by Katie Weisz
Estimated read time: Less than 1 minute

In September, CEO Scott Gillum sat down with VP at Gartner, Brent Adamson, to discuss the question of “do we really need outbound sales anymore?”

During this interview, Scott and Brent dove into the top three things sales and marketers should be thinking about for Fall and their 2020 budget.

Listen in as Brent dives into what he believes are the most important things to be focusing on when it comes to sales, marketing, and the customer experience in the buying process right now.

The post Top Three Tips for Fall appeared first on Carbon Design.

by Katie Weisz
Estimated reading time: 1 minute 

Scott sat down with an old friend and senior tech executive, Stephanie Anderson, to discuss how to survive and thrive in the sales culture as a B2B marketer. With Stephanie’s substantial background in sales, service, marketing, and now as the chairman of the board of a healthcare software company, she brings a vast amount of knowledge and expertise to the conversation.

In the interview clip, Stephanie and Scott talk about sales misperceptions of marketing and what marketers can do to strengthen the relationship.

Along with the discussion on sales and marketing culture, Scott and Stephanie also dive into a conversation on CMOs, what is on their minds, advice for those new to the role, and what should be top of mind when “selling” to a CMO.

Watch the Full Interview here.

Highlights from the Full Interview:

• 2:31- The advantage of having a sales background
• 10:20- The Sales versus Marketing divide
• 20:03- What is on the minds of CMOs
• 25:20- What advice would you give new CMOs.

To hear the conversation with Stephanie, listen or download here.

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The post Surviving and Thriving in the Sales Culture as a B2B Marketer appeared first on Carbon Design.

by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 4 minutes

Over the last few months, I have had the opportunity to attend industry events, review new research on buyers and sellers, work with clients on very difficult challenges and observe the behavior of sales and marketing teams working together… and I’m worried.

I’m worried because of the following. Albeit a small sample size, I am seeing the issues below across organizations of various industries, big and small.  

– Confusing Activity for Performance, Again 

Despite our ability to measure more than ever I have observed organizations rushing campaigns out the door without proper performance metrics defined and/or proper mechanisms in place to capture performance data. And when flagged, the client took a pass on putting them into place because it would take “too much time.” The behavior of go, go, go is pervasive.

– Overreaching Procurement and IT 

This observation is unique. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen the procurement and IT group change the requirements on making a purchase decision. The group changed the client sponsor’s key decision criteria to bring in their preferred vendor costing more than $100,000 above the next highest bid. The owner of the work did not get what they wanted and the organization ended up paying more for it. Someone has too much budget.

– Basic Building Blocks are Missing or Skipped

Database quality is owned by everyone, and no one, customer profiles lacking basic information (like emails), performance metrics are missing or not being tracked, process metrics are in place but not used, call list are not being bounced up against do not call list, agencies lacking knowledge on their clients customers and products, and on and on and on.    

– Lack of Accountability

Large chunks of money being dropped on media without accountability on the performance of the spend, and sales comp not aligned to organizational revenue objectives and goals. Also see bullet above.

– Silver Bullet 

Related to bullet #3, over reliance on the MarTech stack to fix basic problems that they were not intended to fix. The ramping up of Data Science departments to run sophisticated analysis on data that they may, or may not, realize is compromised. Marketing investment decisions being made using outdated marketing optimization models that only output “spend more” recommendations.

– Status Quo

Lack of courage or motivation to make difficult decisions that would impact performance for fear of being disruptive. Control issues that prevent real change from being made by team members who see opportunities to improve performance but may be perceived as threatening to others. “Things are good, don’t rock the boat.”

– Doing the Dirty Work 

This is the most disappointing of all of the things I’ve observed. Good marketing is hard work. It requires research to understand buyers, products and competitors. And guess what, it takes time. Recently, I was in a meeting about a new positioning for the organization. Everyone was excited by the idea but the marketing team lost it’s enthusiasm when they heard the amount of work needed to take to bring the idea to life in a campaign. Breakthrough work requires ergs of effort to make it great. It’s the price you pay…get over it.

Much of what I have observed are symptoms of good economic times. Organizations flush with budgets, high demand for products and services, and growing profits are causing organizations to operate inefficiently. The reason this is so concerning is because we’ve seen this movie before, most recently in 2008.

Things are in motion. The trade war, the presidential election, candidates promising to come after industries and corporate profits, big tech getting squeezed by governments over their size and privacy issues.

For the past five years we’ve been able to get away with average efforts. Strong economies and demand bring about waste. “Doing” became more rewarding than “thinking.” Put more in the top and even more comes out the bottom. But those days are numbered. 

Being smart about what you do and why, will become a necessity again. Doing more with less will become the reality. So as you do you 2020 planning, have a mindset that a recession is coming. Try taking an approach that assumes you have 20% less budget than last year. Here are 10 things to consider.  

1. What would you cut to reach a 20% reduction, and why? Lay out 3-4 different scenarios. 
2. What would you invest in in Q4 2019 to set you up to be more efficient in 2020?
3. If you had to turn off 2-3 tools what would they be, and why?
4. If you had to shut something down to reinvest to get a better return what would it be and where would you put the money?
5. Could you move something off of your budget line and onto someone else? 
6. Are you paying for something that you shouldn’t or it benefits some other group? 
7. Could you centralize something and get greater efficiencies?
8. Could you consolidate vendors to be more efficient? 
9. Could you do less and produce better results by sticking to a limited set of priorities?
10. Could you have one centralized campaign and tie it to several products/markets or goals?

The goal is to become 20% more efficient. Even if the recession doesn’t come next year you’ll be able to clean up some of the sloppiness that comes with good economic times. 

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The post 10 Tips for Recession Proofing Your 2020 Marketing Budget appeared first on Carbon Design.

by Glen Drummond
Estimated read time: 6 minutes

Part Two in a two part series

Recently, I published an article with a provocative observation.  While much attention has been devoted to the need for organizations to adopt Artificial Intelligence as a core capability, we should consider an even-more-pressing need for “artificial empathy.”

If you did not read part-one, I’ll retrace some footsteps here. The corporation is a creature of human invention. But the creature has grown so enormously in its size, capabilities ,and power, that we the people now encounter a diminishing sense of agency for ourselves and an increasing sense of agency for corporations to shape our future on issues including privacy, equality, safety, the environment, and the behavior of public institutions that once governed these things. Not to mention the stuff of everyday experience: stupid IVRs, impenetrable clam-shell packaging, and infuriating password implementations, just to name a few.  

The ramifications of this observation extend beyond marketing strategy. But still, people who think deeply about the relationship between people and brands will play a role in how this narrative unfolds.  

And here’s why: In our fast-thinking minds, we perceive the brands that stand for corporations as if they were other people.  

Now, people – except for sociopaths – are naturally empathetic. And moreover, we expect them to be so.  When we sense a sociopath, the hair on our neck springs, and adrenalin shocks our bloodstream.  

As social creatures, we are born pre-wired with miraculously-adapted endocrine and neurological systems that reinforce our empathy in a positive feedback system known as friends and family, community and kin. But corporations are not born with anything of the sort.

Do you see the problem?   

At least in our hearts, we have an expectation for brands to behave in a way that they are poorly equipped to fulfill.  Expectations disappointed are brands diminished. 

Organizational scale amplifies this problem. (We all know what “faceless corporation” means.)   So does the doctrine of maximizing shareholder profits. Are there signs that both society and corporate leaders are beginning to discern that the corporation has gained such power, that the power needs to be matched with greater empathy? The recent “statement of social purpose” by 181 corporate leaders suggest this might be so.       

The question is how?  Some people who read my first post may have been under the impression that I had a plan for  how “artificial empathy” could be created. Rest assured this was far from the case. I’m sympathetic to the aspirations of the customer experience movement, but I’m skeptical those aspirations are advanced by continuing to ask socially clueless questions that amount to: “How do you like me now?”    

Still, having once stumbled upon the problem of  artificial empathy, it’s tempting to speculate. So, with apologies for pairing a ten dollar question with nickel and dime answers, here are some preliminary thoughts.

Biomimicry    

If you’re familiar with the literature on biomimicry – you will know that many industrial inventions  begin with the observation of patterns in nature. Could we re-conceive the information systems used by corporations through this lens?  

In that case,  the challenge of  “artificial empathy” would cause us to think about a system involving a sensory apparatus, a cortex that integrates the signals from the senses, real-time feedback,  amplifier mechanisms and so on.   

It does not take long to see that analogues for each of these things already exist within the information systems of corporations – but what’s lacking is an architecture marshalled by the imperative of empathy.  

For humans as social creatures – empathy is essential for survival.  Embracing the biomimicry idea in an IT architecture geared to artificial empathy would mean  that the selfish subjectivity of the corporation would need to be subjugated to human experience and dignity.   Do we have engineers this creative and leaders this courageous? 

Philosophy

There is a branch of philosophy, “epistemology,” that deals with the question of how we know what we know.  Historically, for corporations, and indeed any large organization, to operate at scale has required that an internal representation of customers and prospects is shared across the organization. Sometimes this internal representation goes out of date. Sometimes it is simply wrong-headed from the start.  Invariably this internal representation is reductive. 

Done well, the disciplines of customer segmentation and personas offer steps in a journey away from the most reductive internal representations of the corporation’s publics. But too often in practice,  people mistake the map for the territory. In a product-centric world-view with no imperative for empathy, mistaking the customer map for the territory is standard operating procedure – “best practice” even.  In a corporation seeking to attain the capacity of artificial empathy these old habits must die.       

While corporations have raced to hire data scientists and put them to work on the analysis of customer behavior and customer responses to various stimuli, they have not been as quick or adept at hiring and training people in the discipline of keeping separate the map from the territory while the study of people is underway.  

The pairing of these disciplines feels important going forward. Data scientists are in demand now.  Data scientists with a flair for philosophy will be the rarest and most valuable of all.   

Artificial Intelligence

Setting aside the semantic arguments about the existence of AI,  we now can access algorithmic tools that can explore data-sets to find multiple features of interest about people, and discover patterns of difference, similarity and prediction that are more subtle than those derived from averages, demographic co-variates, single-touch attributions, and the other mainstays of traditional customer analytics. 

Indeed, if we are going to operate with less reductive representations for people, and if we are going to simulate the biological mechanisms of empathy within a corporation, artificial intelligence may be the disruptive game-changing technology that finally enables meaningful progress against a problem that has been building for some time.   

Final Thoughts

None of these answers by themselves is a prescription for artificial empathy. The confluence of all three may point in a worthy direction.  Still, some journeys are worth taking, even when the destination is distant and the route uncertain.

This might be one.

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The post Artificial Empathy, Part Two appeared first on Carbon Design.

by Katie Weisz
Estimated read time: Less than 1 minute

The conversation of “Do we really need outbound sales anymore?” continued with another lively interview, this time featuring special guest, Brent Adamson. Brent is a distinguished VP at Gartner, and a published author with a lot to say about the case between sales and marketing.

In the interview, CEO, Scott Gillum, and Brent unpack the idea of Challenger, debunking it as a “sales methodology”, and how both sales and marketing should be co-owning the process of the customer and buyer experience.

Brent also shares three very distinctive approaches (giving, telling, and sense-making) that sales reps are adopting towards information in order to connect with potential customers and buyers.

In this clip, Brent dives into the topic of “the world is crowded with good information.” In sales and marketing, the customer is now surrounded by good, quality information, which is having an impact on their decision making and buying process.

Listen here:

To hear the interview with Brent, listen or download here.

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The post The State of Sales and Marketing with CEO, Scott Gillum, and Special Guest, Brent Adamson appeared first on Carbon Design.

by Glen Drummond
Estimated read time: 5 minutes

Can we agree that making good business decisions is getting harder?

For each business, the reasons vary, but we see common themes:

• Volatility: The pace of change of everything (markets, customers, technologies, products and competitors) is accelerating.
• Uncertainty: The accelerating pace of change challenges assumptions about what’s invariable.
• Complexity: The number of stakeholders, variables, and perspectives involved in a decision keeps growing.
• Ambiguity: We’ve become very clever at accumulating data, but having more data does not solve the problem of knowing what the data means.

School didn’t properly prepare any of us for making decisions in this environment. Deductive problem-solving works best in predictable environments. That’s not the world we live in.

Of course, there is no apparent shortage of external help:

• Analysts proclaim their best practices.
• Consultants promote their proprietary models.
• Technologists offer their SaaS tools that aim to automate some choices.

And in their own particular contexts, all of these are, of course, helpful. But for higher-level decisions, “best-practices,” “models,” and “algorithms” share a common liability: they are, by design, reductive.

And so for those early, fuzzy, high-level and massively consequential choices, the question you need to ask is whether the way to make a good decision is to keep eliminating considerations until the right answer appears.

That happens often enough, but is there a better way?

We think so. It’s called: “Possibility-Oriented Thinking.”

The phrase is most closely associated with innovation, but this capacity is one that marketing people should also hone. Put yourself in the shoes of a classic innovator: you’re not yet sure what the product is exactly, or who the customer is yet, or what they will pay, or what exactly your competitors are working on, or who they even are, and when they will make their next move.

The answers are all emergent properties of a system too complex to fully understand. Doesn’t that sound a little like many marketing challenges today?

So what do you do?

The “Possibility-oriented thinking” approach begins with this perspective.

Rather than:

• assuming there is a “right” answer, we assume there are a variety of answers, some better than others.
• assuming that we have the facts required to make the right choice, we assume we don’t, and so adopt an attitude of humility about assumptions and relentless curiosity about new data and possibilities.
• thinking the answer can be arrived at by way of deduction from existing facts, we assume that something new has to be injected into the system, something we imagine; a possibility we conceive, a relationship we speculate about and then explore.
• making ballistic decisions with resources, we think about “Safe-fail” experiments, pilots, & prototypes.
• thinking that the best idea comes from the most expert or highest ranking person, we think the best idea comes from a diversity of perspectives integrated through thoughtfully designed interactions.

What are some of those thoughtfully designed interactions? This comes back to context.

Are you seeking a strategy of differentiation in an established market?

You might consider using the Challenger Marketing framework that has been articulated by Brent Adamson and his former colleagues at CEB, now Gartner, in The Challenger Customer.

Are you seeking a strategy of transformation around the customer experiences you create, or the business model that you create them with?

You might consider using the Basadur Simplexity model for discovering challenges, organizing a map of dependencies around them, and prioritizing the action plans that advance your goals.

Are you creating a new category, or something very close to it, and seeking a framework for decision-making that does not rely on asking an as-yet undefined customer group how they would respond to an as-yet undefined value proposition?

You might consider a program organized around the concept we call “Pathfinding” – an iterative process that involves a rotation between stances – strategic sense-making, research, ideation, market ecosystem analysis, and marketing experiments.

Of course, organizations also look to Marketers to solve narrower more routine problems. If that’s all Marketing stands for and contributes, it does run the risk of being seen as the “arts and crafts” department of the business.

It need not be so.

A marketing organization equipped to provide leadership in decision-processes at those moments when the altitude is high, the problems are fuzzy, and the outcomes really matter – is a marketing organization that produces value far exceeding the narrow chores of “filling the funnel” and managing content.

Building your musculature in possibility-oriented thinking improves your chances of doing so.

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The post Why We’re Bad at Business Decisions…and How to Fix It appeared first on Carbon Design.

by Katie Weisz
Estimated read time: 1:00 minute

When our CEO, Scott Gillum, posed the question “Do we really need outbound sales anymore?,” it started a great debate and open a candid dialogue between Sales and Marketers.

Friend and Sales Guru, David Brock, penned a rebuttal in defense of outbound sales that continued the conversation.

Scott and David teamed up to continue their conversation about the state of outbound sales today in a video interview, covering topics like Gartner’s ‘sense maker’ identity, the ‘silver bullet’ fix, and what sales want from marketers.

You can watch the whole video here:

After the interview, David wrote a follow up piece entitled “Customers Feel Value”.

Let us know what you think. Are outbound sales dead? Do leaders use technology as a ‘silver bullet’ to try and fix sales, marketing, and the customer experience?

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The post The State of Outbound Sales with CEO, Scott Gillum and Special Guest, David Brock appeared first on Carbon Design.

by Glen Drummond
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Part One in a two-part series

Empathy.  It’s such a defining human quality, you could say it’s in our bones. For sure, it’s in our brains. Neuroscience reveals that we have “mirror neurons” that cause other people’s emotional experiences to become our own. That concept would be astonishing if it were not so familiar.   Empathy runs in our veins. The hormone oxytocin – makes us closer to those we’re close with.  

Beyond this, there are the mental gadgets that history has draped on our biology. For instance, our fine-tuned sense of justice, fairness, and balance.  These qualities also incline us to prosocial behavior, such as helping a stranger on the street, supporting a local non-profit,  separating our recycling…

So if empathy comes naturally, why call for “Artificial Empathy?”  (Presuming, of course, that such a thing could even be possible?)  The answer begins with an observation about a trend in scale. Human nature developed over a long period in which there were rewards for co-operation within groups and competition between groups.  But compared to today, the groups were small. It’s not clear that biologically-rooted empathy equips us adequately for the scale-change.    

It’s not merely that there are more of us, although the human population has tripled since 1945.  It’s that the nature of connectivity between us is transformed.   As members of media-fueled electorates, our mood-swings are damaging institutions that took centuries to build.   As members of a global economy, our collective emissions are generating planet-scale impacts on the environment.  

There are broad conversations underway about these forms of our connectivity. Less so about our participation in corporations.   Arguably, no prior form of connectivity rivals the modern corporation’s capacity to pursue its objectives with such speed, scale and precision

And big corporations are getting bigger.  The World Bank reported in 2016 that among the 100 largest revenue-collecting entities in the world, 69 are corporations; 31 are nation-states.  A decade ago, the US Supreme Court awarded corporations a human right: freedom of speech.  The Danish government has appointed an Ambassador to liaise between the midsized nation and giant tech corporations.

If you have spent your career inside corporations, you know there are instances where scale acts as a liability as much as a strength.  The world knows that something went wrong at Volkswagen, at Facebook, at United, at Boeing.   And while the particulars are different, the circumstances rhyme.  A group of people sincerely felt it was their job to do something that the public would come to hate and the owners would come to regret.   What corporation is free from this risk?  

So why does business need “Artificial Empathy?”  It’s partly because natural empathy is poorly matched to the scale of the modern corporation.  And it’s partly because the consumer and the public are not going to let corporations off the hook for un-empathetic behavior.    

Here’s the basis for my confidence in that second observation.  People imagine brands as if they were other people. The marketing practice of managing brands using a system of archetypal characters speaks to this fact.  So does the blow-back that follows when corporations act in notably inhuman ways. There’s even neuro-imaging research that shows we look at logos and faces in surprisingly similar ways.      

So here, in a nutshell, is why brands need artificial empathy:  

1. Because we imagine brands as if they were other people,  and 
2. Because we expect other people to be inherently empathetic, so 
3. We also expect brands to be inherently empathetic too, and
4. Brands have no natural capacity to fulfill this expectation

This fabric of observations explains a lot. Corporations,  pursuing their interests without paying attention to this prevalent expectation, violate customer trust. And sometimes, public trust too. 

Only on the rare occasion does this violation happen in the dramatic ways cited in the cases of Volkswagen’s emissions masking or Cambridge Analytica’s democracy hacks.   

Far more common are violations so banal they barely register. Robotic voice response systems that remind you: “please continue to hold,  your call is important to us.” Departure lounges that add acoustic assault to the list of insults suffered by air passengers. Manipulative marketing and sales tactics like the email that arrived this morning in my inbox, by no coincidence, at 9:18 AM with the subject header, “9:00 AM Meeting.”   

Viewed through the lens of empathy, (and the lack thereof)  the distinction between the dramatic and undramatic instances becomes only a distinction of degree, not kind. And that observation is potentially helpful because it offers some guidance on what needs to be done.  

Now, you might say, “Ah, you’re talking about customer experience,” and yes, in a way that’s true.  But insofar as the term “customer experience” stands for a department, a performance measure or one in a set of parallel business disciplines,  a “customer experience” capability will only act on symptoms while failing to address the root cause. (Sociopaths are known, after all, for their ability to charm.)

Or, you might say, “Ah, so you’re talking about corporate governance.”  And yes, again in a way that’s true. But how much real capacity do the people charged with such weighty responsibilities have to intervene in the minor daily violations of the customer’s expectation of empathy?  It’s been observed for some time, that “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”   

Since empathy violations appear to take place despite the ubiquity of “customer experience” and “corporate governance” functions the empathy gap – the delta between customer expectations of empathy and the level of empathy corporations are presently organized to muster – is a real business problem.

It seems like a problem that would be worth taking risks to explore, based on the value of the potential outcome if it could be solved.  

To summarize, let’s retrace our steps.   

• Corporations are large, powerful, engines of collective influence and action.   
• They are growing increasingly large, powerful, and influential in the lives of people.
• People expect them to act empathetically, but corporations have no natural inherent capacity, like people do, to fulfill that expectation.
• So, we should expect the empathy gap will grow with the power and reach of corporations, until such time as either corporations design a technology of empathy – “artificial empathy” if you will – or face a more concerted backlash directed at individual brands (“United breaks guitars”), at industry sectors (say, “big tech,”) and at corporations in general.   

Despite all the technical progress, investment and hype devoted to it, there remains a debate over whether “artificial intelligence” (AI) actually exists.  The concept of “artificial empathy,” if it were to enter the public discussion, would be subject to a similar philosophical challenge.  

So why talk about it at all? 

Because corporations have plenty of resources for tackling challenges once they can be identified. This one is staring us in the face. 

Since the processes, which we call “artificial intelligence” will inevitably shape more of the experiences that corporations project and customers and the public will absorb, is there any question that the need for artificial empathy will grow with each passing day? 

The conjunction of “artificial” and “empathy” is a provoking framing of a problem that exists. It matters greatly to a corporation’s stakeholders and deserves far more rigorous thinking and effort than has been devoted to it thus far. Rather than being a zero-sum game, “artificial empathy” will be a project that aligns the interests of shareholders, employees, customers, and the public.  Rather than being a departmental problem, “artificial empathy” will require a systems-level response.  

I’ll leave for a subsequent article the questions of how “artificial empathy” might work and what resources it might draw upon.   For now, suffice it to say if corporations need empathy and don’t have it as a natural quality, then the commercial incentive is there to synthesize it. 

The ingenuity and organized effort that has made predictive science – machine learning, deep learning, expert systems, big data, or more generally, “artificial intelligence” –  such an important component of corporate strategy today, provides at least a framing metaphor for this initiative – and maybe some important tools too.   

But intelligence (natural or artificial)  is no substitute for empathy. No matter what strides we make in AI, brands need to make progress now on Artificial Empathy. And if AI begins to make strides on its own, there’s a good chance brands will need to pick up the pace.   

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The post Brands Need Artificial Empathy. Here’s Why. appeared first on Carbon Design.

by Scott Gillum
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

First published in The Marketing Insider on June 7, 2019

Last year, our first full year in business, our marketing services firm delivered seven-figure revenue and was able to return 40% of the initial investment back to our investors. This was done despite having no full-time staff, no overhead, no products and no footprint.

How’s that for lean?

We’re built on a talent management platform. Or, said differently, we use a collection of non-traditional workers: people like stay-at-home parents, semi-retired executives, freelancers and side-giggers who work to get something done and not to “punch a clock.”

It’s now been close to two years operating in this environment, and we’ve learned a thing or two about being agile and lean.

Make no mistake, it’s very difficult, but also very rewarding.

If you’re trying to create a lean organization, or transitioning to it, here are some things to consider:

1. Check yourself before you wreck yourself. Operating lean and agile by definition means removing much of the structure that has traditionally slowed the organization. You will find yourself getting caught in the trap of wanting to add back those things you are comfortable with. You need to become comfortable with the discomfort. find a way to inspect the decisions you’ve made to stay true to the mission.

2. Rent, don’t buy. Better yet, get it for free. The only asset we own is the computer I’m using to write this post. We are the poster children for SaaS. Our online version of QuickBooks back-ends into our accounting firm (we have no finance department, obviously). We operate the business on G-Suite (we have no IT), use Asana for project management (internal and external), Slack for communication, MailChimp (free version) for our monthly newsletter, and our site sits on WordPress (also free, and we bartered services for hosting).

I have two virtual assistants, one live and the other automated (free). Additionally, we are constantly on the lookout for new or better (cheaper) tools. Never sit still.  

3. Opt for aggressive, active management. The flexibility of an agile organization is only valuable if you actively manage it. We manage project probability almost religiously. As we watch costs come in, we may merge workstreams, focus on producing outputs faster, shift hours and resources to other projects, etc

If we are engaged in a project using agile design, we use a very disciplined project management approach and proactively run a resource ahead of the delivery schedule. Anything we view coming down the workstream that is anticipated to be out of scope, we bring up during our weekly meeting. Just like the cheer, you have to “be aggressive…b-e-a-g-g-r-e-s-s-i-v-e.”

4. Find someone to make you do what you hate. For me, one of the best things we’ve done is to contract with someone tasked to make me focus on the things I don’t like to do or think about.

For example, my natural state is to “go do,” so taking the time to document how we do things is not usually going to happen, even though I know it’s valuable.

By having someone force me (literally) to get it out of my head and down on paper, we are able to create standard operating procedures that allow for automation, outsourcing, and/or creating self-directed how-tos, guides and videos.

Find a way to address your weaknesses. Don’t ignore them — they will come back to bite you.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a whole host of things that we haven’t learned or addressed yet. We still need to build a pipeline, create a steady flow of opportunity, find a way to scale the business, etc. The business is on a path for more steady growth, but almost everyday I have to keep myself from slipping back into old habits and routines.

It’s not easy being lean…

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The post 4 Lessons from Building a Lean Organization appeared first on Carbon Design.

by Glen Drummond

Recently we had a chance to discuss customer segmentation with a B2B marketer with a recurring revenue stream. The approach we proposed was “experiential” segmentation. Whereas most B2B marketing segmentation is organized around categorical differences like company size, spend, or industry vertical, experiential segmentation wraps those factors around a core of attitudinal differences.

Here is the list of capabilities B2B brands can radically improve by adopting the experiential segmentation approach.  

1.  Persuade using stories instead of arguments.

How?  By systematically organizing marketing communications around insights into the relationship of customer motivations to the solutions and experiences offered across our industry.

Why is this important? Story-telling activates the connection between a brand’s offering and the identity-related motives that cause people to act.  Factual arguments have their role, but research by CEB (now Gartner) shows that B2B buyers are more powerfully motivated to action when identity-value is activated.

2. Reduce reliance on direct mail to drive customer acquisition.

How?  By enabling a digital content-marketing strategy that more efficiently attracts and converts inbound traffic through persona-based personalization.    

Why is this important?  In the short-term, tactics with high customer acquisition costs can be justified based on lifetime-customer-value,  but there’s a catch: LTV embeds an assumption about the future rate of customer churn. If churn goes up in the future, the organization will find itself addicted to costly tactics with declining marginal utility.    A strong inbound content ecosystem defends against this kind of deterioration.

3. Predict and pre-empt churn in response to disruptive technology.

How?  By overlaying churn-model classification with persona insights to understand not just who will churn in response to technology disruption, but also why.

Why is this important?  Disruptive technology does show up from time to time.  Faced with this situation, and no organized theory about the actual motivations of the people churning out, the response quickly devolves into discounting that harms margins and offers little assurance that you’ve done anything more than delayed the inevitable.

4. Reduce the reliance on aggressive pricing as a lever for influencing buyer behavior.

How?  By activating insight into buyer motivations as an alternative to price as a behavioral trigger.  (See 1, 2 & 3 above.)

Why is this important?  Studies of B2B buying by CEB/Gartner show that price is not typically the most important factor in buyer loyalty.   Treating price as the key behavioral lever commodifies your value proposition and leaves money on the table.

5. Elevate solution-selling ability of business development reps.

How?  By providing inside-sales with (a) easy-to-grasp persona-based sales enablement tools and (b)  visibility into the persona profile attributed to customers and prospects they are interacting with.

Why is this important?  Customers expect sales-people to treat them with a certain amount of empathy.   Equipping BDRs with personas that speak to customer attitudes helps them do so, despite the pressures of the inside-sales environment, including, in many cases, a short period of time on the job.  

6. Increase customer “share of wallet.”  

How?  By examining the cohort of customers represented by each persona from the standpoint of the trade-offs they experience,  and attenuating that experience of trade-offs through thoughtful cross-selling, and by evolving the solution portfolio through new products and partnerships according to a persona-based gap analysis.   

Why is that important?  If your competitors are accessing a similar value-chain of component providers, business will migrate to the marketer who can integrate those components in ways that make the most sense to the customer.

7. Shift from product-centric to customer-centric offers and experiences.  

How?  By attaching a persona tag to each customer file, and by using the personas as a core resource in the creative briefs for content and experiences in all channels.     

Why is that important?  If you have attitudinal insight to drive personalization, you have a choice between leading with or leading to your products and solutions.   

8. Migrate marketing spend from paid to owned media channels.

How?  Narrow the job of paid media from “selling offers” to the more modest goal of directing traffic towards owned channels where the persona-based design can guide personalized buying experiences.   

Why is that important?  B2B marketing sometimes demands content richness (currency, depth, personalization) that is at odds with the constraints of paid media.        

9. Guide new product/ introduction.

How?  By acting as a framework for problem-finding, product screening, market sizing, user-experience design, pre-launch research respondent profiling,  and market launch targeting.

Why is that important?  Breaking down the silos between product development and marketing can improve the success of both.   

10. Build a stronger brand.

How?  By taking a systematic step in the corporation’s capacity to treat customers empathetically.  

Why is that important?  When customers feel that they are seen, heard, understood, and appreciated they are more likely to appreciate (and recommend)  the brand in return.

Consider the ten capabilities listed above. They are the core disciplines of marketing in a experience-driven, customer-led, digitally-powered, and fast-moving world.  If you’re good at them all now, then your segmentation is serving you well. But if you’re not, then it might be time to ask if outdated theories, hiding in your segmentation model, are the root cause that’s holding you back.   

As Peter Drucker pointed out in The Theory of the Business — segmentation is core to the business model and the business model is an integrated framework of assumptions.  A segmentation reset can be transformative because it offers a chance for the organization to pause, examine and update its deep assumptions.   Those that seize this opportunity stand to gain an impressive jump in capabilities. Those that don’t will likely settle for a solution that rests on industrial-age beliefs and reinforces industrial-era actions.   

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