Corporate karma

Tuesday of the first full week of the New Year is apparently the busiest day for job-hunting.  You've given yourself at least a day to get your feet back under the desk but not left it so long that the resolution to work someplace else has been forgotten.

This is also the week that old clients are most likely to get that Happy New Year! email from a consultant like me.  I send these out in waves to ensure that I properly personalise each one.  After all, these are all people with whom I have a history that must be reflected (leveraged) otherwise I might as well be cold calling. And like anyone embarking on that January job search I wait until Tuesday before starting.  That way maybe I'm less likely to be caught up in the First Great Inbox Purge of 2012.

 

With an augur’s intensity I watch my own inbox for replies.  There’s a hierarchy of outcomes from the exercise:-

1. The quick note proposing a call or meeting in the coming weeks is absolutely the most I can hope for
2. The longer note with specific feedback on last year’s results and the plans for the next twelve months isn't awful.  At least my contact took a few minutes to setout the issues that affect me personally
3. The email saying that there's been a change of roles but also giving me the name of the new contact (cc’d) isn't bad.  Managing a baton-change in a client organisation is part of my job
4. It’s hard not to read a quick note announcing a change of roles without any further information as ‘goodbye and good luck’
5. The cursory Happy New Year reply is the email equivalent of a stilted exchange of pleasantries whilst waiting for an elevator

Optimist that I am, getting no response at all is still reason for hope.  Maybe my contact isn't back at her desk for another week.  Maybe she’s gone straight into a procession of heavy-duty meetings.  Or maybe she’s surreptitiously on the job hunt herself, in which case there's no point me being on her radar until she either gets settled in a new position or resigns herself to the current role and refocuses on her 2012 To Do List.  I make a note to try again in mid-March.

I've long believed that no genuine marketing effort goes ultimately unrewarded.  Those efforts must be genuine, an ongoing part of the day-to-day job and not just the occasional paroxysm of activity intended to refill an otherwise empty calendar. And don't be surprised when that reward arrives from an unexpected direction.  Yesterday I got an unsolicited email requesting a meeting in Italy as soon as is convenient.  Not so much attributable cause-and-effect as ‘corporate karma’.

 

Approach the low-yield tasks with the right attitude and trust that the cosmos is taking note

Holidays

 One way to get to grips with the opening premise of Friday’s post is to consider our attitudes to holidays.

Sometimes your ambitions move faster than the world.  Sometimes the world moves faster than you.

Holidays are an annual ritual in paying real money to calibrate our ambitions with the pace of the world.  If you want a week of sleeping, eating and reading you buy a ‘fly’n’flop’ at a child free resort somewhere sunny.  To reconnect with your preteen kids choose Euro Disney.  Because our own scarce resources (time and money) are at stake any dissonance aggravates us so much more on holidays than in usual life; “It wasn't like this in the brochure” is a near-universal lament.

 

For eight years my family ran a 3½-star hotel on Mission Beach in Far North Queensland. I looked after the marketing on a part-time basis, which was a pretty cool job.  How could it not be when this is your workplace?

In our day Castaways on the Beach was a pretty modest operation whose prime selling point was the location.   The property had a longstanding reputation for being ‘family friendly’, offering easy access to a vast waveless beach, lots of suites with in-room cooking facilities and a short walk to a town centre that featured lots of relatively inexpensive dining options and a small supermarket.  Our in-house restaurant also offered an extensive children’s menu.  As everyone knows (or should know), ‘family friendly’ is code for “There will be screaming kids everywhere.  If this is not want you want on your holiday then best you go someplace else.” Families with younger children were consistently our most satisfied customers, not least because our business plan didn't rely on corralling our guests into the dining room three times a day.  What parent doesn't find it galling paying for a full breakfast buffet when all the kid wants is a bowl of cereal?

 

Our least satisfied customers were always honeymooners who had locked onto the picture on the website and the 3½-star tariffs but (often willfully) ignored the ‘family friendly’ signals.  Signals that included the literal words ‘family friendly’ on all our brochures, billboards, website, etc.  We accepted that our offering couldn't match the ambitions of most loved-up newlyweds and instructed the booking staff to gently warn off such customers.  Over the years we invested quite heavily in improvements to the property but intentionally stuck to the 3½-star bracket.  We were happy with our positioning at the ‘family friendly’ end of the market.

 

I have no children and a relatively high disposable income but we never attempted to build an offering that would appeal to people like me and in 2007 my family sold a thriving business.  The new owners, who have far more access to far more capital than we did, spent an actual fortune taking the place ‘upmarket’.  They refurbished the public areas, reduced the pool size to increase the bar area, added a day spa, removed most of the in-room cooking facilities and upped the tariffs by about 60%.

 

I was back in Mission Beach last July and to my childless eyes the place looks amazing.  But to a family on a budget with a brood of young kids the whole package screams “Stay Away!”  The word around town is that Castaways Resort & Spa is for up sale again.

 

The need to purchase a world that temporarily matches our ambitions is the reason why we expend so much energy researching our holidays.  We only get to spend this time and money a few times a year and it's personal.  This is why holidaying with any but the closest of friends is rarely a good idea ("It’s my holiday too, y’know") and why most of us revisit those trusted holiday places again and again and again.

A week I won't get back

I live in London and mostly work in Europe.  I have a few North American clients and would like more and I have one in Asia.  The rest of the Asia-Pac business is handled by an erstwhile business partner who lives in New Zealand.  I'd like to think I'm pretty good at long-distance collaboration.

This week I've been dealing with two quite different men who want to do me the favour of taking my work to new clients.  One is setting up a consultancy in the Middle East and reckons that he can generate a demand for our IP in the region and the other needs my skills to round out a product offering that he's making (speculatively) to a Canadian company.  Both men are entrepreneurs who have identified potentially lucrative opportunities that would never come across my radar.  But each has inserted himself between me and a client and I'm unsure how I feel about that because like most Headcount: 1 types I'm a control freak.  If anyone's going to be in front of a client or an audience it will be me.

This control freakery has been going on so long that I've learnt to treat it as a strength rather than the flaw it is.  Being unable to delegate means that my business will never, ever be scaleable, ergo it will never be saleable.  And as I've said before on these pages, when I get down about this I feel trapped.  If I can't relinquish control of the marketing interactions with clients in far-flung places that I'd never meet otherwise then when can I?

Isn't this just 20th Century Thinking?  Wasn't one of the key learnings from the life of Saint Steve Jobs that an overweening sense of control is a positive thing?  Merlin Mann recently described success, apropos of Apple, as: -

You get to decide who pays you

I suspect that my erstwhile partner doesn't care who pays us for our residual IP.  He sees this incremental (and essentially unearned) income purely as a bonus, as an undiluted good, and especially in markets like Egypt and Saudi and the Gulf.  I'm not sure I agree.   I want my collaborations to enhance not diminish what I do.  I want to finish a project with a stronger brand, a more interesting product and a new set of experiences.

And before we've even gotten to a proper pitch meeting each relationship has gotten bogged down in a separate legal morass.  I've spent the last week proofing licensing agreements and drafting cautionary emails.  The last seven days' efforts have been about protecting what's mine now instead of creating a better, cooler something for tomorrow.

My business is such that I can't license my way to wealth and I certainly can't sue my way there.  A week spent neither developing new ideas or delivering existing ones is a week wasted

A segment of one

The old cliche has it that the world can be divided into two types of people: those that divide the world into two types of people and those that do not.  Typically marketers fall into the former category and salespeople into the latter.  We pay marketers to make sense of the big wide world whereas salesmanship rewards an intense focus on the individual customer.

Much of the time I find that the segmentation strategies operate in much the same way as horoscopes: a point of post hoc analysis more interesting than useful from a sales perspective.

Segmentation strategies, predicated on the assumption that a market can be divided into discrete, identifiable, predictable (and thus exploitable) blocs, are like catnip to marketers.  There's nothing a product manager wants to cultivate more than an aura of prescience, omniscience if that can be managed.  There are plenty of strategic research consultancies who will happily take your money whilst promising you that aura.

Things are different in pharma.  Because the major comms channel available to marketers in most markets is the sales team, broad-brush segmentation models often clash with the salesperson's worldview wherein each prescribing doctor is unique.  Imposing a segmentation strategy on a sales team often adds an unneeded element of complexity into the mix and I'm often brought in to assist translating the marketing speak into sales action.  My question for marketers is this: -

A segmentation model implies that different customers will respond to different messages.  How many conversations do you want the sale rep to carry around in her head?

At the moment I'm involved in several such segmentation projects of varying degrees of sophistication.  The most unfortunate of these went live with the sales team recently.  A ham-fisted marketing presentation managed to be patronising of the sales team, which was in attendance, and contemptuous of the doctors, who were not.  It's generally a bad idea to portray a segment of your customer base as "just wanting a quiet life and more interested in his golf game than his patients".  It's an even worse idea to illustrate your point with cartoon imagery usually associated with Covent Garden street artists.

The sales team in question took it with a grain of salt, which is what experienced sales teams do when confronted with overwrought marketing efforts.  If each customer represents a segment of one then the return on effort for fashioning a plan for an individual is far higher than that for memorising 4-5 separate conversations that will apparently 'push the buttons' of the different types before deciding into which segment each customer belongs.

The unspoken challenge in all of this is that even if the strategy is correct and the market can be broken into four or five segments the salesperson still has to dumb down her knowledge of the customer so that he or she conforms to a certain segment.  If you can close your eyes and visualise an individual doctor then a cliched overview is going to be of partial value to you at best.

The stories we tell

For the last five years I've served on the board of trustees for a West London charity. We offer adult education in the form of Numeracy & Literacy and Information Communication Technology (ICT, aka 'computer skills') to unemployed and otherwise excluded people in North Kensington. The charity has been in operation for 28 years and the chief function of the board is to support our inspirational (and formidable) CEO.

As with all charities everywhere, attracting adequate funding is a constant battle. Our geography counts against us we are located in one of the most deprived wards in London (Golbourne) but that ward is in the richest borough in Britain (Kensington & Chelsea). This incongruence means that we attract less funding than similar organisations in the east of the city even though our students, many of whom are refugees and asylum seekers from places like Ethiopia, Somalia, the Sudan and Iraq, are equally deserving.

Lately I've been making a renewed effort to get friends and acquaintances to help us out financially; my strange, schizophrenic social circle includes quite a number of City Types who, at first glance, would be ideal benefactors to an organisation that is doing good work in their own back yard.

Not so much.

This is not to say that my friends aren't generous but rather that as you'd expect your typical City Type finds himself constantly targeted by a bewildering selection of charities representing good causes ranging from small theatres to the Guide Dogs to the local school to disabled kids to the alma mater. With wealth comes the right to pick and choose where you bestow your munificence.

In marketing terms this amounts to: -

Whose story moves me the most?

What I've learned is that even people with even moderately right wing views are not moved by the origin tales of foreigners. An entreaty that highlights a benighted past can result in a shrug of the shoulders or even something uglier. I've learned to save the stories of famine and refugee camps and even the obscene oppression of women for my lefty mates.

The narrative that motivates the right wingers is not where the beneficiary is from but where she's going. They are no less generous but words like 'motivation', 'integration' and 'aspiration' resonate where 'deserving', 'justified' and even 'humanity' fail.

As with any sales pitch it's all about the story; I've learned to distinguish what has already happened from what is yet to come.

Engaging the disinterested customer

The WSJ recently ran a piece on the growth of digital marketing in American pharma.  As with so many of these articles it begins with dark portents of the death of the drug rep and then frantically rows back from there to conclude that reports of this death are greatly exaggerated.

All pharma companies now have some sort of 'digital' capability, however, the buzzword is too broad to be useful in dissecting industry trends.  Digital is employed by pharma in two broad ways: -

1. Shinier presentations on iPads given to reps
2. Websites for doctors to access information

Whilst the same eMarketing department / digital agency can handle either type of project, the underlying effect of each should not be confused: the former is an animated sales aid with an infinite number of pages whereas the latter requires the doctor to make the first click to succeed at all.  Digital is only as good as the people who see it.  A client of mine is deploring a subordinate's budget request for a medical journal (i.e. print) campaign to drive doctors towards their underused website; old media giving succour to the new.

Vast amounts of time and energy are being spent on luring doctors' eyeballs to pharma company sites, including novel and generally useful activities such as having a key opinion leader Twitter his impressions of a major congress in real time.  Yet as with any other online campaign getting potential customers to your site is a balancing act and compelling someone to visit you is rightly seen as obnoxious.  Pharma companies must be especially careful because the doctors they're trying to attract represent a relatively small and definitely finite population, pretty much all of which is valuable.  The 1% success model that drives the rest of eCommerce definitely does not apply.

The article quotes a German GP -

Christopher Luyken, a general practitioner near Cologne, Germany, says he exchanges views with other doctors online, but sees some of the industry’s online marketing as “spam.” He says he’d rather hear about new drugs from a sales rep he knows and trusts.

Online is certainly cheaper than reps; pharma sales teams are the most expensive comms channel in any form of marketing.  But reps are compelling in a way that websites can never be, especially with those customers who aren't especially interested in what you're trying to say in the first place.  Unlike markets where you really make your money just from those customers who want to buy from you, pharma success requires that everyone be aware of what your product does and for whom.  The uninterested doctor must be engaged with or patients get suboptimal care and a website cannot achieve this.

And what about all the sales reps that Dr Luyken doesn't really know or trust in the slightest?  For what is a rookie rep with a list of target doctors and a shiny new iPad if not spam incarnate?  Delicious to Polynesians but annoying to everyone else.

Interlinked levels of branding

When a pharmaceutical salesperson sits in front of a prescriber there are three interlinked 'branding' interactions in play: -

1. Corporate: doctor's opinion of the pharma company
2. Product: doctor's opinion of the product
3. Personal: doctor's opinion of the individual representative

Product is by far the most important of the three; the doctor's main priority is to his patient so this is where he focuses her attention.  As most doctors will tell you: -

What makes a good drug rep?  A good drug

No rep ever wants to hear this.  She wants to believe (must believe) that her specific input makes a difference.  How the hell do you get about of bed every morning otherwise?  The thing that every experienced salesperson cherishes most and discusses least is her credibility, aka her personal brand.

The very embodiment of 'passive aggression' is a roomful of salespeople, arms folded, listening to a marketer some outline some brilliant new 'brand building' initiative.  The lens through which they view everything the marketer asks of them is this: -

If I undertake this activity will my personal credibility (brand) be enhanced or diminished?

Any product manager who treats a sales team as merely an especially expensive comms channel is a fool. If the team fails to execute the clever, agency-wrought strategy it's not because they didn't understand it but rather they didn't bother executing it at all.  Marketing activity must enhance the credibility of the individual salesperson or it's a waste of time and money.

What of corporate branding?  Would a doctor shy away from trying Horizant (a new GlaxoSmithKline treatment for restless leg syndrome) because of concerns over Avandia (its diabetes drug linked to increases in heart attacks and subject to $6 billion in law suits)?  Not if Horizant is as good as the data seems.

But will the GSK rep selling Horizant have to work that bit harder to establish her own credibility in the face of all the negative Avandia headlines?  Almost certainly.

In a perfect world these three branding level complement each other; a credible salesperson selling a valuable drug made by a respected company.  That alignment happens regularly.  Even so the salesperson has to earn that credibility just as the company has to earn that respect.

That begins and ends with honest, straightforward conversations about a new, needed therapy drug that does some genuine good.

Live stand-up? I went once...

A Birmingham promoter named James Cook writing on Chortle: -

If your first experience of live stand-up comedy is a night at your local where you've paid a fiver to see eight comedians, only three of whom looked like they knew what they were doing, there is a very high probability that you will never go to see live comedy again.  Not just in this venue, but in any venue, even the big ones.  Not only that, all the punters at these sort of gigs are likely to tell their friends.  'Live stand-up? I went once, it was shit.'

My point exactly.

A bird in the hand is worth...

This post may be a bit dry for some.  I'm going to try and set out the new way of forecasting that I'm applying to my consulting business.  The more I think about it the more I'm sure that these principles apply to most freelancers including stand-up comics, graphic designers and the like.

Every successful freelancer struggles with the 'feast or famine' phenomenon whereby you're either too busy to scratch yourself or else you're sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.  The problem stems from failing to generate future work whilst you're preoccupied with the challenges of the present.  Most of us fall into the dreadful habit of not worrying about the blank page in the diary until that actual day.  The oh-so-astute Kate Smurfwaite nailed this with an observation that you often go through periods of always gigging with the same few comics because they emailed with the same promoters s you on the same day three months previously.

I can't remove the need to constantly be prospecting for new business but there are ways to be smart about it.  Firstly, focus on the money, not the diary.  For fear of an empty diary it's easy to fall into the trap of selling your at a discount.  The logic is that it's better to be busy but underpaid than, I dunno, going to the gym and then reading a book.

This diary / money nexus has to be inverted.  The question you need to ask is: how much do I want to earn in a year?  Work out how much do you need to pay the bills, to add to your savings and still have a little left over to splash around to prove to yourself and the world that this self-employment malarkey is working out.

Let's call that 'annual earnings' figure A

Have a good hard look at it.  If it doesn't look a little daunting then you probably haven't got the maths right.  Once you're happy, divide it by four as we're going to work in quarters.

Let's call that 'quarterly earnings' figure Q

Now rather than one big problem (A) you've got four smaller problems but they won't seem to be problems of equal size.  If we say we're going to start this new regimen on April Fools Day then the challenge of earning Q for April-May-June probably seems much more daunting than for January-February-March.  Or maybe your diary's looking good up until summer and you've got less of a handle on July-August-September.  Either way, the psychological challenges represented by Q fluctuate over time.

From here in on you'll need pen and paper or (better still) a spreadsheet.  Create four columns, one for each quarter with three rows.  Write Q at the bottom of the first row as per below

Now get your diary and enter every definite job in the appropriate quarter.  Only include those where you are 100% sure that your services will be needed and that you will be paid.

Let's call these 'definite earnings' D

List the details of D in the top row of appropriate quarter and subtract that from Q.  Call that new figure Qa

This example roughly follows the pattern that my business follows: few clients book me a long way in advance so I have to be comfortable with a 3-6 month horizon.  I know I should be worried that the end of the year and early 2012 are looking thin but I also need to know what to do with that worry.

Go back to your diary.  Now list every probable job by quarter.  Define 'probable' as anything where there's a better than 2 in 3 chance of your services will be needed and that you will be paid.

Let's call these 'probable earnings' P

List the details of P in the top row of appropriate quarter.  Now divide P by 1.5 and subtract that from Qa to get Qb

Why 1.5?  Because we think there's about a 2 in 3 chance of the job coming off.  And look what I've learned; I'm probably going to miss my budget (Q) for April-May-June by 17 but I'm more than fine for July-August-September.  More importantly for the period between October and March I still have a lot of work to do.  Even though I might bill another 360 in October-December, which would get me to 510, the jobs aren't booked yet so I'd be a fool to bank on them.  And I still have plenty of work to do for the start of 2012.

We have to make up the difference in the bottom row.  This is where the diary is of less use than the old the contact list, that stack of business cards and the guy who said to give him a call some time.  We're deep in maybeland.

So let's call these 'maybe earnings' M

There are only two places that these earnings can conceivably come from:-

1. Finding new clients (Mnc), or
2. Selling new products (Mnp) to old clients

I've had my UK business for almost six years, so I have enough data to know that my average time from first meeting with a client to actually delivering a project is 8.67 months.  I've never been able to reduce this.  I now accept it as a fact of my working life.  So even if I met a potential client today I can't realistically bank on anything (Mnc) before January.

Another problem is I'm not especially good at putting time aside for new product development (Mnp).  Almost all of my innovations have emerged as solutions to problems articulated by clients and I'm actually quite crap at building the thing that meets the unrecognised need.  But I do have a few ideas that have worked in one market but have yet to be taken up in others so there's hope for me yet.

I guess we'd better input M into our spreadsheet

This bottom row always has a fantasy element about it, however, the rule is you must keep the Qc fantasy to the right hand side of the page.  If I could realistically anticipate any new business in the next six months then it should appear in the middle row (Qb).  If I need it to happen later in the year it's a task, needing it tomorrow makes it a prayer.

In keeping with my 8.67 month average I've assumed I'll get no new clients (Mnc) before next January.  This means that all of my October-December earnings have to come from existing clients (Mnp).

To temper the fantasy just a little you'll notice that I reckon there's only about a 1 in 3 chance of any Qc earnings actually coming off; remember that we're selling either something that doesn't yet exist or to someone we haven't met.  So we have to be able to identify three times as many Qc opportunities.

Summary
My imaginary business might just survive the next twelve months.  Well done me.  But for that to happen I've got to find new things to sell to my existing clients as well as speaking to new ones.  I knew that already.  The nasty truth I've was avoiding was that both these tasks have to happen now.

Variations
There are a few obvious variations to this basic model that will make it more applicable.  For example, I've assumed that the demand for my stuff is constant throughout the year (500 / quarter).  If your business dries up in the summer then you the initial Q figure for that quarter and compensate with higher targets over the rest of the year.  Anyone contemplating the Edinburgh Fringe may well have a negative figure for July-August-September. 

I've also gone for conversion rates (1.5 and 3) that are a realistic reflection of the way my industry operates but may be questionable elsewhere. 

In Conclusion
As I said at the beginning this is a new technique for me and I apologise if in my excitement I've overcomplicated it.  Like many good ideas it seems to clarify something that I've long known but never articulated.  I like knowing where I need to focus my attention.  I like that it shines a harsh light on the naive expectation that 'somewhere, someone unknown to me is about to come to my rescue'.

I like that if I can see a feast on the horizon then I can decide that next week isn't a famine but a chance to finish that book.

Strong ties

Last October Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great piece in the New Yorker about the strengths and limitations of Twitter and other forms social media. He compares the (successful) American civil rights movement of the 1960's with the (generally unsuccessful) colour revolutions of the last few years.

Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist

Gladwell's argument is that Facebook and Twitter are all very well for establishing the 'weak ties' that are great for disseminating information but no replacement for the 'strong tie' relationships needed to ferment political change. Tweeting your dislike of the government is not the same as occupying Tahrir Square. Friends are only of use to you if they're by your side. You need to bear witness to each others' commitment.

High-risk activism... is a “strong-tie” phenomenon. This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

So what we know can be expanded by 'weak ties' whereas what we do is rarely influenced in that way.

Last week I was in Birmingham helping a client refine their strategy for a new breast cancer treatment. The sales team has successfully established almost universal awareness of the product but the number of actual sales (prescriptions) has been disappointing. Cancer is a grim business and oncologists are thus quite conservative. Whilst no one wants to be the last person to start using a new therapy neither does anyone want to be first. This leads to chicken-and-egg scenarios, which is where my client finds itself.

The sales team is frustrated by doctors' reticence to make what they see is a very low-risk change to prescribing. Every rep I spoke to believes passionately in the product but that's just what they're paid for. They don't have any 'skin in the game'; no pharma rep will ever get the 3am call saying that a terminally ill woman has been admitted to hospital with an unexpected side effect that no one on staff has any experience of handling yet.

So what can my client do to get this group to act differently (ie start prescribing the drug)? By discovering and cultivating any 'strong tie' relationships that exist between the less conservative members of the population. The sales team has to act on the answers to two questions...

1. Which doctors out there believe in our product?
2. How do we connect them; first to each other and then to everyone else?

This is a well-established path in pharma marketing. The client will stage a series of educational meetings where less believing customers are given the chance to bear witness to the testimony of their peers. As non-peers, the sales team's role in all of this is peripheral; they have no real role in these 'strong tie' relationships. Frequently they get in the way at the worst possible time.

On the flipside of my life Andrew Watts is starting up a comedy club in the wilds of Wiltshire. He's been musing over best way of promoting what will undoubtedly be a consistently high quality night. Hopefully he'll dodge the all-too-common reliance on facilities like Facebook and Twitter to drag in the punters.

It's no Tahrir Square but many people find the idea of a night of going to live comedy stressful. The most cited reason for this is a terror of being singled out / picked on. I suspect that this is a polite misplacement; the larger, usually unspoken fear is that the acts will just suck. A night spent in deep sympathy for an audibly sweating twentysomething comic dying in an otherwise silent room is a highly unpalatable prospect.

One of the hallmarks of a (newly) successful comedy night in a rural or even provincial setting is a large number of group bookings. In Gladwell's parlance this is a 'strong tie' phenomenon in action; punters are less likely to view the night as stressful and so more likely to attend if encouraged to go as a group.

My advice to Watts is to offer a heavy discount for larger group bookings, at least in the early days. Once punters have come to the opinion that it's a quality night their stress level will dissipate and they're much more likely to return in twos and threes.

Of course it'll also help if he doesn't book comics whose acts rely on picking on the more unfortunate looking individuals in the crowd. That sort of behaviour's the height of rudeness down Devizes way.

Niching

"The danger with your approach is that we risk niching the product with the individual customer."

As it usually does the comment came from a sales manager at the back of the room.  Salespeople are paid to be ambitious (let's not say greedy) and, practical souls that they are, tend to view the contributions of external consultants like me with a suspicion that regularly crosses over into contempt.

Niching, in the marketing sense, is one of those words that stupid people toss into a discussion to seem more intelligent.  Apparently we are all marketers now, which creates endless frustration for those of us who actually know what we're talking about.

Let's start with the definition: -

niche (n) a specialised but profitable corner of the market: [as adj.] important new niche markets.

When did having a profitable corner of a market become a Bad Thing?  Somehow owning a corner isn't ambitious enough.  We could have an entire wall or even half a room if only we weren't so conservative.  The confusion stems from the differing outlook of sales (where the aim is to have the customer do something specific, usually in the short-term) and marketing (which attempts to get the customer to think or feel a certain certain way over time).

For action-focused salespeople, the worth of a customer should only be determined by his or her current and future actions: either buying our products or not.  To say that an individual has 'niched the product' is meaningless.  Yet in many sales teams there is a strange, pervasive sense that we can remedy this non-existent threat by asking it away.  This is how we get those horribly jarring questions at the end of bad sales calls: -

Why are you staying just one night at our hotel?  Why don't I put you down for five?

The logic is that by demanding that the individual customer do more for us we can't be accused of niching ourselves.

Marketers, who should think deeply about such things, know that a niche (aka a 'segment') is a description of an aggregation of customers that have a certain, consistent set of needs.  If we can meet those needs and make a profit then we just need to communicate this in a meaningful way.  If not then turn your attention elsewhere.

Salesmanship requires passion and persistence.  A big part of marketing is dispassionately doing the maths and being prepared to walk away.

Trent Reznor: comedy prophet?

Big thanks to Bob Slayer for his comment on my Doug Stanhope entry.  He directed me to an excellent piece by Trent Reznor (aka Nine Inch Nails) that offers advice to the 'new / unknown artist' looking to get into the music industry.  The piece takes the broad Kevin Kelly / Chris Anderson ideas around what technology now forces you to give away: -

The point is this: music IS free whether you want to believe that or not. Every piece of music you can think of is available free right now a click away. This is a fact - it sucks as the musician BUT THAT'S THE WAY IT IS (for now). So... have the public get what they want FROM YOU instead of a torrent site 

And what you can do about it: -

what you NEED to do is this - give your music away as high-quality DRM-free MP3s. Collect people's email info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods. Base the price and amount available on what you think you can sell. Make the packages special - make them by hand, sign them, make them unique, make them something YOU would want to have as a fan

All of which is Kelly / Anderson / Godin gospel with the added impact that it's coming from the guy who gave us Closer.

Of course I'm unlikely to agree with Bob that I don't understand Stanhope.  I get what he does as comedian and I'm happy to believe that on his day he does it unbelievably well.  But he didn't bring his A-Game the night I saw him in London.  And it's a really dumb gig to drag your wife along to.

I think that Bob's real point was that Doug Stanhope is also interesting because he's a comedian who's gained control of his marketing in a way analogous to Reznor's advice above.  This is something that we all really need to understand.  If you'd asked me a year ago I would have said that the comedy business is different enough from the music industry that Reznor's rules don't apply then along comes Bo Burnham and it seems that comedy is just like music only more so.  This is a guy who can generate 12 million You Tube hits and then storm it at this year's Edinburgh Fringe.  Apart from anything else, Burnham looks like he's having more fun than everyone else out there still jumping through competition hoops*.

The only way to get ahead on any stand-up scene is to give your stuff away.  Unpaid gigs are the only way new comics get stage time and they resent the hell out of the fact.  Career nirvana for a comic is the day you do your last unpaid (non-charity) gig.

Maybe we've got it all wrong.  Maybe the problem with most comedians' careers is not that they've given away too much free comedy but too little.

* A happy byproduct of competitions like FHM is that they attract genuinely funny friends of mine like Andrew Watts and Catie Wilkins both of whom blog hilariously well about the experience.

A bullet dodged

Recently I endured one of the strangest meetings of my consultancy career.

It began with an email from an ex-client who was now an account manager with one of the most successful pharmaceutical advertising agencies in Europe.  She had a client whose product was facing some specific strategic challenges that she felt I could help resolve.  Given our history I was confident she had a realistic idea of what my company does and specific thoughts as to how I might be able to help her help her client.  Could I come in for a pitch meeting?

When an agency this big calls you take the meeting.

It was scheduled for 930am a few Friday's ago at the agency’s lovely Home Counties offices and to run for ‘ninety minutes, two hours at the outside’.  As requested I customised my basic credentials presentation to hone in on the product’s current needs by highlighting some successful work with other products facing similar challenges.

In a pre-meeting she’d stressed that Charlie, the client in question, was sometimes a bit unpredictable and hard to handle.  That she’d insisted on a formal pre-meeting should have been red flag enough.

I arrived my usual fifteen minutes early to be told that Charlie, also travelling out from London, would be about thirty minutes late.  I chatted with my ex-client and her colleague when a few minutes after 10am a secretary announced that Charlie had arrived but was outside having a smoke.  The other account manager was describing a long overdue beach holiday she is taking next month when he appeared,

Holiday?  Who said that you could take a holiday?  I never signed off on that.

 Charlie wore a golf shirt, jeans and ancient trainers.  Without shaking hands or acknowledging me he threw himself in a chair and announced that he was late because he’d been up all night watching the General Election.  We got a short yet impassioned lecture about the inequities of the first-past-the-post electoral system and then turned on me, 

What’s he doing in a suit?

Before I could respond he waved his own comment away.  I handed over a business card which he tossed unread on the table next to his BlackBerry and cigarettes.  My contact said a few words and handed the meeting over to me.  I began to begin when he interrupted, 

Is he going to stand the whole time?

I was. 

I’d really prefer it if you’d sit down.

I declined.

I’d be using flipcharts and so on and he’d get a far better idea about what my company offered far more easily if he just let me do what I normally do.  He snorted but let me get on with the presentation.

I made it as far as Slide 2 before he interrupted again.  This time he wasn’t objecting per se but rather commenting on the way I was constructing my argument, 

I can see what you’re trying to do here.  It’s not going to work.

He lasted two more slides before declaring that he ‘got’ what I was trying to do but what was I going to do for him?  I negotiated my way through another six or so slides to the point where I move from what my company offers to hone in specifically on the client’s challenges.  And I really do mean ‘negotiate’; after each slide Charlie had to be told to hold his question as the issue raised was addressed always on the next slide.  Finally I picked up a marker pen, turned to the flipchart and asked my usual question, 

So, who is the correct patient for your product?

Charlie immediately left the room for a cigarette.  When he returned ten minutes later I repeated my question,

So, who is the correct patient for your product?

There isn't one.

All I'm trying to understand is where the product should be positioned and define that in terms of the patient that the product will help.”

My next slide outlined a few parameters to help the discussion. 

You don’t understand.  No one knows where to position the product.  I've been in pharma for twenty-five years and I’ve never see anything like this.  It’s impossible.

I’d read the research and it didn’t seem impossible to me.  The product was currently getting low-level usage in one major European market but not in the right type of patient to sustain long-term growth.  I told Charlie I wasn’t talking about how to position the product; we’d get to that later, but simply where it should be positioned.  That is, for which sort of patient.

 That’s the problem.  It’s a extremely complicated area of medicine and no one can say where it should be positioned.

What does the clinical data say?

It says we can be used anywhere in the disease area.”

Okay let’s start with this; how many prescriptions do you need a year to make budget?

He named a figure (which I knew already). 

Then as I understand the disease area, that means we have to avoid pigeonholing the product for last line use because the epidemiology shows us that there aren’t enough eligible patients in that ‘last line cohort’?  Coincidentally this is the only place you’re currently getting sales.

I see what you’re trying to do.  You’re trying to say where we should tell the market where the product should be used.

That’s what positioning is, Charlie, that’s exactly what I was trying to do. 

There’s no point.  The sales team isn't smart enough to follow a strategy as complicated as that.

Let’s leave the sales team out of the mix for the moment and start with the customer; where do the doctors want the product used?

I obviously didn’t understand enough about the product.  That was certainly true; at the start of the meeting I’d given myself permission to ask naïve questions.

Charlie responded by likening the challenges he faced in his market to the launch of the blockbuster antidepressant Prozac.  I told him I found analogies to be of limited benefit.  Why didn’t he instead walk me through the actual issues facing his own product in a way that I could understand and we’d take it from there? 

I find it easier to use this analogy when explaining to people about my product as it keeps things simple.  It’s not just you.  I do this all the time with our sales team.

The point of his Prozac analogy was that the drug represented a game-changing technological advance that created a multibillion-dollar market overnight.  He felt strongly that his product should do the same.  Prozac hadn’t been niched, which was why it was so successful.  And wasn’t that what positioning was?  Niching by another name?  He suggested that we dwell on this wisdom whilst he stepped out for another cigarette.

Need I say that his product was no Prozac?

Around we went.  Every time I proposed a positioning Charlie rebutted it with either another ridiculous analogy, by ‘reminding’ me of a piece of data that he’d hitherto neglected to mention or just by leaving to smoke.

At 1230pm I said I was mindful that it was now Friday afternoon and that I had enough information to put together a costed proposal which he’d get by the middle of next week.  I started to pack up my things, as did the account managers. 

Wait a minute.  What's going on here? I didn’t say that anyone could leave.

I said that had a teleconference scheduled with another client. He demanded that I postpone it, which I duly managed to do (thank god for sane clients).

I don’t have anything else on this afternoon so I want us all to stay here and keep going until we work this thing out.

After we went around the analogy/previously unmentioned data/cigarette loop another time I’d had enough, 

Charlie, I think that three hours is more than long enough for a pitch meeting.

Pitch meeting?  Who said anything about this being a pitch meeting?

It said so on my first slide.

(One of only seven you saw you boor.) 

No, you should know that I don’t waste my time with pitch meetings.  If the girls here say that you’re the right guy for the job then that’s good enough to work for me.

Well, we haven't agreed terms yet and I'm not prepared to share any more of my IP until we get that sorted.  Anyway I still have to make that other call.

I said my goodbyes and left.  My ex-client walked me out, apologising the entire way to the car, 

He knew damn well it was only a pitch.  I told him a dozen times.

The following week I fired off a brief proposal that included a ballpark budget that ignored his request for a discount ‘because we’d never worked together before’.

And that, of course, was the end of the matter.

***

Charlie was a walking Petri dish of insecurity.  Everything he said or did amounted to an ironclad guarantee that he would be a nightmare to work with.  Except that in Charlieworld I wouldn’t be working with him, I’d be working for him.

The ways in which Charlie would be a poor client fall into three broad categories: (a) his inability to engage in Marketing 101; (b) his total lack of respect for anyone inside his business, but most of all (c) the aggressive status games presumably played to mask the first two shortcomings.  The specific behaviours that bother me fell under one of those three headings: - 

Deficit in Marketing

• Hypnotised by the complexity of the product and unwilling (unable?) to see that the marketing still needs to be simple


• Overuse of banal analogies to avoid engagement in the actualities of his own market


• Opting to make a show of positioning the product ambitiously if unrealistically but without any real plans to assist the sales team in establishing this in the field 

Lack of Respect

• Seeing the sales team as stupid


• Antagonistic towards the rest of his organisation.  I got a sense that Charlie’s vociferous support for a project would immediately damn it in the eyes of everyone else.  What good would that do my long-term prospects within his organisation?


• Wanting the whole project to be prohibitively difficult as that might excuse the ambiguous positioning and correspondingly poor sales results to follow 

Status Games

• The relationship with the two (female) agency account managers totally ignored their expertise


• Withholding information from a potential supplier (me).  Of course I didn’t know the data as well as he did, but I resented the implication that I was incompetent rather than newer to the project


• Leaving the room to smoke every time the discussion put him under any sort of pressure


• Dressed so casually as to be dismissive of everyone else in the room


• Actually lying about his understanding of the nature of the meeting

***

So like the title says, a bullet dodged.  If there was an upside it was that I got to bond with the account managers over the experience and that just might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Brand v reputation

I need to cut back on my use of the word 'brand'.

Brand (n). 1.  A trademark or distinctive name identifying a product or a manufacturer.  2. A product line so identified: a popular brand of soap.  3. A distinctive category; a particular kind: a brand of comedy that I do not care for

A key element of the long-term project to legitimise marketing as a profession is the argument that a brand should be treated as an intangible asset and thus be included on a Balance Sheet.  As a marketer by training I certainly understand that a well-respected brand makes it easier to sell the product so branded and thus has a value.


'Brand' is meant to have a value neutral connotation.  A brand is manipulable, which is the purpose of positioning.  This leads to a line of thinking that like any other asset a brand can be neglected or even purposefully damaged and then repaired.

This is the thrust of an article on the IPL cricket competition by Gideon Haigh who is surely the world's finest cricket writer.  He explores the damage that marketing thinking can have in sport: -

A game is a cultural activity, operating at myriad levels, all of which need to be maintained, nurtured, protected. In the world of the brand, all that really matters is the face shown the public, the spectacle, the image. A game depends on fair dealing, robust processes and good people prepared to place their individual interests second. Both a game and a brand are at reputational risk, but in the case of the brand only the appearance of respectability and integrity is essential, and that can be achieved, or so it is usually felt, by sound media management, and at worst post hoc damage control.

Part of the problem is that the term is used far too loosely.  Often when we say 'brand' we really mean 'reputation'.

Reputation (n). 1. The general estimation in which a person is held by the public.  2. The state or situation of being held in high esteem.  3. A specific characteristic or trait ascribed to a person or thing: a reputation for courtesy

Reputation has a old fashioned judgmental, not to say a moral, element to it.  David Cameron's long-term project to 'detoxify the Tory Party brand' was a worthwhile exercise yet it fell short of establishing a reputation for inclusiveness.  Of course there is only so much of a (positive) effect that a political party can have on its reputation if it is out of power so the Tories' real work on this starts now.


I spend a lot of time advising pharmaceutical clients to ignore the brand and to focus on patient outcome as this is where a drug's real value lies.  Advertising agencies, who make money on the premise that a manipulated brand is an enhanced one, rarely thank me for this.  Then again, if I'm annoying the agency then I'm probably doing something right.


The brand v. reputation distinction operates most cogently at a personal level.  As a performer I suppose I have a brand and certainly every show I've produced has benefited from attention to this detail.  Still, I think we'd all do better if we were less concerned with branding and each paid a little more attention to our reputations.

David Heinemeier-Hansson

Yesterday I went along to the Regent Street Apple Store to listen to David Heinemeier-Hansson speak.  I'm not a programmer so until yesterday he was someone who existed only on the edge of my radar.  This was the descriptor for the talk: -

David is the developer behind the hugely successful software Ruby on Rails and Basecamp. Join him as he discusses 37signals’ business manifesto, co-written with Jason Fried, Rework: Change the Way You Work Forever.

It was a free talk so that he could spruik his GTD book so what was there to lose?  As with any other free event nothing but my time.

Even an hardened stand-up would label the lecture theatre at the back of the Apple Store 'a tough room'; substandard acoustics and an audience full of nerds accessing the free WiFi but that doesn't begin to explain the underwhelming non-event that followed.  A profound inability to engage with the audience, an absence of stagecraft and a monotony of delivery all gave the impression that the speaker was focused on nothing more than his final PowerPoint slide and the customary yet desultory round of applause.

Leaving aside the props that Heinemeier-Hansson gets for being sickeningly fluent in English, he wasted my time.  The content of the talk was not so much 'how to improve my personal productivity' but rather 'how to behave if I worked at 37signals'.  I was less likely to buy the book at the end of the talk that at the beginning.

When will people realise that all public speaking is performing?

Exceeding expectations

An easy point of differentiation between stand-up comics and improvisers is their attitude to collaboration.  An interesting question to ask a performer on a long car journey is this: -

Would you rather be recognised as the best act on a mediocre night of comedy or a good contributor without being the stand-out act on a great one?

Every decent improviser opts for the former; the audience experience (aka 'the night') is all that matters.  Far too many stand-ups measure their performance comparatively against the rest of the bill rather than in the absolute terms of audience appreciation.  When I'm going through a bad patch I fall into the same relativist trap and my post-gig analysis starts sounding like the ravings of a paranoiac: -

Was I the weakest on the bill?  Was there a sense of palpable relief when I said goodnight?  The audience only talked during my set and listening intently to everyone else didn't they?  The other acts were all backslapping each other but did anyone say anything complimentary to me?  In fact when I came off stage I don't think that anyone even looked me in the eye...

And so on.  As such schadenfreude is the default setting for most stand-up comics.  This is why a commonplace on the English scene that Michael McIntyre is a poor comic, hardly better than Jimmy Carr really but at least he's no Joe Pasquale.  This mindset is self-destructive in the most obvious yet insidious way and we each need to guard against it.

Conversely, in consultingland it's been years since I've watched another external consultant or trainer work.  I often share a stage with internal speakers but it's very rare for direct competitors to speak to the same audience on the same day*.  The only indicators I have that I'm any good are that (a) my clients pay me on time and (b) keep asking me back.  I find that it's actually pretty easy to 'exceed expectations' when a client has paid thousands in travel, accommodation and fees and effectively gambled tens of thousands more in taking the sales team off the road for a few days because I'm given a brutally clear sense of what those expectations are.

Part of the frustration in performing comedy on most nights is that the audience has no more than a shaky idea why they're there in the first place.  Expectations usually range from the depressingly downbeat (I just hope no one embarrasses themselves, I couldn't bear to watch that) to the ludicrously optimistic (What do you mean a tenner in a room above a pub doesn't get me Eddie Izzard?) making it hard to judge your performance on anything other than your fellow acts.

None of this improves the mental health of your average stand-up comedian, who was unlikely to be especially sane before he took up the craft.

* The exception to this rule are those showcase events where speakers are allotted stage time in front of an audience of would-be buyers.  It's been years since I've attended one.  My business is totally driven by word-of-mouth recommendation amongst a small number of potential clients so the effort needed to make a showcase work has never justified the return.

Your Employer is Not Your Friend

I had two 'proper' jobs before I struck out on my own.  In total my tenure was just over three years, which was long enough to learn what should be a pretty self-evident truth: -

Your Employer is Not Your Friend 

In the mid-80's Unilever, my first employer, had an aggressively promoted Graduate Marketing Programme that roamed Australian campus Careers Days looking for soon-to-be marketing graduates like me.  I applied for the programme and was accepted.  As a 23-year-old Bachelor of Business with a major in Marketing and Advertising working for the multinational that produced roughly half of the brands sold in any supermarket meant that my career was off to a flying start.

I had chosen marketing for two reasons;  I had just enough self-knowledge to know that I didn't have either the maths or the patience for accounting, but mainly the vague idea that a marketing was the job where the advertising agency took you out for The Great Long Lunch.

My immediate problem was that the Graduate Marketing Programme took another 25 marketing graduates on the very same day as me, despite there being only five actual marketing roles on offer.  I got shoved into ‘Trade Marketing’ which is a sort of bastard son of sales and marketing that is all number crunching and report printing.  There were no long lunches only a boss with a bad haircut and an unenviable yet comprehensive collection of polyester officewear.  At least the word ‘marketing’ appeared in my job title – others were randomly dumped in sales, manufacturing, new product development and, in one especially unfortunate case, Occupational Health & Safety.

We learned that the programme was one big lie when we understood the myth of us being on a Six-Month Rotation.  Even then I could see it takes at least a year before a graduate accomplishes anything even vaguely useful and no manager is stupid enough to take on two new smug little incompetents every year whose only genuine thought is “When do I get to go to Rockpool?”

Closely aligned to The Six-Month Rotation Myth was The Great Overseas Posting Lie which worked like this; about three-quarters of the way through a successful graduate interview there’s a lull in conversation when the HR person leans conspiratorially towards the interviewee to ask in a hushed yet serious voice “How would you feel if we had to send you to say, London, for six months for work?”

The interviewee faces the stern challenge of suppressing an immense shit-eating grin whilst selflessly promising to be available for any and all overseas postings ‘for the good of the company’.  Internally The Great Long Lunch is upwardly revised from ‘Rockpool’ to ‘The River Café’.  The trick works in company’s favour every time because anyone who dreams of The Great Long Lunch (i.e. anyone in marketing) is a sucker for the prospect of overseas travel.

The beauty of the lie is that as long as the employee believes in it then it forms a part of the remuneration package.  For over eighteen months I truly believed I was but a heartbeat away from a Business Class ticket to Heathrow and that alone compensated for me being substantially less than my classmates who got sane jobs.  I shudder to think what a 24-year-old version of me would have done in the London office had they ever made good their threat, probably just stood around grinning inanely and crashing the mainframe if his cheerfully monolingual Japanese replacement was anything to go by.

To keep us happily underpaid all the company had to do was send a respected if replaceable employee on an overseas secondment every year or so.  When the ‘All Staff’ memo hit the notice board (this is all pre-eMail) the rest of us were torn between bilious envy and the internal whispering “I could be next!”

The theory behind the ‘Graduate Marketing Programme’ was that there were plenty more where we came from and this was annually proven to be correct.  The attrition rate was either horribly high or spot on depending on how you viewed it.  Most of us lasted less than five years in the company and I was gone in under two without ever leaving Trade Marketing.

 A couple of my intake did stick it out and both went onto greatish things.  If I was asked for adjectives to describe them I would settle on ‘patient’ and ‘unimaginative’; the exact words the business press use to describe the company overall.

The day I realised that I never likely to be on the short list for the long flight to London I felt underpaid.  A big part of our salary packages is hope and when that goes we generally follow it out the door.

Marketing-by-telepathy

The endless British winter this week brought a paucity of punters at gigs across London and the south of England. On a cliched foggy night I drove with a couple of comics to a once-a-month gig at a pretty little pub in an isolated village.  The landlord greeted us with a bizarre accusation: -

"Not many in tonight. Don't know why I bother with comedy. I got twice as many to watch opera last week and paid the singer half what you lot cost me."

Who were we to dispute this? The thirty (happily happy) punters who turned up to watch us apparently amounted to less than a third of the audience for the first foray into arias.  The comic in me shrugged his shoulders, did the gig, collected the fee and drove on home.

My inner consultant wanted to grab him by the lapels and shake some sense into the fool. Can't you see that you're blaming the acts for a lapse in your marketing?  How does that help us entertain the people who have managed to turn up and god knows how they did given that your sole promotional effort was a chalkboard listing our names inside the pub itself? Are you having the same whinge at your equally underwhelmed bar staff tonight?  Well done on the opera thing.   Maybe you've tapped an exciting new market of well-heeled culture-vultures or maybe you got lucky.  Either way I bet you spruiked the night a lot harder than the solitary chalkboard we got.

Marketing-by-telepathy. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?

Sales v. Marketing

Why is it that the senior sales guy who publicly declares that his company brooks no divide between Sales and Marketing is the one to run down his colleagues in private?

He's also the guy who backs the marketing strategy 100%, unless of course that entails any on-the-ground behavioural change from the sales team.

And he's the man most likely to insist that it takes years to gain credibility as a salesperson but that marketing can be mastered in months.

It's going to be a long week.

Standing at the intersection

This week is all about the iPad.

As an Apple loyalist I guess I'll own one sooner or later but for now it's fun watching the commentariat contorting to either damn the thing or else worship unquestioningly at the altar of Steve Jobs (the Economist cover is fantastic). Stephen Fry is an unashamed Apple fan and as a good writer passionate about his subject is always worth reading I recommend his paean to the iPad. I especially liked Fry's improvement on a Jobs quote from the launch: -

Apple stands at the intersection of Technology, the Liberal Arts and Commerce

The idea of the intersection is intriguing to a small-shop consultant like me. I arrived at self-employment by stepping off the road that everyone else was on and the only niche that I can genuinely inhabit must derive from the sum total of my experiences.

What is self-branding if not an exercise in standing proud at the intersection of your own talents, skills and experiences and convincing the world it's worth paying to spend some time with you?