to get some great insights and practical take-aways from this event.

2.  Networking

I know at every show you hear about the “power of networking” but in today’s social age, it is more powerful and relevant than ever. The opportunity to network and share ideas as well as learn from peers is invaluable, and MarketingProfs does a fabulous job at providing these opportunities throughout the event.

3.  Access to Pros

One of the things I like the most about this show is the one-on-one “therapy sessions” that MarketingProfs arranges for attendees. These sessions are designed for folks who want insight and advice, and want to go deeper in their understanding and approach to the challenges they are facing within their organizations. If you have a specific challenge or issue you want to address, I highly recommend signing up for one of these sessions.

4.  The Diversity of Speakers

One of the many things I love about the way MarketingProfs has designed their conference is the mix of vendors, analysts, and end users they have as their speakers. This provides such a well-rounded view of the B2B landscape that you are bound to walk away with new perspectives and insights into the challenges you face daily.

5.  It’s Just Fun!

We all work extremely hard and, to be honest, at this conference, your brain will be in overdrive, but I can tell you that it will be fun. The conference is fast-paced and exciting, and has a buzz about it. Why should it be any different?  I have stated before that there is no better time to be a B2B marketer, and this conference embraces that.

I hope to see you in Boston in the coming days. If you were on the fence before, I hope this has helped you make your decision.  Go and register now!

Increases in the call for transparency are legion. Health inspectors post food safety grades for eating establishments. Websites track lists of political campaign donors. And restaurants redesign bars, kitchens, and more to show patrons how drinks and meals are prepared. All this, in order to give customers a window into processes for product and service creation.

And to be sure, there’s definitely even more opportunity for transparency in product creation, especially in financial services. As an example, Michael Lewis’ Big Short cites how via the securitization process, hundreds of subprime mortgages were packaged up and divvied into “tranches” of investment quality. Through securitization, it was tough to estimate the contents of a particular asset-backed security. One hedge fund manager exclaimed; “I didn’t know what the (expletive) was in the things. You couldn’t do the analysis. You couldn’t say, ‘Give me all the ones with all California in them.’ No one knew what was in them.”

Creating a product with so much complexity that teams of MBAs are necessary to decipher its contents surely is a recipe for confusion. And on the ugly side of things, perhaps that was the intention. Regardless, in an age of social media where a company’s reputation can be destroyed in five minutes or less, this avenue will not ensure long term success.

However, a key question is whether customers really want to peer inside the black box. After all, investment banks had very little difficulty offloading these impenetrable structured products. Plenty of hedge, pension and even sovereign wealth funds lined up to buy these complicated products—and most with no questions asked.

In the analytics market, there’s an adage that business users really don’t care how a particular solution works, just so long as it meets their needs. And while this may be true in some instances, there’s also ample opportunity to enlighten consumers (or in this case application users) as to the “value” received through peeling back the curtain on how a product or service is designed and delivered.

What say you? Do your customers really want transparency? Do they really need to know what’s in the black box?

A case in point is the Captains Table blog by Captains of Industry, which was ranked by BostInnovation  as one of the top five blogs in Boston—even though our company is a fraction of the size of other companies on the list, such as Hill Holliday and Mullen. How did the Captains get ranked in the same league as the titans of Boston advertising? Here are the basics of our plan of action, a blueprint that any good company can follow.

Tip #1. Make it a company priority. Politely urged on by our colleague David M. Scott (who basically said we’d be idiots not to do it) we decided to start our own company blog, and we made sure everyone here knew that it was important. This is a crucial first step for any organization embarking on this journey.

I guarantee there will be some level of resistance to any blog effort. It takes time. It requires resources. Managers who are experts in their field, always busy professionals, may balk at spending their precious time blogging. Others might complain at the notion of sharing ideas—your intellectual capital—in a free online forum. For all these reasons, the initial blog directive must come from the top of the organization. So, when you announce your company’s blog initiative, have it come from the CEO.

We focused on our audience, which we determined to be marketing managers, colleagues, and talented people we could hire down the road. We thought a lot about what they would be interested in reading, and how those topic areas matched against areas of Captains’ expertise: web video storytelling, branding, content, social media, and technology trends shaping the industry. And because we, as a company, believe that work and fun are not mutually exclusive, we threw in a healthy dose of comedy and what blog-watchers have labeled “sass.”

Tip #2. Do some research on your customers. Find out what they care about and what they are searching for on the web. Also, dig a little to see what blogs they read, what movies they like, and what TV shows they watch. When you know what your audience likes, and what they choose to experience in other media, it helps shape your messages and writing tonality.

We kept SEO in mind. We highlighted topics we knew we could add some valuable insight based on our experience. But we also knew that having continuously published content on our site would help elevate the agency in search engine rankings, especially when other blogs linked to ours.

Tip #3. Research the key words and phrases your audience searches for most often, and build them into your writing. This way, search engines find them. But keep the focus on writing good stuff that’s genuinely helpful to your readers. Fake sentences designed strictly to enhance SEO are obvious and obnoxious. Keep it real.

We opened the doors of our knowledge base. In the pre-blog era, clients would only be able to benefit from our expertise if they paid us first. We threw that out the window and have consistently erred on the side of giving away everything we’ve learned over the years. In other words, we lost our fear of getting our ideas ripped off.

Tip #4. You need to go into the process understanding that a percentage of readers will simply take your ideas and run with them, without ever contacting you. And that’s OK because a larger percentage of readers, typically ones with money to spend, will in fact hire you for your expertise. An example of this is an e-book that the Captains of Industry created and published titled Branding and Marketing for Renewable Energy Companies.  We were visited by a renewable energy startup recently that had found the ebook online, and then called us. When they arrived at their first meeting here at Captains, we saw that they had actually printed out the e-book so they could use it as a guide. They didn’t have enough money to hire us at the time, but they eventually will. Other companies have found us and hired us based on the e-book, not because they actually read the book, but because that e-book and our blog made us rise higher on Google. (We are on page one of Google when you enter “Marketing for renewable energy.”) My takeaway is that some companies, often due to budget constraints, will always do everything in-house. But there really is no risk to us for giving away our ideas.

We made sure it wasn’t all about us. Nobody wants to read a blog that’s just another form of advertising, with the agency blowing their own horn. That’s why we frequently publish examples of work created by other agencies that we dig. This is not only good business, it reflects the reality that we don’t have all the answers, and that there are lots of great agencies doing interesting, innovative things in the industry. And if we do say something negative about someone else’s work, I hope we’ve done it in a way that’s respectful.

Tip #5. Direct your staff to spend 10 minutes each day reading leading blogs within your industry. Not an hour. Not a half hour. Just 10 measly minutes. It’s a small change that adds up to big change organizationally. By focusing on the work of other companies, you learn from them, and that learning helps make your company smarter, sharper, and more competitive. In the process, you’ll also have a lot more to blog about. From my experience, those other companies really appreciate your interaction with their brands, and they will reciprocate in time. And when other companies link to your blog, your SEO relevance improves.

Tip #6. Get organized and assign roles. Who’s going to make sure that a new, interesting post gets published daily (or almost daily)? We put someone in that lead role. But, understanding that leaders are often incredibly busy themselves, others on the team were empowered to jump in and make sure the posts got written. Our goal is to have a bunch of posts in the queue ready to go so we’re not scrambling on any given day to get a post done. We also have the flexibility to switch out posts in the cue for new posts that relate to timely news. In addition to the editorial leader, there’s also a core group of bloggers within the company who are constantly thinking up new post ideas, writing and editing. While it’s possible for one person to write the blog daily, we’ve found that having a range of voices mix together over time creates a unique flavor. Plus, having multiple writers helps share the workload.

Tip #7. Only hire people who are good writers, and let them know up front in the interview process that their participation in the blog is not only welcome, it’s required.

Like the Ford Motor Company, we made quality job No. 1. It’s more important to post something good than it is to post frequently. We’re always striving to post daily, but we’re not going to compromise on quality. If something’s not ready, we’ll skip a day or two until it is.

Tip #8. Establish a set of criteria that your posts have to meet. Make these clear, so your writers understand. For example, you might have three key requirements for every post: 1.) It has to shine a light on an issue that’s relevant to our readers, 2.) It has to be no more than X# of words, and 3.) It needs to tie in somehow with our core strengths as a company.

We engage with other blogs on a regular basis. They call it a blogosphere for a reason. It’s like some kind of huge organism made up of individual cells that are all connected. Commenting on other people’s blogs and participating in those conversations not only demonstrates that we are part of a larger community, the process also adds to our own knowledge.

Tip #9. Assign staff members to read specific blogs that are of interest to them, and share what they find with the team. We keep feeding our brains. We determined that finding something interesting to write about requires constantly looking outside the company, searching blogs, watching the news, checking out trends, and just plain listening. By getting input from lots of different sources, we’re able to cross-pollinate our thinking and come up with original ‘takes’ on industry themes and campaigns. That said, there are still plenty of days when we feel stupid when we can’t think of anything to write. This is normal.

Tip #10. Have everyone on the blog team read a different book on a regular basis that relates in some way to your industry. When they find noteworthy ideas, have them share those with the team. This generates a lot of great thinking within the company and leads to more interesting posts overall.

We add web content to spice things up. While good writing is the core of any blog, adding content such as original videos gives people something extra to engage with—like this video we made to show the difference between big and small agencies.

Tip #11. For a great guide on how to make content, check out the Content Rules book. We get social with our posts. New blog posts on a regular basis give us something to tweet about, allowing us to build connections with people who are interested in what’s cooking at Captains and in the industry as a whole.

Tip #12. Be sure to have a retweet button and other share options on your blog. In addition to sharing the posts on your corporate Facebook page, individual company members can also link to the posts on their own personal Facebook pages. But this should never be forced on employees.

We keep experimenting. Over the past year, we’ve added new types of content and themes, including “Products We Wish Existed”  and Friday Candy, which is basically a post that’s reserved for Friday afternoons when everybody’s in the mood for something sweet and funny.

Tip # 13. When you’re working with your blog team, make it clear that they are the ones in charge of pushing the boundaries and making the blog better and better. It’s like a shark; if it stops moving, it drowns.

Partly as a result of our focused blog strategy, Captains has grown 40% within the past year. Clients are finding us more frequently on the web, lowering our cost of customer acquisition. And more clients are hiring us to work with them to implement their own blog strategies. It’s a constantly evolving process, and we continue to learn more the longer we’re at it. But trust me on this: If a smaller agency like Captains of Industry can be successful with a blog, anyone can. It’s really just a question of starting.

In an early effort to begin aligning with sales, I decided to eat lunch with the Western Region sales team and its vice president. When I sat down and introduced myself, the vice president shook my hand and greeted me with these words: “Welcome to the company.  I’ll be honest. Marketing has never made a difference for me and my team, and I don’t expect much to change.” 

With that I was put on notice. I had a very, very tough crowd!

Four years later, I attended my last sales meeting at that company. That same vice president stood up, told the story of the day we met, and then told the entire group that he was glad he was wrong.

How did this happen? How had we aligned my marketing team and with sales by the end of my tenure at that company? How was it that we were now working collaboratively? How did we find success when the beginning looked so daunting?

In short, we dropped the “and.”

Historically, marketing and sales have been kept separate, viewed as two separate departments. They are even measured on different goals. However, as the B2B buyer has changed dramatically, this separation of marketing and sales is proving less effective. In response, leading companies are dropping the “and” in sales and marketing. As one vice president I spoke with recently said, it is now “smarketing.”

In one of his latest blog posts Gerhard Gschwandtner of Selling Power Magazine says, “Organizations that want to win must find a way to get sales and marketing to speak with ONE voice. Ideally, sales and marketing leaders should be able to complete each other’s sentences.” The key words here are “win”, “must,” and “ONE.” It is no longer effective to have the two separated. After all, the objectives of both groups are engaging buyers, creating new customers, expanding current customers and ultimately creating more revenue. Why wouldn’t they be doing so together?

So how does a company make the jump and transform to a place where they lose the and? Here are a few quick tips:

1.  Common Goals and Measurements

As mentioned above the ultimate goal of any company is to create revenue and profit. This can be accomplished in a variety of means (new customer acquisition, upselling/cross-selling, retention through customer service, etc.). Your company will meet its revenue goals faster and more efficiently if marketing-sales both have their eye on the measuring revenue and on those things that impact revenue, such as:

• Contribution to pipeline
• Lead aging
• Pipeline velocity
• Conversion metrics

Marketers may say, “What about impressions, clicks and opens?” The answer is that those metrics are good for measuring initial campaign effectiveness, but ultimate success (how campaigns generate revenue) is the metric on which both groups should focus. 

2. Unified Compensation

I remember working in one enterprise company where part of my quarterly bonus was tied to the number of press releases we issued.  (For the record, I am not diminishing the power and use of PR; I’m a big believer in it). The problem was that I was receiving a bonus for a tactic in which we had no means for measuring its effectiveness. Sales needed more leads, yet my attention was diverted so I could get some PR out the door and increase my paycheck. (Yes, ultimately even marketers are coin-operated.)

The goal of marketing-sales is revenue. So, both should have some level of compensation based on their attainment of the revenue goal.

In contrast to the press release focus I had in the company I mentioned earlier, another company I worked for provided commissions to marketing for each sale made. I bet you, as marketers, can guess where our focus was. Yep, you guessed it: quality leads delivered to the sales team, improving time to sale and sales enablement. Our common goals were netted out in a unified compensation plan.

3. A Collaborative Process

I keep reading posts and articles about how marketers need to include sales in defining what a lead is and that they need to help sales understand the lead-management process.  It’s as if sales is the new dorky kid at school, and marketing’s parents have instructed them “be nice to the new kids.”

Marketing doesn’t need to explain anything to Sales.  Sales knows what they want and what they need.  Both groups need to ask, listen, and get to work on the respective tasks that will generate revenue. Marketing-Sales is a joint value proposition whereby both have to roll-up their sleeves and jump in together. Developing a lead-management process is not a marketing function. It’s a corporate-wide process developed by ONE group made up of those with a marketing background and those with a sales background.

Buyers don’t care about the internal politics or alignment issues between marketing and sales.  They care about buying from an organization that knows them, engages them in meaningful dialogue, and addresses their challenges.  The only way organizations will consistently achieve this is by dropping the “and” and becoming “one.”

Keith Trivitt, associate director of PR at the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), wrote about the ongoing debate over ownership of social media recently over at the PR Breakfast Club blog. He says, in short, Enough fighting! “We must come to the realization that a concept that once seemed preposterous — collaboration with competitors — is fast becoming the norm for modern PR, marketing and advertising initiatives.” The different disciplines shouldn’t be fighting over territory, in other words.

I believe social media, in most cases, should be a shared effort. Parameters for messaging should be determined by the marketing folks, in close coordination with the ad and PR people, and possibly even top management. Day-to-day implementation should be handled, in most cases, by the PR people, because they are supposed to be the experts in communications. But all the marketing disciplines must have regular involvement.

It’s also essential to have good, clear lines of communication established among all the players, so all are able to have a voice if an issue, event, or online discussion goes beyond the predetermined parameters, whatever those might be for a particular brand or company.

Just as in so many other areas of business and organizational life, a lot of success in handling social media is based on planning ahead.

“Competition is indeed a great thing,” Keith Trivitt says, “but so is a collaborative sense that helps build many industries’ overall value to consumers and brands.”

Or, in the case of those of us in PR and advertising, collaboration can build value to our clients and/or bosses.

As “master at charming his subjects into revealing interesting pieces of information,” Rose has spent countless hours of interviewing some of the world’s most interesting people. What makes Rose so special? Rose interviews politicians, celebrities, generals, scientists, musicians, and anyone really with ease and clarity. He sets the environment with a simple oak table and a black backdrop, as if there were nothing more important than his guest. He comes well prepared for his meetings, ready to pounce on an answer, but also willing to let the conversation ebb and flow within defined constraints.

The Financial Times also notes that Rose rarely takes sides in an interview, preferring to take an even-handed approach. And in comparison to competitors on other cable news channels, Rose seems downright “thoughtful” and willing to have a conversation rather than a shouting match.

Studying his technique from multiple online interviews, I curated five best practices (there may be more) that should be emulated in the hiring process:

1. After Pleasantries, Get Right to It.

Rose doesn’t waste a lot of time in his interviews. He introduces his guests, shakes their hand, and  jumps right into questions. It can be argued that this rapid style is more suitable for television audiences with a limited attention span; however for the corporate interviewer with five to seven interviews lined up in a row, it makes a lot of sense to get right to business.

2. Do Your Homework.

Recruiters often plead with candidates to learn as much as they can about a company’s history, culture, and needs before they meet with a hiring manager. Indeed, the well-prepared candidate is one who is ready to engage in the interview and excited about the opportunity. Taking a cue from Rose, it is not only the candidate that should be prepared for the interview, but the hiring manager as well. Charlie Rose does his homework. He doesn’t fumble in his questioning. He knows exactly what he wants to ask and when. And his detailed preparation is obvious.

3. Go Deeper.

Because of Rose’s detailed preparation, he’s ready for questions that do more than simply skim the surface. In fact, he often asks probing questions two or three levels deep, in an effort to clarify his understanding. To dive deeper in questioning, one must have familiarity with the subject matter and the interviewee. Charlie Rose isn’t an expert in everything, but his breadth of knowledge allows him to show command of a specific topic and reach deeper with his line of questions than most interviewers.

4. Interviewing Style Matters.

Rose has an almost casual bent to his interviews. Case in point, a writer from the Financial Times remarks how a two-hour lunch with Charlie Rose “glided by, seamlessly and unnoticed.” These types of breezy interviews may not be favored by the aggressive hiring manager who likes to put candidates “on their toes” with rapid fire questions. However, it’s often wise for hiring managers to remember that while they are interviewing candidates, the converse is also true.

5. Listen and Learn.

Sadly, many hiring managers would rather formulate their next question than listen to the candidate answer the previous question. And that’s a real shame because an interview provides a gold mine of information for both parties. Interviewers should take a cue from Charlie Rose and really listen to the answers provided by candidates. It’s amazing what information can be gathered by truly listening when someone speaks!

Questions

• Do you find Charlie Rose a particularly effective interviewer? What do you like or dislike about his methods and style?
• What interviewing techniques help you find the best qualified candidate?

If everyone is sourcing from China, it must be a worthwhile endeavor right? Author Paul Midler might disagree. In his tome, Poorly Made in China, Midler discusses Chinese business culture, manufacturer/importer relationships, counterfeiting, and more. Of particular interest, Midler provides a behind-the-scenes look at quality control in a typical factory, where he spots workers sticking their hands in product, problems with substandard and “wobbly” packaging, and the routine shipping of defective products. “Consumer and product safety (are) not large concerns,” he says.

And that’s why, despite initial cost advantages, some companies are finding that it is ultimately a better choice to bring production back home.

A March 2011, Wired Magazine article titled, “Made in the USA,” mentions a case study for Sleek Audio, a high-end maker of ear phones. Every few months, Mark Krywko, CEO of Sleek Audio, would make a trip to China’s factories to discuss quality challenges. And when Krywko visited his outsourced factories “his Chinese partners would assure him that everything was under control. These promises always proved empty.”

According to the article, in one instance, Sleek Audio had to discard an entire shipment of earphones (10,000 in quantity) because they were improperly welded—a mistake that cost the company millions of dollars. Another issue was continually missed production deadlines, which caused Sleek Audio lost profit opportunities.

Fed up with quality issues, Sleek Audio decided to bring production back to the United States. After exhaustive research, Sleek Audio contracted with a Florida company to produce the company’s earphones. Granted, the product cost 50% more to produce in the United States vs. China, but the benefits of increased product quality and faster time-to-market far outweighed an initial up-tick in costs.

And while this is just one case study, the Wired Magazine article notes that many companies are finding that once design considerations are taken into account—to remove as much manual labor as possible—manufacturing in the United States can actually be quite competitive.

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s be sure to recognize that there are many advantages to sourcing from China. China is still the manufacturer to the world—from shampoos and lotions to high-end technology. And without a doubt, according to a recent World Bank Report, there are few “low-cost” countries that have China’s infrastructure (transportation, electricity, telecommunications, water supply etc.) for making and transporting goods in an efficient manner.

However, as sources from this article recognize, an initial low cost is only part of the overall value equation. The entire supply chain must be considered in addition to the demand chain. It is for this reason then, marketing executives—with a pulse on customer needs and expectations—should be a crucial component of any product or service outsourcing discussion.

Questions:

• Paul Midler writes, “American consumers had once preferred to see the Made in USA tag, but somewhere along the line, Made in China began to sound like a bargain.” Do you see a sea change in consumer expectations, or does the mantra “as cheap as possible” still reign?
• Is “paying a little extra” a wise trade-off—not only for companies but customers too?

While I’ve never met Segal, nor do I doubt his experience in the B2B marketplace, I fervently disagree with his statement.  To explain why, here are my four reasons why B2B marketing is still alive and kicking.

1. Sales Needs It

It was not long ago that Marketing was seen as merely a cost center to most organizations.  Marketing offered no intrinsic value beyond designing brochures, making sexy presentations, and ensuring brand compliance.  When cuts had to be made, Marketing was one of the first targets. After all, Marketing had no value (or if it did, it didn’t know how to prove it).

However, this is not the case anymore.  Marketers in the B2B world are providing and proving value more than ever before.  They are working alongside their sales counterparts in the development of demand-generation and lead-management strategies.  They are helping to propel deals through the sales pipeline through the development and execution of lead nurturing.  They are focusing on generating quality (versus quantity) leads.  They are providing metrics that show the value of their work and how marketing spend is directly generating revenue.  More and more, sales organizations are understanding and appreciating the value of their marketing teams. Together, both groups are working to meet revenue goals.

2.  The B2B Buyer

In his statement, Segal mentions the use of mobile technologies and people who are shifting continuously. He is absolutely correct.  The B2B buyer is changing, and that change now has them in control of the buying process. Sales used to be in control of disseminating information to the buyer.  Not so anymore. Today, the buyer (or more often, buyers) now control and manage the entire process and involve Sales much later in it.  Buyers have access to information like never before.  Peer-to-peer interaction, social networks, and online research have shifted the power to the buyer, thus making Marketing all the more important.  Why?  Because Marketing is better positioned to engage the buyer in a one-on-one dialogue, while doing so in a mass context.

Buyers today are not just looking for a vendor. They want the assurance of a business relationship.  They are looking to buy from partners who will provide value, understand their needs, and grow with them.  Building this relationship requires consistent, relevant, timely content centered on each buyer’s needs. Today, marketing is the entity driving this in B2B organizations.  So as the buyer continues to transform, marketing will be ever so vital to customer acquisition and retention.

3. The Focus on Revenue

One of the reasons Marketing has traditionally been a corporate doormat is its inability to show value in what it was delivering.  This is no longer the case. With the attention to metrics and the use of automation and BI technologies, Marketing is now able to show its impact on pipeline and revenue.  This shift in focus is putting Marketing on par with sales from a revenue goals perspective. It’s also bringing alignment to organizations.  While many marketing groups are still in the process of developing this approach, the awareness and understanding of revenue impact as the key barometer of success is certainly there.  This shift in focus has revived marketing groups and is allowing them to showcase their impact on their companies.

4.  Enabling Technologies

The marketing automation industry is a little more than a decade old. Yet the last three years have seen a significant increase in awareness where marketers are now looking to these technologies as keys to success.  While adoption rates are increasing slowly, marketers are beginning to understand that combined with the right people, process and content, marketing automation can enable them to meet the needs of their buyer and deliver the most quality leads to sales.  These technologies have truly been a game changer for B2B marketing organizations. When used correctly, they breathe new life into a marketing organization, giving them exponentially greater resources to drive revenue.

I have said it before and will continue to say it over and over again: “There is no better time to be a B2B marketer!”  Proclamations of its death—while provocative—are surely premature.  B2B marketing is just hitting its stride!

That’s what’s happening with the Digital Marketing Forum 2011.

The party took place Feb. 3 and Feb. 4 in Austin, Texas. And some of the biggest names in digital marketing held sessions that showed why they have that distinction. Information and stories were shared in real-life, accessible, and engaging language.  And the sessions themselves showed the current state of digital marketing: lively and personal.

Here are some reasons  the Digital Marketing Conference stood out:

• well-known anthropologist Michael Wesch’s brilliant take on our mediated culture (and the history of the words “whatever” and “meh”)
• a special book-signing section for authors (and forum speakers) Jay Baer and Amber Naslund of the “The Now Revolution,” and authors C.C. Chapman and Ann Handley of “Content Rules”
• rockin’, geeky graphic designs and a talk about passion for a product, courtesy of Threadless vice president of marketing, Cam Balzer
• a real-time example of the frustration of dealing with non-social-media-savvy companies using Facebook as Frank Eliason spontaneously shared the roadblocks he faces while working in a company with private, legal info
• awesome insights regarding the convergence of search and social from ExpertBail, a bail bond company that wowed everyone with its social-media savviness

In the true spirit of digital marketing, the sessions were like conversations between the speakers and the attendees, those listening in Austin and those watching from their computers. And the #mpforum hashtag served as a campfire, where we swapped info, memorable tweetable quotes, cell-phone pics, and even gave shout outs to the speakers.

And now though we’ve all headed back to our own stomping grounds, the campfire is still there. Here are some recent quotes from Twitter:

• @JJPool: Head still swimming with all the great ideas and inspiration picked up at #mpforum. Thanks for a great event!
• @Marcomm3: Revisiting @CKsays #mpforum  session on What’s Hot in Mobile Marketing. Just as awesome as the first time! Thanks again CK and @MProfsEvents
• @MitziThomas: I’m so impressed with @marketingprofs live video feed. Sorry to miss Austin, but this is next best thing. #mpforum

I could go through agenda and offer up more examples; each session had a steady stream of attendees sharing info via Twitter, Facebook, and their own blogs. But you’ll just have to check the forum out online. Yep, the fire is still burning bright for y’all.

So, if you didn’t get to experience the Digital Marketing Conference last week, just register to see it online until May 1. It features streaming video of 20 sessions plus both keynotes—all for just $199.

And after you’re done, don’t forget to join us at our other campfire site.

The same kind of fear and skepticism shown by the heroine can be seen on the faces of B2B marketers today.  For years, B2B marketing was the proverbial forgotten stepchild. Marketers just needed to focus on getting campaigns out on time, and all was well.  Not so today. Suddenly, B2B marketers find themselves being “chased” by sales, finance, and other groups that are looking to them to generate leads, measure their impact on revenue, generate content, and help sales move deals through the pipeline at a faster pace.  In addition to those internal pressures, marketing automation (a technology about which many are still uneducated) is now at the forefront. These factors are causing confusion and “fear” for today’s marketer,  making it seem there’s no way out.

If you are feeling like this, don’t worry. Unlike the Fire Swamp, many have adapted to the new world of B2B marketing. I’d like to offer four tips to help you survive.

Tip #1:  Relax!

I’m not being flippant here. Just relax, take a step back, and consider enjoying the role you’re in.  I’ve said before that there is no better time to be in B2B marketing.  Yes, there is much that is expected of us. But with that expectation comes a great opportunity to shine.  So, enjoy the ride and accept challenge.

Tip #2:  Be Realistic

Years ago, in a previous role, I became the head of a marketing department at a technology company. Within weeks of starting, I began to receive calls from others in the organization asking why things were not moving at a faster pace. I took each of these opportunities to outline for my peers where the department had been, the dormancy of marketing in the organization, the vision for what we were going to accomplish, and the plan for how we were going to do so. Some of the items on our plan were easy, resulting in quick wins. Other items would take longer, and we made it clear that they would.  The bottom line is that we were realistic.  We knew what had to be done, and we also knew that not all of it could be done overnight. In fact, some of our initiatives took up to two years.  But all along, we were sure to show our incremental progress.

Understand that you will not change things overnight. Map out a realistic plan, work with others in the organization to execute the plan, and allow the necessary time to do it right.

Tip #3: Seek to Know That Which You Don’t Know

Several years ago, I had a plumbing issue in my home that was causing low water pressure. The first plumber I called told me the problem was the line running from the water main to our home, and it would cost $5,000 to replace. Wanting a second opinion, I called another plumber who informed me that because the home was built in the 1960s, I would need to replace all of my pipes.  We didn’t get to the “quote stage” because I hung up on him.  The third plumber I spoke to spent 20 minutes asking me a variety of questions about the house, if we’d had past problems, did we have any water filters, etc.  After the discovery process, he diagnosed the problem and gave me a relatively low-cost, do-it-yourself fix. And it worked!

The lesson here is take the time to diagnose.  Discover and identify the real problems that exist.  Too many times marketers begin fixing what are perceived issues when in reality they are focusing on symptoms and missing the problem all together. To get a good understanding of where you are in terms of marketing health, conduct an audit of your current state.  This audit should apply to your lead management process, your content library, demand generation strategy, resources and any other area that will impact the success of your marketing efforts. After you identify the real issues, prioritize what should be addressed and work that into your plan.  Once this is complete, the real work and fun begins!

Tip #4.  Make Friends With Sales

True success in marketing cannot be achieved if there is a gap between marketing and sales.   Make sure you are listening to, asking for input from, and collaborating with sales.  While they view the world differently, they have incredible insight into the needs and patterns of your buyers that will prove invaluable.

The world of the B2B marketer has surely changed. This change is a positive one and should be looked at as a tremendous opportunity for all marketers.  So, keep running. You will survive!

What I wanted to know was how Daniel thought the six abilities he mentions in A Whole New Mind would affect marketers today in light of new media. If you haven’t read his book, don’t worry. He explains it all in the video clip. However, the book is worth reading as marketers.

I love what he says about organization change—how “one smart, strategic person” can do something “semi-subversive” to make big changes.

What do you think of his comments?

I think the real reason is that the misalignment between marketing and sales is not actually the real problem. It’s actually a symptom of deeper problems:

• Lack of process
• Aligning around the wrong things
• Mismanaged sales quota

Lack of Process

According to several recent studies, up to 80% of leads do not get the proper follow-up. So, not surprisingly, one of the biggest challenges facing marketers is delivering qualified leads.  But in most organizations, there are multiple definitions for “qualified leads,” depending on who you speak to. This inconsistency helps contribute to the misalignment.  This challenge faced by organizations is most often because marketing and sales do not share a set of common definitions for terms such as “lead,” “qualified,” “prospect,” etc.  Marketing and sales have not collaborated on defining a process framework that answers fundamental questions, such as “What is the definition of a ‘qualified lead’ for our company?”

Marketing and sales should work together to define a Lead Management Framework, including:

• data process
• lead planning process
• lead routing process
• lead qualification process
• lead nurturing process
• metrics process

Organizations that do so will benefit by having:

• A set of common definitions for managing leads
• SLAs and business rules for lead routing
• A lead scoring model that delivers quality leads to sales
• Lead nurturing communications for those not ready to buy
• A host of other benefits.

As one customer stated after developing their process,  “Marketing and sales used to pass in the halls and not even look at each other.  Now we pass and give high fives because we know we are a team.”

Aligning to the Wrong Thing

One of the obstacles that marketing and sales organizations face when looking to align is their own misunderstanding on what alignment should be based. They’re aligning around the wrong thing. For example, marketing may want sales to come their way and think about campaigns. Sales on the other hand, may ask marketing to start thinking about collateral support for helping to close deals. These examples are not alignment; they are just trying to get the other side to view the world their way. The truth is that the right thing around which marketing and sales teams should align are their buyers.

Today’s B2B buyer is looking to engage with their vendors and have a relevant 1-1 dialogue. They don’t care about the internal squabbles that may occur between marketing and sales teams. They want to feel attended to. So, marketing and sales need to collaborate on how to have the dialogue with the buyer.

There are three key areas on which this collaboration should focus. The first is identifying the ideal buyer profile.  Having this profile (or profiles—most companies will have multiple personas/profiles unique to each service or product offering) ensures that marketing and sales will be engaging with the same targeted buyer.

Secondly, it’s vital to create a map for each profile’s buying cycle. This is more than just time to sale. It’s a full understanding of the buying journey of each persona to whom your organization sells.  Understanding and defining the buyer’s journey will allow you to “walk in your customers’ shoes,” helping both marketing and sales to better understand what they need at each stage, and to engage them in meaningful dialogue.

The third area of focus, once you have identified the personas and mapped out the buyer journey, is to develop your offer and content maps. These maps are guides that will enable you to deliver the most relevant content to the buyer at every stage of the cycle. Communicating based on an offer/content map will improve the alignment with your buyer, enable 1-1 engagement and deliver a more qualified and educated prospect to sales.

Mismanaged Sales Quota

One of the biggest obstacles marketing and sales organizations face in trying to align is the issue of quota.

I remember a conversation I had with a sales VP at a company I used to work for where I ran one of the global marketing teams. It was about half-way through the quarter, and he was panicking because his team’s performance was not what he needed to attain quota. During the conversation he looked at me and said, “I know we agreed on a strategy at the beginning of the year, but right now I need revenue. I’m telling my team to ‘chase it and sign it’ or else I won’t be here to work the strategy for the second-half of the year.” What was I to say to that?  This guy and some members of his team were fighting for their jobs. At the very least, I appreciated his candor.

The quarterly quota pressure is felt in organizations every 90-days. But this pressure would be easy to alleviate if organizations would begin to align their sales compensation plans to the buying/sales cycle (see customer alignment above). In the scenario I mentioned above, we had statistics that showed that the average buying time was 180 days. Yet we were telling our sales folks they had to sell in 90 days.

This quota pressure was not only causing panic in my sales counterparts, but it kept us from alignment with them as well.  Sales had bypassed the agreed to strategy in exchange for demanding only hot leads.  With that pressure there was no talk of nurturing, dialogue, buyer journeys, etc. They wanted leads they could close today!

This issue is easy to resolve and it’s something most organizations should seek to address early in 2011. The simple fix is to align sales quota to the customer buying cycle. This could result in either lengthening or shortening the quota cycle: If you have a 30-day sales cycle, then adjust your quota accordingly; if it’s 180 days, do the same. By adjusting your sales compensation to reflect the buying patterns of your buyer, you will not only provide your sales people a less pressure-filled environment in which to sell, you will better align with marketing and more importantly your buyer and marketing will be able to develop a demand generation strategy based on the buying cycles.

As we begin a new year, let’s stop addressing the symptom of marketing and sales alignment and begin working on some of the fundamental problems that are causing the symptom. It would be great if at this time next year, we could write about success stories instead of repeating ourselves on how to solve the problem.

Greg’s premise is that the most successful businesses need to stop with the grand gestures, splashy creative, and big-budget media buys designed to reach and appeal to the widest possible audience. Instead, the most successful business will increasingly rely on “micromarketing,” and they will rethink how they invest in marketing their business.

Here are 3 ways the smartest organizations can embrace the notion that, in 2011, smaller can be more powerful. And by “smartest organizations,” I mean you. Of course.

1. Use small as a competitive advantage. Rather than investing in traditional mass marketing tactics that to make you “look big”—like print ads, radio advertising, event sponsorships, out-of-home, or spot television—try acting small. Rethink how you invest in marketing, and identify more economical and more effective ways to engage your core audiences by using social media, content creation, customer-centricity, and influencer relations.

2. Market like a small businesses. The bigger a business is, the more likely it is to struggle with the things that will spell success in 2011: The ability to market “real-time;” be quick and nimble; emphasize human-scale, one-on-one interactions; embrace simple social media approaches and the amplification effect you get when the right people start spreading their interpretations of your messages and content throughout their social graphs; and maintain a maniacal focus on super-serving niche audiences (or “microcultures”), as Greg calls them. Need help? Take a page from small businesses, which are typically more natural micro-marketers and are generally more open to serving niche audiences.

The best businesses in 2011 will think and act this way, rather than trying to be all things to all people.

3. Understand how to create microcontent. What’s “microcontent”? It’s all the bite-sized pieces of information and entertainment we create and share on the social Web: our tweets, our photos, our short Facebook or LinkedIn status updates, shared links with a sentence or two of commentary as to why we’re sharing, all those two- or three-minute YouTube videos, Greg says. He uses the term “microcontent” to contrast all of this with the more conventional notion of content—long articles, television shows, movies, books, etc.—that have generally been the domain of mass media outlets.

Microcontent, Greg says, has become a currency of the socially connected—people love it when their friends share bits of content that are cool, interesting, informative, entertaining, funny, shocking or eye-opening. The challenge for business is to create microcontent that connected consumers will want to share (hint: not your ads, and nothing penned in Frankenspeak). Or consider how you can partner with your customers to create compelling microcontent that is relevant to your brand, and provides new ways to get the word out about your company, products and services without spending a lot of money on paid media buys.

So what other ways can you think and act small in the coming year? Leave a comment below, and let me know.

Need some inspiration? I’ll pick a lucky individual at random and will give away a copy of microMARKETING to jump-start your 2011 marketing. (So be sure to leave an email address!)

As someone who’s sat in that chief marketing officer chair (I was a line executive for a number of years with organizations like Digital River, Wilson’s Leather and Deluxe Corporation), I know the challenges of trying to stay ahead by looking forward, but also trying to keep one foot on the ground by continuing to achieve financial results.

So, what would I share about the year ahead from a customer experience standpoint if I had 10 minutes with a roomful of Fortune 500 executives? I thought you’d never ask.

First, top performing organizations are learning that customer experience is a path to profitability—not a trade-off. A while ago an executive said to me, “Linda, I’m not sure how much customer experience we can afford.” He saw investments in experience as a trade-off to profitability. Heading into 2011, fewer executives profess this view—and that’s good news for them, their organizations, and their customers.

More and more leaders are defining a specific ideal customer experience, then using it as the guide for daily decision making across the organization, in good times and in bad. They’re winning the same payoff we saw in the top performers in our 2008 research. In that study we found that organizations with a well-understood definition of customer experience are TWICE as likely to beat their profit targets than those who do not. Heading into 2011,  I see more and more companies follow the customer experience path to better financial performance.

For additional insights, I polled seven other thought leaders and line executives who have proven success in driving performance for organizations via customer experience. I asked them what they’d share with a Fortune 500 executive if they had 10 minutes to talk about key trends in 2011. Here’s what they had to say:

Barry Dalton

“Customer experience and marketing will converge. A turf war is possible for ownership between chief experience offers and chief marketing officers. Also, self-service and social media for customer service will continue to grow.”

…

Chris Reaburn

“I have to say, a key trend is that people are starting to link the service profit chain in a meaningful way, recognizing the connection between employee satisfaction and loyalty, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and profit. The best are measuring internal satisfaction as a leading indicator of external satisfaction.”

…

Ted Coine

“Savvy companies are already using social media to engage their customers more, to include them in the actual design of products and service experience. We’ll see a LOT more of that in 2011 and onward. The gulf between 20th- and 21st-century business models will grow vast as a result.”

…

Wim Rampen

“I think customer involvement is the overarching trend that will affect customer experience in 2011 and beyond. We’ll see a huge increase of customer involvement in customer service through support communities and we’ll see an increase of mass customization propositions, product co-creation efforts and ideation forums. I hope to see companies seeking to involve customers more to create value for themselves or other customers than seeking customer involvement for broadcasting marketing messages to potential targets.”

…

Alan See

“First, you will not get a do-over, mulligan ,or practice shot. Translation: Do your P&L homework upfront and structure your best offer immediately. Don’t hold back. Consumers with cash and a willingness to spend it are in short supply right now.

“Second, focus on the consumer. Translation: Make sure you address competitive weaknesses within the four stages of the consumer purchasing process lifecycle, including: Awareness, Information Search, Evaluation, and Purchase/After-Sale Service. In addition, you may need to think smaller by breaking large marketing initiatives into several highly targeted micro campaigns based on continuous selection of the best (most profitable) of the best (ready-to-buy).

“Third, don’t wait until there is a problem to contact or follow up with customers. Translation: Monitor trigger events (contract dates, service calls, etc.) closely and nurture two-way relationship-building conversations. For example, my cell phone contract expired back in February, and I still have not been contacted. When you do follow up, make sure you have something valuable or significant to relate. By the way, a call merely to say you ‘just wanted to touch base’ is not value-add.

“Finally, keep asking, listening, analyzing and improving. Translation: Keep asking for and listening to your customer’s feedback. And make sure you are leveraging and engaging your entire organization as it relates to that feedback. Social media platforms are an excellent channel to help you both listen and engage in conversation.”

…

Jeannie Walters

“I would tell them to be aware of giant killers in customer experience. There are several larger companies that have ignored what smaller, more nimble competitors are doing to create memorable experiences for their customers. This differentiator can create more loyalty, word of mouth awareness, and recommendations. I’ve watched as large companies stick their heads in the sand as start-ups, even with fewer features or higher prices, chip away at their customer base by appealing to the emotional experience people are craving. ‘The way we’ve always done it’ is not good enough! Watch what your competition is doing to appeal to customers, and take note.”

…

Kent Huffman

“In 2011, your entire organization should be laser focused on customers—not on simply satisfying needs or even fostering loyalty, but creating a unique customer experience that motivates them to willingly spread the word about your products or services with evangelical enthusiasm. One very effective way to accomplish that is by truly listening to and interacting with your customers via social media. Companies like Dell, with its newly launched Social Media Listening Command Center, are already leading the way.”

…

That’s what the experts think. What about you? What customer experience trend would you point to if you had 10 minutes with a Fortune 500 excutive for 2011?

…

I am a B2B marketer and, for some time, have felt compelled to write to all of you about the often discussed yet never solved marketing and sales alignment gap. In no way is the intent of my letter to cast aspersions upon you or point the finger for the gap that exists between us. This letter is meant to serve as an apology to all of you on behalf of all of us B2B marketers (and since I am writing on behalf of all B2B marketers, I will speak as the collective “we”).

We hope this letter is accepted with the sincerity in which it was written. We hope it can be the start of something transformational between marketing and sales. We truly believe that to adapt to the changing B2B buyer, we must work together in a collaborative fashion and that, in doing so, we will deliver incredible value to our customers and increase our companies’ revenue exponentially.

We know that we have a rocky past, but we are committed to a healthy future together. To get there, we vow that we will build our relationship in the future by doing the following:

We Will Listen

As marketers, we’re aware of our tendency to talk. We are full of good ideas, and we are aware of our ability to make things look pretty. We are also aware of our aptitude for pulling numbers and putting them in PowerPoint presentations to show how successful our marketing campaigns have been. However, we have also come to realize that we are really bad at listening. Sure, we know that every once in a while we send an email asking for sales input, but in reality, we haven’t given your responses  much consideration. Starting now, that will change. We will continually involve you in our work. We want to know what you need from marketing to be successful. We want to know what you mean when you use the word “lead” so that we can deliver quality ones to you. And not only will we listen, but we’ll translate that listening into action.

We Will Work With You to Deliver a Process-Based Lead-Management Approach

We know that in the past we have taken a very “top of the funnel” (i.e. lead generation) approach to our marketing. We know that when “leads” came into the funnel, all we did was dump them on you, so you could follow up and sell. We then went back to our PowerPoint presentations, so we could tell management about all the leads we generated.

But now, in listening to you, we have realized that what we generated were not really “leads.” They were more like “responses.” To correct this, we promise to develop, in collaboration with you, a lead-management approach so that you receive only the best quality leads. This process will ensure that all leads are managed through the buying process. By marketing this way, we hope to help you increase the conversion rates on the leads you will receive, which will ultimately increase your sales numbers.

In addition, as part of this process, we will work to ensure the integrity of our marketing and sales data. We will ask you to help us plan our quota (i.e. the amount of revenue for which marketing will be responsible, and the number of leads it will take to get there). We will ask you to help us build a lead-qualification framework. We will ask for your help in developing nurture strategies that help push deals through the pipeline in a more timely fashion. We need your help to build this lead-management framework effectively.

We Will Become Coin-Operated

We confess that when we are in our marketing meetings, we often talk about sales being “coin-operated” as if it’s some kind of disease.  We understand that coin-operated (i.e. having a revenue creation mindset) is a healthy way to look at our business. Please forgive us for the derision. Going forward, you can consider us coin-operated marketers. We will look at our marketing success in terms of the number of leads you accept from us and how many of those leads contribute to revenue. We will deliver reports that show the revenue we have helped create through our campaigns. We look forward to helping you create more revenue for our company. We will need your help in this area as we are not accustomed to working this way. As part of our commitment, we will make our marketers compensation tied to revenue, just like you. In doing so we will share the burden with you and be more aligned towards a common goal.

We Will Market by the Numbers

We will no longer market by activity-driven pressures. We will not attend events, send emails, buy online ads or run social campaigns simply because it is “what we have always done” or because “we have money in the budget to do so.” Instead, we will measure our campaigns based on their contribution to revenue. We will then continue to run those campaigns which contribute to revenue, and do away with those that do not. We will use business intelligence that we derive from both marketing and sales metrics to help us plan for the future. (We’ll need you to share your metrics with us.)

We Will Be Accountable and View You as Our Customer

We will no longer point the finger at sales, blaming you for “not getting it” or suggesting that more diligent follow up on leads by you will solve our problems. We will be open with you, sharing our failures. We will learn from them and seek to improve. We will also share our successes with you. Together, we’ll show management how we’ve created more revenue for our organizations. We won’t hide behind insignificant data such as “opens” and “clicks.” We’ll focus on numbers such as lead to sale conversions and marketing pipeline contribution.  Based on metrics from the past, we’ll commit to goals and objectives and do our best to meet them. You have a quota, and now, we’ll have one as well. We’ll ask you for continued feedback and input.

We hope you can see our earnestness in what we’ve written here, and that, together, we can begin anew. Our prospects and customers are tired of us bickering and pointing the finger at each other. They want us to deliver value, provide relevant content, and address their pressing needs. I’m confident we can do so together.

We look forward to a long lasting and fruitful relationship!

Sincerely,
B2B marketers everywhere

The Best Boss

Respects

1. Earns Respect: Understands that title alone doesn’t grant respect. Respect is earned. And the fastest way to get respect from your team is to respect them first.
2. Never Belittles: Criticizes in private. Praises in public. A good boss doesn’t reprimand employees in front of other people. Growth comes from constructive feedback. Tearing someone apart in front of their peers kills morale and says more about your need to wield power than help your employee.
3. Stays Grounded: She doesn’t let having an executive assistant and a corner office let her forget what it was like in the cubicle trenches. She remembers and is willing to roll up her sleeves.

Trusts

1. Stands By Me: Shows loyalty and support. When someone from another department has a complaint about one of your workers, a good boss listens to get a clear understanding of what happened, then speaks with that person before forming judgment.If you were out of line, she’ll have you fix the situation. If you were in the right, she’ll return to the person who complained to set things straight.
2. Respects the Role: Despite what they show on Mad Men, your employees won’t respect you if you leap out of your chair to poke your head out your office door to check-out a co-worker as she walks by. It is also really out of line to sleep with your department’s human resources representative. (True story, by the same boss.)

Supports

1. Keeps Distance, But Is Always Near: Sometimes, an employee needs micro-management. When they don’t, stay out of the way. However, like a life-ring at the pool, be nearby when you are needed.
2. Sets You Up for Success: While a good boss may push and challenge you, he won’t throw you to the wolves or sharks. He has realistic expectations of what can and needs to be done, and sets you up for success.
3. Is a Bulldozer: A great boss clears a path for her employees. If there is a new well-thought and well-planned program that may get resistance from another department, she works to clear the path for the program.
4. Support Themselves: The best boss hires an awesome Executive Assistant and treats them like gold. Truth is, bosses don’t run companies, assistants do. Their skill to serve as air traffic controller for your team and busy schedule is critical.

Fosters Teamwork

1. Sets The Example: Actions speak louder than words. A “do as I say, not as I do” approach may not work. For example, if you want your team to respect deadlines, lead by example.
2. Plays To Our Strengths: Knows his department well enough to form teams of people with complimentary skills.
3. Teaches: Be a boss your team can learn from. You don’t have to know all the answers. It’s enough to know where to find the answers.
4. Doesn’t Air Dirty Laundry: If there is a problem or dysfunction among the team, this is information and a situation that should be handled within and among the department—perhaps behind closed doors. Don’t expose co-workers, internal customers, or clients to your problems.

Communicates

1. Knows “The Five Work Languages”: This riffs off the book by Gary Chapman called The Five Love Languages. Chapman describes, in personal relationships, there are five ways we speak and understand how expressions of love. They are:
   1. words of affirmation
   2. quality time
   3. receiving gifts
   4. acts of service
   5. physical touch

   Though you may appreciate “words of affirmation” as an expression of love, your partner may prefer to spend “quality time” as a measure of love. Common understanding of these leads to more fulfilled relationships.

   These can be reapplied at the office as The Five Work Languages. (I think there is a book idea here!)

   These categories match with what a boss should look for in their employees.

   1. words of affirmation (Tell me I’m doing a good job.)
   2. quality time (Take time out of your schedule for me.)
   3. receiving gifts (Show me the money.)
   4. acts of service (Do something for me that requires thought, planning, time energy and effort.)
   5. physical touch (Thank me with a handshake or pat on the back.)
2. Dishes the Inside Scoop: Most companies require employees to be able to manage certain levels of change and ambiguity. Reorganizations, layoffs, and new departmental structures can throw hard-working employees into a spin.One boss used to call an “emergency meeting” when something fairly major was going to happen within the organization. She probably would have gotten in trouble for sharing what she knew before the company-wide general announcement. But, she respected (and trusted) us to provide us with the inside scoop. Her goal was to have us better prepared when the announcement took place.Instead of being in a panic when the change was announced, we already had time to think about it (just as she had) and were able to prepare—mentally and logistically. We didn’t waste time in a panic; we put the knowledge into immediate action.

Recognizes

1. Recognizes And Rewards: A great boss knows the job well enough, they appreciate the work it take for an employee to do it right.It can be very deflating, for an employee who works their butt off, to accomplish a huge project simply to have the boss fluff-off the effort.
2. Gives Credit and Takes Blame: When things are going well, she recognizes the efforts of her team. When things get messed up, she accepts responsibility to make it right.

Develops

1. Replaces Themselves: One goal of a great boss is to develop employees to be their successor. You’ll never be able to promote if there is no one to fill your shoes.
2. Builds Bench Strength: While developing a successor, they are also building up a manager for a director role. While making sure specialists are ready to move into the manager role.
3. Is a Gardener: Great bosses grow great employees. They develop their team. They measure themselves by how much they’ve grown their team.
4. Pushes: The best boss pushes you. They know what you’re capable of, and ask for a bit more. This helps you grow.

Kevin, I hope this helps you. I invite everyone to join in. Please add your experiences below. Perhaps, start your comments with either @GOOD BOSS or @BAD BOSS so we can sort through the advice.

It surpassed our wildest expectations.

More than 180 people from around the world joined in the conversation, and more than 1,350 tweets were sent—stunning for any chat’s first night out of the gate.

But what was much more impressive to us than the numbers was the stratospheric level of the conversation.  There was genuinely smart debate around leadership insights, experiences, and sources—and in some cases blatant and ardent disagreements that were respectful and often laced with humor.

That’s exactly what a vigorous discussion should be like. We loved it!

Lisa says that, having grown up in an Italian family where loud voices and arm waving are not only the norm but mean you’re among family, it felt good to be a part of the chat. It represented our version of sitting around a very large dinner table, perhaps in Tuscany, where every guest has a seat at the table and the conversation is stimulating, vibrant and passionate. For Steve, who grew up in a more restrained New England environment, the free-wheeling type of discussion we experienced at #LeadershipChat is always refreshing.

If there is a “real essence” to social media, this felt like it.

We believe there are 4 key reasons the first #LeadershipChat was so successful:

1. We gave it a lot of thought before deciding to move forward, making sure we were committed and prepared.

We hope that this turns out to be a long-running weekly event, so we discussed our ability to commit to the day and time and our genuine enthusiasm and commitment.  Lisa believes that the fact that she’s been attending #blogchat quite regularly for a year now enabled her to “learn from the best” (Mack Collier) and to understand what it takes to be a great host. Steve has participated in enough chats to gain a sense of what works—and what might work better. We also decided that our promotional approach would be fun and a little offbeat, using video, graphics, and a touch of snark to gain exposure.

2. We tried to make the format unique to the topic and something that would provoke smart discussion.

We’ll learn as we go, but right now we’re excited about the plan to discuss a different leadership article each week, with Lisa posting her perspective on it Monday mornings on her blog, and Steve creating and sharing a “counterpoint” video on his blog every Tuesday morning.  We’ll turn it over to the #LeadershipChat participants on Tuesday evenings to run with it and tell us what they believe.

As we shared when we announced the launch, we see ourselves offering a “chat with a twist.” We’ll be something like your morning DJs, a “he said/she said,” “yin and yang” of leadership with Steve coming from the entrepreneurial and small business side of leadership while Lisa’s experiences have predominantly been with Fortune 500 companies and leaders. And we definitely won’t shy away from controversial topics, with lots of room for diverse opinions!

3. We know a lot of smart people.

What we really mean by this is that connections matter, and we both have always been very committed to nurturing our networks for the long haul.  Anyone wanting to start an endeavor like this wants to begin with an existing base of fans and friends. They helped spread the word for us about the chat and participated wholeheartedly.  In the end, they made the chat the success that it was.

4. We believe in the “why.”

Leadership is a topic we’re both passionate about.  Being leaders has affected our lives deeply and the leaders we’ve worked with have left their imprint, for good and for bad. As new structures of business increasingly rise to the forefront through the instrumentality of social networks, our understanding of what makes a good leader (or what makes a leader at all) is going to be a major topic of discussion and revision. This is a welcome development.

We’re both inspired by people like Liz Strauss and Terry Starbucker who had the vision to create something real and of immeasurable value by believing in people and the power of connections, and who took that vision and brought it to life with conviction. We believe that well-established leaders, emerging influencers, and all who follow them have much to contribute to the conversation. Feel free to join us on Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. (Eastern time), using a tool like TweetChat or the Twitter client of your choice!

As Morgan D. Jones writes in his book, The Thinker’s Toolkit: 14 Powerful Techniques for Problem Solving – “The aim of problem restatement is to broaden our perspective of a problem, helping us to identify the central issue and alternative solutions and increase the chance that the outcome our analysis produces will fully, not partially, resolve the problem.”

“Restate or redefine the problem in as many different ways we can think of. This allows us to shift our mental gears without evaluating them.”

Below I’ve provided eleven different methods to help restate a problem. The first five are found in Jones’ Thinker’s Toolkit.

Suggestions Jones suggests include…

(1) Paraphrase:

Restate the problem using different words without losing the original meaning.

Initial statement:	How can we limit congestion on the roads?
Paraphrase:	How can we keep road congestion from growing?

(2) 180-Degrees:

Turn the problem on its head.

Initial statement:	How can we get employees to come to the company picnic?
180-Degrees:	How can we discourage employees from attending the picnic?

Jones points out that taking the opposite view of a problem is a surprisingly effective technique.

(3) Broaden the focus:

Restate the problem in a larger context.

Initial statement:	Should I change jobs?
Broaden focus:	How can I achieve job security?

(4) Redirect the focus:

Boldly, consciously change the focus.

Initial statement:	How can we boost sales?
Redirect focus:	How can we cut costs?

(5) Ask “Why”:

Ask “why” of the initial problem statement. Then formulate a new problem statement base on the answer. Then ask “why” again, and again. Repeat this process a number of times until the essence of the “real” problem emerges.

Initial statement:	How can we market our in-house multimedia products?
Why?:	Because many of our internal customers are out sourcing their multimedia projects.
———
Restatement:	How can we keep internal customers from outsourcing their multimedia projects?
Why?:	Because it should be our mandate to do all of the organization’s multimedia?
———
Restatement:	How can we establish a mandate to do all of the organizations multimedia?
Why?:	Because we need to broaden our customer base?
———
Restatement:	How can we broaden our customer base?
Why?:	Because we need a larger base in order to be cost effective?
———
Restatement:	How can we become more cost effective?
Why?:	Because our profit margin is diminishing?
———
Restatement:	How can we increase our profit margin?
Principle problem has emerged:	How to obtain a mandate to do all of the organization’s multimedia projects.

In their book Strategies For Creative Problem Solving, the following are what authors H. Scott Fogler and Steven E. LeBlanc call “problem statement triggers” These are how they restate problems. They use a breakfast cereal for each of their examples.

Original Problem Statement:
The Toasty O’s cereal is clearly not getting to market fast enough to maintain freshness.

(6) Vary the stress pattern:

Try placing emphasis on different words and phrases.

• Cereal is not getting to market fast enough to maintain freshness.
  (Do other products we have get there faster?)
• Cereal is not getting to market fast enough to maintain freshness.
  (Can we make the distance/time shorter?)
• Cereal is not getting to market fast enough to maintain freshness.
  (Can we distribute it from a centralized location?)
• Cereal is not getting to market fast enough to maintain freshness.
  (How can we keep cereal fresher, longer?)

(7) Substitute:

Choose a term that has an explicit definition and substitute the explicit definition in each place that the term appears.

• Breakfast food that comes in a box is not getting to the place where it is sold fast enough to keep it from getting stale.
  (This restatement makes us think about the box and staleness. How might we change the box to prevent staleness?)

(8) Opposite:

Make an opposite statement, changing positives to negatives, and vice versa.

• How can we find a way to get the cereal to market so slowly that it will never be fresh?
  (This restatement makes us think about how long we have to maintain freshness and what controls it.)

(9) Change Adverbs Of Frequency:

Change “every” to “some,” “always” to “sometimes,” “sometimes to “never,” and vice versa.

• Cereal is not getting to market fast enough to always maintain freshness.
  (This change opens up new avenues of thought. Why isn’t are cereal always fresh?)

(10) Replace Persuasive Words:

Replace “persuasive words” in the problem statement such as “obviously,” “clearly,” and “certainly” with the argument it is supposed to be replacing.

• The word clearly in the problem statement implies that if we could speed up delivery, freshness would be maintained. Maybe not! Maybe the store holds the cereal too long. Maybe the cereal is stale before it reaches the store.
  (This trigger helps us change the implicit assumptions made in the problem statement.)

(11) Diagram:

Express words in the form of an equation or picture, and visa versa.

• Freshness is inversely proportional to the time since the cereal was baked:
  (Freshness) = k/(Time since cereal baked)

Try out one or more of these techniques. Problem restatement helps you focus on the core of the problem. Identifying the core saves immense time, effort, and money. As a bonus, sometimes restating a problem points you directly to a solution. However, it shows there is more than one problem and helps identify them.

Sources: Restatements 1-5, and examples from:
The Thinker’s Toolkit: 14 Powerful Techniques for Problem Solvingby Morgan D. Jones.
Problem Statement Triggers 6-11, and cereal examples from:
“Strategies For Creative Problem Solving by H. Scott Fogler and Steven E. LeBlanc

Yet, that’s exactly what happened leading up to the 2008 financial crisis where banks bundled shaky and suspect mortgage loans known as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and resold them to pension funds and other investors worldwide. And while some financial services companies have since settled with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission for their role in misleading investors, most have not admitted fault.

Which leads to a larger question—when is it acceptable to knowingly sell a substandard product?

Charles Morris, author of “The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown” aptly describes the period leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 as “sheer idiocy”. To start with, he says, debt to equity—or leverage—by many financial firms was as high as 100:1. In addition, high risk mortgages were more than the flavor of the month, as CDOs in 2006 were created from “more than 40% of all mortgage originations.” And of course, we haven’t even mentioned derivatives such as credit default swaps (CDS) that tied global banks together in an intricate web of interdependency.

What is the end-result of the 2008 financial crisis? The International Money Fund (IMF) estimates losses from the financial crisis at $4.1 trillion, jobless rates still hover at 12.5% or more in some states, and 401K account’s are still recovering from losses of 30-50% and sometimes more! Indeed, if anything has been learned from this global meltdown it’s that —caveat emptor still reigns—otherwise known as “let the buyer beware”.

Let’s get back to CDOs for a minute. A collateralized debt obligation is simply a bundle of 100-200 mortgages that are sliced and diced into “tranches” and then priced and sold to investors based on a risk management formula. Investment banks engaged in buying mortgages from “mortgage mills” and then packaged and resold these CDOs to investors. Not a bad concept, unless you know beforehand that the package consists of fraudulent and dubious loans that will likely never be paid.

In fact, Carl Levin, chairman of the US Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on the Financial Crisis scolded a row of investment bankers on the process of producing CDOs and other financial products saying, “You people think it’s a piece of crap, and go out and sell it!”

But here’s the rub—as the writer of the Financial Times Lex Column describes it; “…selling crap is no crime per se.” In fact, the writer goes on to say, “If the SEC is so against the practice, it should also prevent people from the buying of crap too.”

In fact, there are many businesses that profit greatly from the buying of distressed assets including foreclosed homes, flailing companies, and even tarnished brands. Obviously, these sales should continue. However, the writer of Lex must also remember that some US states do prohibit the “knowing” sale and re-sale of defective products; for a good example see lemon laws for pre-owned cars.

A Financial Times reader responds—tongue in cheek—to the Lex column by saying if it is indeed a legitimate business practice to sell substandard products that the Lex column author, should “bear this principle in mind (the next time he/she) visits a doctor, dentist, pharmacist, lawyer or accountant.”

With the advent of the internet, the Smartphone explosion and now social media, global companies cannot afford to take the risk of knowingly selling sub-standard products. This advice of course, only applies if companies care about brand perception, reputation and integrity.

For many companies—reputation is one of the last bastions of competitive advantage. Millions if not billions of dollars in brand equity and goodwill are at stake. And consumers have long memories. There are no real shortcuts when it comes to quality.

Questions:

• In an age of “asymmetric information”—where the seller often knows more than a buyer—why are brands so important?
• When is it OK to sell a substandard product?