Tag: growth

External help

FabrizioLeave a comment

There are three kinds of external help a marketing department can get.

There is the help that is valuable because it provides a competence that is missing. This is typical when you hire a freelancer, for example. Perhaps you have a small team, you lack some skills, you want something specific done that you cannot do yourself.

Then, there is the help that is valuable because it gets things done. Most agencies fall into this bucket. They do not really deliver mind-blowing results, they might or might not have specific competences, some might actually argue they could have gotten pretty much the same outcome by doing the job internally. But the truth is, the team simply does not have enough bandwidth, or it is not well organised, or its skills are not well mapped.

Finally, there is the help that is valuable because it delivers quality. It might be a freelancer, it might be an agency. But in this case, they are at the edge of their field, they are doing things that not many others know, they are reinventing a particular tactic or the way it is approached. Things might get difficult, because the counterpart is somebody with convictions, ideas, opinions, and they might not be willing to simply do what pleases the head of marketing. They repay these difficulties with an outstanding job.

Now, the fact is that often we approach external help in marketing with unrealistic expectations. And so, when we hire for competence, we do not want to do the project management work that is necessary. When we hire for project management, we are unprepared in feeding the right information at the right time because we do not have them. When we hire for quality, we are not ready to change our assumptions and beliefs, and potentially redefine strategy and tactics altogether.

Who are you hiring to help you out? Are you aware of what that means?

Specific

Fabrizio1 Comment

Would you rather buy services from:

  1. A company that promises to improve your workforce efficiency;
  2. A company that promises to reduce the lead time of your projects by 10%;
  3. A company that promises to digitalize your paperwork and automate some of the most tedious of your processes, therefore reducing lead time of your projects by 10%;
  4. A company that promises to give your project managers the tools to digitalize the documents coming from customers and partners, to ensure they move through project lifecycle with digital assignments and approvals, and produce an exact report of what was done, when, by whom useful both for the customers and for your internal finance department. All of this, estimated to reduce lead time of your projects by 10%.

It is a matter of specificity, of course.

There is no difference between product 1, 2, 3, and 4. What changes is the level to which the company providing the service demonstrates to know what you are dealing with day after day.

Moving from option 1 to option 4 requires more data, more research, more effort. And to motivate the investment, just survey some of the websites of your competitors and alternatives: how many belong in every category? A fairly common situation is: 80% use option 1; 15% use option 2; 4% use option 3; 1% use option 4.

So, does being specific pay?

Winning machine

FabrizioLeave a comment

When you have a new idea, it is quite difficult to avoid having all your following thoughts gravitate around it.

If a new slogan comes to you in the middle of the night, all the successive iterations will just be slight variations.

If you think at a solution for a problem you have had for a while, you will expand and stretch the solution until it gets good enough to actually cover at least a small part of the problem.

If the process you have just implemented has proven successful, you will use it until it is too late to understand it is no longer up-to-date.

A possible way around this could be to ask different people to come up with a new idea. Or to foster an environment in which it is normal that different people come up with a variety of new ideas. If you match with a process that clearly defines what gets picked, what gets postponed and what gets rejected, you have a winning machine.

The temptation

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Having an idea, an opinion, some knowledge, a preference comes with a strong temptation. The temptation to overwhelm, to impose, to change, to replace.

We cannot be wrong, and therefore all that is around us must accomodate our view.

This temptation grows stronger as two things happen.

First, the more we accumulate experience the more we think what has worked so far will also work here and now. Second, the more we are high up in a hierarchy the more we expect it is our right to have better ideas, opinions, knowledge, preferences.

Executive, managers, leaders regularly give in to this temptation. And it is not a matter of being right or wrong. It is more a problem of breaking morale, of mining trust, of diminishing the value you can get from people who work with you.

Temptations can be resisted though. It takes practice and discipline, but it is not impossible. And in this case it will translate in an act of kindness that people will reward you for.

A new tool

FabrizioLeave a comment

Things that might turn around a difficult situation in business.

Asking for help.

Sitting down with the people involved and listen.

Asking somebody who has been there before.

Interviewing your best customers.

Communicating.

Sharing your vision and make sure any decision made falls within its scope.

Allocating extra time for those who will be dissatisfied.

Learning to say no to every opportunities.

Communicating some more.

Offering concrete help to those who will be left behind.

Rather than just using “we” in presentations, live as “we”.

Overcommunicating.

Things that will NEVER turn around a difficult situation in business.

A new tool.