Click here to view the embedded video.

So, do you think that might have some rather profound effects on Domino’s marketing efforts?  Think you’ll be eating at Domino’s anytime soon?

What’s interesting is that the basic principle behind this was predicted not by some far-seeing futurist working in the technology field, but by Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Charles C. Krulak.

Gen. Krulak coined the term “strategic corporal” to refer to the possible strategic foreign policy impact of actions taken by individual Marines in an age of universal media coverage and counter-insurgency warfare:

“In many cases, the individual Marine will be the most conspicuous symbol of American foreign policy and will potentially influence not only the immediate tactical situation, but the operational and strategic levels as well. His actions, therefore, will directly impact the outcome of the larger operation; and he will become, as the title of this article suggests – the Strategic Corporal.”

Since the publication of Gen Krulak’s article in 1999, the rise of cell phone video cameras, YouTube, and twitter have further amplified the potential impact of local, tactical actions of seemingly “lower-level” or front-line individuals.

Granted, minimum wage workers operate in a far less dramatic and less-threatening arena than Marines, but the above video offers a stark example of the far reaching strategic impact of their actions.

The Marine Corps response to this has always been to recruit the very best individuals possible and to push decision-making and responsibility as far down the chain of command as possible. Many successful businesses take a similar approach with their front-line workers.  And the results pay-off when the great actions of individual employees hit the social media echo chamber.

What is (or what will be) your organization’s response?

In January, I was sitting with Jack Love publisher of Internet Retailer as he was being interviewed on WebMasterRadio. Jack told my friend Jim Hedger that it didn’t take much to look good over the last 6 or 7 years in the ecommerce space while industry growth was 25% or greater year after year. A rising tide lifted all boats. Most people could just be on auto-pilot and their business would grow.

Times have changed.

We are no longer experiencing that explosive growth, and in these turbulent times I still see many people hoping to pilot their business using auto-pilot. I have bad news for those people. If you want to avoid a crash and burn over the next few years you are going to have to roll up your sleeves, maintain control, and maneuver yourself to safety.

This week at the “New Rules for Engagement” breakfast Forrester analyst Patti Freeman Evans played the following humorous video (just wait till the commercial ends) from the Daily Show with John Stewart for the 50+ retailers in the room:

In every bit of humor there is underlying some truth. I am seeing so many businesses relying on “Emergency Christmas”, offering huge sales (20+% off) week after week. You probably can see many of those same offers in your inbox. This show of panic to move merchandise is not the way to a safe landing.

I urge you not to stay the course, the times for easy money are over. Sully could have crashed in the middle of NYC, but he stayed calm with effort, some close calls and real precision he could succeed. So can you.

]]> http://www.grokdotcom.com/2009/03/05/sully-sullenbergs-secret-to-online-success/feed/ 4 http://www.grokdotcom.com/2009/01/28/on-cmos-customer-service-and-birthing-elephants/ http://www.grokdotcom.com/2009/01/28/on-cmos-customer-service-and-birthing-elephants/#comments Wed, 28 Jan 2009 09:09:48 +0000 Howard Kaplan http://www.grokdotcom.com/?p=2799

If you’ve been to one of our trainings over the past few years, or seen any of us present at a conference, you’ve probably heard the line about the average tenure of a Chief Marketing Officer being less than the gestation period of an elephant.  Well, it’s time for…

If you’ve been to one of our trainings over the past few years, or seen any of us present at a conference, you’ve probably heard the line about the average tenure of a Chief Marketing Officer being less than the gestation period of an elephant.  Well, it’s time for some new material.  New research from executive search firm Spencer Stuart shows that CMOs are making it into their 3rd year with the same organization, on average, based on a review of the 100 most advertised brands in the U.S.

The CMO Strategy column in Ad-age does a good job postulating why CMO tenure is rising, and soliciting feedback from the folks who put together the research for Spencer Stuart, as well as a few who currently hold the position of their firms marketing top dog.  I’m encouraged to see most interviewed recognizing the (necessary) shifting role towards more accountable marketing- establishing hard measures of success and utilizing Analytics tools to help achieve the organization’s underlying objectives:

“Elisabeth Charles, who starts a new post as CMO of Petco in mid-February, also credits analytics and measurable results for the increased tenure. “You see a lot more folks doing marketing ROI studies, using more direct marketing that can be measured and shows a payback, as well as really scrutinizing the balance of brand investment vs. traffic or sales driving initiatives.”

Ms. Charles goes on to point out an area that has improved but “is still highly underleveraged”, that of utilizing technology & tools to better tap into consumer insights- listening to the voice of the customer.  Interesting she brings that up, as it dovetails with a another piece of research on CMOs, seemingly far more negative.

Bestselling author Scott McKain (@scottmckain) points to a new study by the CMO Council, and opines:

“While we often first point the finger at the Chief Financial Officer as being disconnected from customers, the truly shocking part of the study is that it is the Chief Marketing Officer who fails to listen to, and learn from, the very people they are marketing to!”

Now before you get all hot and bothered by Scott’s comments, he’s simply reacting to the CMO Council’s published statistics.  MediaPost spoke with the Executive Director of the CMO Council, Donovan Neale-May, and when you understand the lens through which he views the role of CMO, it makes sense why he’s led Scott to the conclusion above.

Donovan defines the CMOs most critical role as “owning every facet of listening, learning, interacting, engaging, and optimizing the relationship with the customer, and understanding where the attrition, pain and aggravation is, and doing this in real time.”  I like that definition, although I’d offer we need to add an explicit benefit/outcome- optimizing the relationship with the customer, to what end?  As long as it’s help them achieve their goals, and by extension, our business goals, I’m on board.  Doing so also reminds ourselves of our responsibility to our organization to be new age accountable marketers   I digress.

“Neale-May argues that the study shows that marketers tend to view customer services reactively, as a function for resolving a problem, not enough as an opportunity to engage or interact. Only about 37% of companies surveyed gather customer insight from customer engagement situations, per the firm. Only 15% use such situations to identify and cultivate potential customer champions and advocates. Only a third reported that they look for ways to turn problems into new sales opportunities, and only 16% introduce new products or services to further monetize the relationship.”

Apparently this research seems to validate what Elisabeth Charles expressed in her Ad-age quote, underleveraged indeed.

However, I think these two pieces of research, taken out of context, simply show (or aim to show) extremes on a continuum.  This shouldn’t be a sky-is-falling blog post, there’s good news and opportunity here.  As a marketing community as a whole, there’s still plenty of room for growth, but collectively *I think* we’re improving.  I look at brands like Comcast (with Frank @ComcastCares), Dell (@RichardAtDell), JetBlue (@JetBlue), Southwest Airlines (@SouthwestAir) as signs of a positive trend.  I look at service providers like BazaarVoice, who not only get it themselves, but can be legitimate resources to helping their client organizations improve their efforts to better listen and serve their customers.  I look at CMOs like Barry Judge (BestBuy), Sam Decker (BazaarVoice), Patrick Moran (Mzinga) who are clear examples of accountable marketers, who know the value of (and have the discipline to) measure success and continually optimize, not to mention constantly listen, learn & interact with their customers.  These signs point me to this trend accelerating in the future, despite the current research.  I choose to see the glass half full, although I know, hope is not a strategy.

All that said, I can be as optimistic as I choose to be, but I’d much rather listen to the marketing practitioners themselves, you guys out there with your feet on the street.

• Do you see a shift in your organization towards aligning your business objectives with your customers?
• Do you see the Marketing group and the Sales groups breaking down silo walls and collaborating on the same performance goals?
• Are you finding service providers and tool makers who help you leverage the social web to get closer to your audience, to better understand them, and to better service them?

If so, we’d love to listen and learn from you, so please share with your community here and don’t be a stranger.

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Here are 5 strategies companies use to become market leaders.

They have great operations -

Operations that let them be more efficient than you at getting order picked, packed and delivered so that customers’ expectations are exceeded. These efficiencies in operations also allow them to keep their costs down.  At the same time those interested in capturing additional market share invest those efficiencies back into improving the customers’ experience. Walmart.com online exemplifies this quality.

They do a better job at generating word of mouth -

Everything they do is focused in on delighting customers. They are driven by service. They understand that success is a long term strategy and can afford to do what they need to in order to please their customers. They go to every extreme to delight their customers and offer lagniappe in many ways.

They live on “life-time value” metrics. They are driven by a passion to serve and a philosophy that it is easier to keep a customer for life than to try and keep acquiring new ones. These some times over the top efforts that lead to so many of their customers sharing the amazing experiences they have had with the brand. Zappos.com exemplifies this quality..

They deliver as good of a product/service in a more customer friendly way -

I’ve seen this one happen so many times. One day you, the market leader, the first person to market with the product, with significant marketing budgets, and with the hugest market share become aware of some smallish competitor and ignore them because their product isn’t up to snuff.

They slowly start winning customers, that just need the basic features they offer. All the while they keep building up their product/service. However,  from the get go they eliminated many of the hassles of getting started with their business. Instead of a complicated sale processes, or in-the-way sales people they made their pricing transparent and made it easy to sign up online to get started right away. GotoMeeting employed this strategy when competing with Webex.

They do a better job at being found when people need them -

Location, location, location. Budweiser is not the world’s finest beer. However, they sell a lot of beer. Bud dominates so many channels that they are always available. We know Bud and so we order it because often good enough is good enough. Amazon applies this principle online.

Wherever or whatever you search for comes up on their site or on Google as being sold by them. I am not just talking about having a first place ranking for the most competitive single word key phrase, but they have invested in having content (a large portion customer generated) that spans the long tail, from early in the buying process to later in the buying process. Their pages tend to keep showing up time and time again. They thrive on generating content that is relevant and are thrilled to live off the 3 or 4 searches a month for a particular piece of content or obscure product as long as they have thousands of them that people are finding. Amazon has utilized this to keep adding product categories to their vast catalog.

They developed a culture that continuously optimizes the customer experience -

This is different than being customer intimate, it is more incremental, it is about being metrics driven. The key is to focus on key performance indicators that drive success for your business and being relentless and innovative in way to drive up those numbers. They may not often start off as the category leader but through relentless testing and optimizing they gain market share. These companies tend to be less risk averse preferring gradual and continuous change. This is a very powerful strategy for companies to leverage in a down economy, because while your competitors are trying to maintain status quo you focus on constantly improving. Many of Intuit’s brands exemplify this strategy.

How can you leverage these strategies to drive your own growth?

Outages happen all the time, but there is a scale at which this becomes amazingly rare and the amount of time of the outage was surprising. 30 minutes to two hours doesn’t sound like a lot of time, but when you consider the scale of a business like Amazon.com, it has massive impact to the sales of the company. Advertising Age estimated that Amazon may have lost $1.8 Million, based on the company’s last quarterly earnings report.

Personally, I doubt it was that large — considering Amazon’s revenue mix and the date/time of the outage — but it was a sizable chunk of change. Then consider the collateral brand damage of taking down the sites of all the small businesses who decided to trust Amazon.com as their platform for launching their businesses. Try measuring the true impact of that hit.

The most chilling impact, though, is how much forward momentum was just wiped out for the company and the marketing team responsible for reaching their targets. How many of the hard-fought growth numbers for the period are just negated by technology failure.

This type of impact sneaks up on a company as it matures. It reminded me of an instance in my career, managing acquisition marketing for a large online subscription business. On a particularly high traffic day, the store went down and I was shocked when no one dropped everything to start fixing it.

The problem was scale. In the past, when the company was small, an outage like this wasn’t a big deal because they only lost a few sales. But as the company had grown (with the same people in the same roles), the scale and impact of such a problem was forgotten. It wasn’t until I brought management an estimation of the 5-6 figure number we were likely to lose because of the issue that the whips started cracking and the problem received the attention it deserved.

There are insights to be gained from both examples that any effective marketing team should put into practice:

1) Analytics and Tracking: Make sure you as marketers are watching the health of your site and ads. Most analytics packages have alerts for metrics. Build reports that allow you to see critical areas of your site in real time. For instance, I had a real time view of all the steps of our purchase funnels on my desk at all times and it saved the day a few times.

2) Marketers, understand the importance of building it right as well as fast. Sometimes we push developers too hard to deliver in tight time-frames and scalability and fail-safes are sometimes the first code to get cheated. Developers, empathize with your marketing team’s critical deadlines and don’t go overboard on scalability.

3) Understand, in real dollars, the impact outages have to the top and bottom lines and invest appropriately to protect your performance.

Sounds like something the dev team should do, right? Well, yes, but this is one area where two eyes are better than one and where healthy collaboration helps the entire enterprise.

And to Amazon.com, your recent outage sent the bookworm-like staff here at FutureNow into a raw panic, but we empathize with your recent pain and hope you’ve learned many powerful lessons from the issue.

. .

About the Author: Brian Bond is VP of Marketing and Product at FutureNow, Inc.

Marketers often get so worked up about the prospect of website optimization that we forget an important step. Before we can pursue optimization, we must convince those in our own company about optimization’s value.

Here, then, are some tips for convincing executives, coworkers, teammates, and anyone else in your company of the importance of investing in marketing optimization, analytics, and conversion improvement efforts.

Get the Math Right

When you present your numbers, don’t assume your listeners are getting the math right:

• 100,000 people visit your Web site
• 3 percent of people convert into a desired outcome
• Your site gets 3,000 total conversions

What happens when you increase conversion rate by 1 percent? How many total conversions does your organization hear?

• 3,030
• 4,000

Translate All Numbers Into Dollars

Another dangerous assumption to make is that your listeners can translate numbers into dollars. Always show impact in terms of dollars. Use average order value (AOV) or average lead value (for lead-generation or registration sites).

Let’s say your AOV is $50 and your company spends $200 for every 1,000 visits. For those 1,000 visits, your conversion rate is 2 percent, which equals 20 actions. For every 1,000 visits, you gross $1,000 in sales (calculate: $50 AOV x 20 actions = $1,000 in gross sales). If you increase your conversion rate modestly to 3 percent, your gross sales increase is 50 percent, or $500 per 1,000 visits (calculate: 3 percent x 1,000 visits = 30 actions; 30 actions x $50 AOV = $1,500 in sales).

It’s also helpful to show the dollar impact over an entire quarter or a fiscal year.

Oftentimes companies have a hard time determining AOV or average lead value with any degree of accuracy; that’s OK. Of course, the cleaner your data, the easier it will be to have organizational buy-in. The key is to show some sort of monetary value. We often encourage our clients to make a conservative estimate that most in the company will agree on.

Leverage Your Reach

Show your team the advantage of taking control of the visitor instead of existing solely at the mercy of visitor traffic.

With an AOV of $50 and a modest conversion rate increase from 2 percent to 3 percent (50 percent), the sales increase is impressive, but that’s only one part of the story. In the table below, you can see the impact of increasing both conversion and traffic:

In the “good” column, you get more from the traffic and spend. Your CPA (define) goes down, and you generate more profit from your advertising. You won’t grow faster, but you make more.

Let’s say you reinvest some of those dollars into acquisition spend to drive more traffic. You can grow exponentially and outspend your competition, you can even afford for the conversion rate to go down a bit. Your conversion and traffic increase rockets your growth dramatically.

This advantage of conversion rate optimization is often missed or overlooked by many companies.

With a conversion rate increase, you now have a choice:

• Use incremental profits to expand reach: 133,000 visits x 4% conversion rate = 5,320 orders
• Lower your marketing acquisition costs. If your acquisition cost was $100 per action, with this efficiency it would now be $66 per action.

Again, even with modest increases in conversion companies can begin to wean themselves off addictive traffic or make their traffic work harder for them instead of working harder for traffic.

Is There a Catch?

While there are many tools to aid marketers in their quest, there’s still no conversion rate black box. Conversion optimization always require resources and effort, trial and error, and sometimes sweat and tears. And it never ends. Optimization is a continual process of gaining customer insight, implementing changes, testing, then starting the whole process over.

The Bottom Line

You can’t always control the amount of visits, but you can control what you present to visitors. Why not optimize it?

Still have doubts? Ask yourself: what would it cost you to double traffic (if this is even possible) versus doubling conversion rate?

*Article cross-posted on ClickZ

. .

Editor’s Note: At FutureNow, we insist on measurable ROI for our clients. That’s we start by identifying the areas that will make the most difference to your conversion rate and other vital performance metrics. Please contact us to learn how we can help you, or an executive team you know, market better.

This isn’t the dumbest thing they’ve done lately, but it’s weird.

Starbucks, meanwhile, also hopes to emulate Starbucks — as it once was, anyway — now that Howard Shultz has returned as CEO, renewing his vows with customers. Considering that they’ve been the McDonald’s of coffee since at least 2000, when Shultz last held the position, this oddball battle of the brands is already the height of corporate irony.

Sure, this may seem like a good time for McDonald’s to get into the game (their share price went up 31% last year while Starbucks dropped 41%). And yes, there are a lot of great reasons to compete with Starbucks from the two-dimensional comforts of a spreadsheet. But do they really want trained baristas?

Besides, isn’t the current Starbucks mess thanks to the company’s over-caffeinated growth — the very growth that Shultz pioneered — and not because they abandoned their mythical, shade-grown je-ne-sais-quoi?

The bagel shop near my apartment has some of the best bagels in Brooklyn. They also have a cappuccino machine, if not a barista. You can order a “half-caff french vanilla iced latte” if you want, but I don’t recommend it. The guys behind the counter will sneer at you, as will fellow customers as you hold up the line. But there’s something nice about that. It’s honest. Terrace Bagels doesn’t want to be Starbucks, and neither it seems should McDonald’s.

Starbucks, on the other hand — yeah, they might wanna look into that.

Brand Autopsy’s John Moore, who wrote the book on Starbucks’ marketing, compares Shultz’s return with that of Michael Dell. It’s too early to say what will and won’t work for these two (*gulp*) cafe chains, but Moore has some good advice from the Starbucks playbook in the meantime.

UPDATE: Not sure how I missed this from the WSJ article, but here’s a video of the machine the McDonald’s “baristas” will be operating:

But all that’s changed. Today, they have a brand-spanking-new fleet of mid-sized jets staffed with would-be friendly people who, bound and gagged with corporate red tape, can’t do much to help the customer even when they want to. Sure, the fares are lower than ever, but even with off-peak flights for as low as $1 (yes, really), it’s still not worth it. Why? Because, according to their current CEO, Ben Baldanza, the customer is always a cheapskate — and wrong.

Maybe it’s time to put a dimmer on those red light specials. They say that “a fish stinks from the head,” and if there’s ever been any proof, its this email Mr. Baldanza sent to a customer by accidentally hitting “reply to all” on his BlackBerry:

“Please respond, Pasquale, but we owe him nothing as far as I’m concerned. Let him tell the world how bad we are. He’s never flown us before anyway and will be back when we save him a penny.”

But, wait! There’s more!! Here’s their Director of Communications, Alison Russell, on a separate incident where blogger Alex Rudloff told readers, “Do Not Fly Spirit Airlines“:

“We wouldn’t respond to a blog post. This goes back to the larger question of the veracity of everything you read on Internet blogs. Our customer service is great.”

Oh, really?? More on my horror story with Spirit 2.0 in a moment. But first, let’s see what Google has to say about the company:

Here’s what Rudloff had to say in his blog post:

“So, instead of losing $5 on a customer who has every right to be angry, I’ll write this blog post and tell all my traveling buddies to add Spirit Airlines to their growing list of airlines to avoid,” Rudloff wrote on Aug. 4. “If Google works their magic like they usually do, at least one of the 4,931 daily searches for “Spirit Airlines” will turn up this result and save someone the headache (and hopefully end up costing Spirit Airlines $6 or more).”

Rudloff later told the Orlando Sentinel that:

“I think ultimately that customers have to speak out and they have to engage in word of mouth . . . That’s what the market responds to.”

Cool! What a great segue…

All Spirit, No Soul

Last May, I was flying from New York (LGA) to Detroit (DTW), as I often do for Memorial Day weekend — my favorite time to vacation in Detroit. I was running late. The car service was half an hour late, and traffic wasn’t moving, thanks to jackknifed truck on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. After paying top dollar to sit in a car for two hours, it was clear that I’d miss the 30-minutes-before-departure check-in deadline. So, I called Spirit Air’s 1-800 number, only to find there was no “customer service” option. So I waited on hold for, say, 20 minutes until I eventually hung up and called back, pressing a random — and incorrect — selection in hopes of reaching a human who could tell me what to do about the situation. When I finally reached a customer service rep, she told me to go to the airport and speak to the agents at the check-in counter — where I waited for (you guessed it) another 30 minutes.

After all of that, I got to the airport just before the 30-minute mark, but there was a line — a long one — and not enough agents to serve it. When I got to the front of the line, the agent told me that nothing could be done. If I wanted to book another flight, there was one leaving in an hour, but it would cost as much as my entire round trip. I kindly informed this person that I’d be willing to pay a charge — as is typical with other cheapskate airlines — to switch the ticket, but that buying a whole new one, just for a one-way leg of a round-trip flight was absurd. Then, when I asked for a number for customer service because I wanted to complain about the event — after all, I’d been a customer for 10 years — the guy hands me a card with the same freaking number I’d used earlier to get someone who couldn’t help me! When I brought that to the agent’s attention, he said, “I’m sorry, sir, there’s nothing I can do about it” — a common refrain at today’s Spirit Air.

So, Northwest Airlines to rescue (for once), and I was on my way to Detroit with a pounding headache and the world’s dumbest $200 missing from my bank account.

On the way back to New York, I was actually looking forward to flying Spirit. “If this isn’t a good trip after that nonsense,” I thought, “I’m so going to blog this.” Checking in with a smile, I handed the agent my ticket. “I’m sorry, Mr. Gorell, but we don’t have a seat with that name on it for this flight,” he said. I told him that was impossible and that I wasn’t imagining the ticket in my hand. Then it hit me: They’d canceled my entire round-trip ticket because they couldn’t serve me in time!

Turning beet-red, I calmly told the agent of my snag in New York. As I retold the story, one-by-one, all four agents at the desk came up to me, visibly upset by what I had to say. I let them know I was a blogger for a company that specializes in planning and optimizing the customer experience, and that I couldn’t believe the airline had tied their hands from doing anything of value for its “passengers.” Then a crazy thing happened. They actually encouraged me to blog about it! As it turned out, everyone at the counter seemed upset with the company’s new policies, too. I could tell they were biting their tongues, until…

“We used to be #1 in customer service,” said one agent. “Now we can’t help people.”

Her co-workers looked me in the eye and nodded. It was such an honest moment that I actually bought a one-way ticket from them… for the flight I’d already, supposedly, booked. (Oh, and since this was a last-minute one-way flight to NYC, you can be sure I got red flagged for security screening.)

For months, I let it slide. After speaking with the good people at Spirit in Detroit, I worried that blogging about the experience might put their jobs at risk. That is, until I saw Mack Collier’s post, which hipped me to the fact that a lot of other bloggers out there are also convinced that Spirit’s CEO — and not its employees — is what’s putting their jobs at risk by causing this fish to stink:

Alex Rudloff

BL Ochman’s WhatsNextBlog

Bold Interactive

CEO Smack

Darwin PR

Gadling

Jaunted

Josh Hallett

Lawrence Salberg

Perpetually Befuddled

Propeller

Reality Bites Back

Sarah and the Goon Squad

Search Engine Guide

Stuck on the Palmetto

The BOOT

Transmission

Upgrade: Travel Better

Sorry, Mr. Baldanza, but you can’t fly faster than word of mouth (or blog).

Deloitte & Touche is trying to find out.

According this Wall Street Journal article, Deloitte & Touche USA LLP has implemented a new program in conjunction with Marti Barletta’s TrendSight Group, to better understand the needs of female clients and train employees on how to treat them like, well, females.

Deloitte began offering four-hour workshops on gender differences to its employees last year. Among its other suggestions:

Don’t be frustrated if female clients reevaluate or modify their initial requests; because they discover as they shop, women may be very receptive to suggestions about other services.

Women clients want to know and trust their consultants personally as well as professionally; sharing personal details can help build trust.

Women often prefer business lunches to dinners, because they tend to have more responsibilities at home. And they may be more receptive to evening social invitations if asked with sufficient time to make arrangements at home.

Body language differs by gender. Men tend to stare as they listen and nod to signify they understand. Women may nod when they don’t yet understand to encourage the speaker to keep talking. And while consultants often seat themselves beside a male client as their “right hand man,” women are more comfortable seated face to face.

There’s certainly some valuable insight here. I do believe Deloitte will see some positive results. And I applaud any company willing to spend the time and money to truly understand their customers and their customers’ needs.

One point I found particularly interesting was the suggestion that you bring “subordinates” into meetings, so your female clients can meet the people they well be working with. I agree whole heartedly. Women do want to meet the actual people who will be doing the work. But what really interested me was the use of the word “subordinates.” (Can you say “male communication style“?) That’s a loaded word. It implies hierarchy, status, and that such people are “less than.” Be very careful with your choice of words.

There are two things I hope Deloitte will be careful of:

1.) You don’t want women to feel patronized.

2.) You don’t want your employees to stereotype female clients.

This last point is very important. As I’ve found in my research, there’s no such thing as “all women want this” or “all women do that.” Automatically treating someone a specific way just because she’s a woman is dangerous.

I do think there’s some valuable insight that has come from this training program. I’ll be very interested to see the results and feedback Deloitte gets from their female clients.

In the meantime, be sure to read Tami Anderson’s perspective, and let us know what you think of Deloitte’s research in the comments.

(Okay, perfectionists, you can put your hands down. Nobody’s actually keeping tabs.)

If you answered anything but “doing it quickly,” it’s time to take the “Do it Wrong Quickly” Challenge. The good people at IBM have been kind enough to offer GrokDotCom’s readers an exclusive on this fun interactive quiz they’ve developed. Yes, it’s fun — and it is challenging. Sure, we all want to do our best, but sometimes our best intentions get in the way of getting things done.

So, in the spirit of our buddy Mike Moran’s new book (you guessed it) Do it Wrong Quickly, we’ll leave perfection for another blog post and just ask that you to take the quiz!

Oh, and don’t forget to share your results with the rest of the class…

Acceller CEO Steve McKean is happy to point out that “the Inc. 500 list looks at 4 years of data, and that you can correlate Acceller’s work with Future Now to that growth.” While we do appreciate the compliment, I correlate their success to Steve’s vision as CEO; a relentless focus on execution, the customer experience, and commitment to ongoing improvement.

Their next step: start a new business unit.

While many CEO’s would be content with 2,250% growth, Steve, aware of changes in his industry, knew they had to innovate. Rather than reinvent BuyTelco — which is focused solely on converting ready-to-buy, internet-service-only customers — they created an entirely new experience and brand: Digital Landing.

How did they do it? How does a company capitalize on what it knows about its current business while there are so many unknowns about the new brand’s potential customers and their buying process?

1.Assemble an Investigative Task Force, consisting of people experienced with past/current products, new research, and conversion issues. Make sure you ask the right questions, keeping lessons learned from the former site in play.

2. Develop customer persona assumptions. Why assumptions? Digital Landing didn’t have any customers yet, so we had to make assumptions as to who their customers might be. The good news is that, once a site launches, you can test these assumptions and optimize accordingly.

3. Develop and refine the buy-flow. This is the conversion-related part. Since they were adding additional services — e.g., phone, video, HD — and bundles, we knew it would be complicated. We worked closely with them to make sure it would be as smooth as possible, but much more time was focused on the details — specific wording of calls to action, shopping cart usability, color choice, etc. — pre-launch. There’s still work to be done (read: optimization).

4. Plan content strategy using personas. By planning content through the eyes of our personas, we were able to match both the tone and types of content to their individual needs. While one needs, say, a video on how to install a flat panel TV, another wants to print an article on how to set up a home office.

5. Develop top-quality content. Don’t skimp on production quality. Look at all these resources for digital newbies. Or this custom internet speed test. They didn’t have to do that — which, of course, is exactly why they did have to do it.

6. Develop a launch plan. Work with everyone on the team — engineers, researchers, project manager, the analytics team, designers, copywriters — to coordinate the launch. If something can’t make the launch date, prioritize what needs to be fixed as soon as possible.

7. Do a “soft launch” ahead of time. It makes everyone feel good and allows you to fix what’s broken before creating mixed first impressions. Digital Landing officially “launches” late next month. Here it is today, flaws and all. Why? Because the first version was never meant to be perfect. Besides, a soft launch gives search engines spiders a chance to crawl and index the site.

8. Allow customer’s to interact. Open it up to a small-yet-vocal audience; GrokDotCom readers, for instance. Launch a little Pay-Per-Click traffic and see how it affects the priorities on your optimization list.

9. Measure, Listen, and Optimize. TEST your original assumptions. Figure out who you’re losing, where you’re losing, and adjust.

10. Stay cool. This isn’t childbirth, even if it does feel like it at times.

Join me in congratulating Steve and the rest of his phenomenal team at Acceller on the “soft launch” of Digital Landing. While broadband growth has driven a lot of his business, the marketplace is shifting. People want additional services, and Digital Landing is meant to help us get away from the marketing hype individual providers in order to make intelligent choices and get the best offers on high-speed internet, digital phone, video, and HDTV services.

Originally, the goal was to have the site “soft” launched by Labor Day. They beat that by a few days. As I’m sure you can see, there’s still plenty of tweaking to be done. But one of the biggest mistakes anyone can make when launching a new site is trying to make it perfect from the get go. Getting it perfect in your eyes means very little. Getting it perfect for your customers matters a lot.

One of the best pieces of advice my mentor gave me — and hopefully I can teach you — is “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing wrong.” It’s all about execution and allowing yourself to do it wrong quickly.

We’d love to have your fresh eyes check out Digital Landing. Go as far as you like, with or without placing an order, and share your feedback here.

Any suggestions to add to our list? Find any bugs?

We appreciate your help, as does Steve. He didn’t get on the Inc. 500 list by not listening carefully.

It’s no mystery that we’re meeting averse, but here’s another reason why we think meetings are toxic: There’s no such thing as the one-hour meeting.

If you’re going to schedule a meeting that lasts one hour and invite 10 people to attend then it’s a ten-hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting. You are trading 10 hours of productivity for one hour of meeting time. And it’s probably more like 15 hours since there are mental switching costs associated with stopping what you’re doing, going somewhere else to do something else, and then resuming what you were doing before.

Is it ever OK to trade 10-15 hours of productivity for one hour of meeting? Sometimes, sure, but it’s a heavy cost. Meetings are expensive when you think about the opportunity cost. On a pure cost basis, meetings can quickly become liabilities, not assets. So when you schedule that one-hour meeting for 10 people think about the 10-15 hours lost. Is it still worth it?

I’m sure a few of our readers also read the Signal vs. Noise blog but I wanted to ask those who don’t what they think. One of our friends likes doing 15 minute-and-under stand-up meetings. Is that better? Is it still worth having them? How do you keep meetings from eating up time, or do you? Do you have any suggestions about maximizing value and minimizing time of meetings?

Innovation may be one of the hottest buzzwords in business today. But at the world’s largest companies, senior executives understand that innovation is much more than an easy-to-achieve management fad du jour.

The world seems to move at an ever-faster rate, but it also increasingly demands accountability. Is it any surprise that risk aversion is the biggest obstacle companies face?

Managing innovation vis-a-vis risk is a battle organizations have faced for the longest time. Peter Senge in the Fifth Discipline refers to this as “creative tension,” and one of the few ways to overcome it is what he calls “systems thinking.” They need a process to see how all parts of the organization systems interconnect. No amount of innovation training overcomes this challenge. This issue has plagued other disciplines like CRM, corporate learning management, etc.

Success depends on process, people/talent then tools.

Executives need:

• A framework that manages risk with built-in accountability that produces results
• A methodology to shorten development times and coordinate activity within the organization
• A process that brings relevant consumer insights to the table (like Intuit’s Customer Driven Innovation)

Do you have process in place?

Business Week

For instance…

Perhaps it is time for companies to adjust the paradigm of management responsibility:

“You are investors and speculators, not shareholders, and you temporarily find yourselves holding the securities of our company. You are responsible for maximizing the returns on your investments. Our responsibility is to maximize the long-term value of this company. We will therefore act in the interest of those whose interests coincide with our long-term prospects, namely employees, customers, the communities in which our employees live, and the minority of investors who plan to hold our securities for several years.”

They continue to argue for restructuring public companies. Whether or not you agree, it’s worth a read.

I’m sympathetic to the argument that management has to act in the long-term interests of not only of shareholders, but of the company’s greater constituency. It’s a higher standard than mere shareholder ROI, and more difficult to manage, but it reduces volatility and forces management to focus on what matters.

Wouldn’t it be nice if companies could focus on what matters, and not simply on this quarter’s results?

Instead of acting like John Wayne, management should be more like Einstein at the OK Corral.

These are important questions.

Ask a Bigger Question

What makes people buy? When you focus on this question, all the subsequent details fall much more easily into place. This is not a word game; it’s a change in perspective. Without a proper strategy, you can win every battle and still lose the war.

Tactics: The Unspoken Assumptions

Whenever businesses tackle optimization, site design or redesign, they start with a set of assumptions. Very often, these assumptions depend on a granular, detail-oriented view of the problem as the business sees it (from the perspective of the business, not the customer). Very often, the problem is couched in the language of “best practices”, a series of tactics. However, to paraphrase Sun Tzu, tactics applied without strategy are the noise before defeat.

Asking a “bigger question” broadens your view of your situation beyond the details; bigger questions often lead you to reevaluate your strategies, which in turn allows you to devise more effective tactics. The critical answers to these bigger questions—the answers that meet your specific needs—can only from you.

7 Online Marketing Challenges & How to Frame Them as Bigger Questions

Here’s a list of the top seven challenges clients put to us, with their variations. We reframe them through bigger questions to target the deeper issues that influence your marketing effectiveness.

1. “We need to reach more people.”

Sometimes you simply need to reach more people. You need to improve your search engine rankings; you need to add more keywords to your search engine marketing; you need to find new or more places to advertise; you need to grow your list; you need to advertise offline; you need viral marketing; you need to increase the number of links to your site; you need to add or modify an affiliate program, and other variations on this theme.

Bigger questions to explore and ask yourself:

• Are enough of the people coming to our website sufficiently satisfied with what we present that they buy, or does our presentation damage our reputation and create an impediment to buying?
• Are enough of the people who buy from us sufficiently delighted to purchase again, are we wasting resources by driving new traffic?
• Do we provide enough of the right information for people to return even when they are not ready to buy right now?
• Are we focused more on marketing to the search engines or marketing to the people who visit our site?

2. “We need to reach better people.”

Sometimes you simply need to reach better people. You need to target more appropriate publications; you need to select better keywords; you need to source better lists; you need to find more qualified buyers; you need to reach your competitor’s customers; you need to reach people when they are ready to buy; you need the right content to attract search engine traffic, and other variations on this theme.

Bigger questions to explore and ask yourself:

• If we reach those people, do we have relevant content for them when they are in the early, middle and late stages of their buying process?
• Is our offering so narrow that there are too few “better” people?
• Does the buyer only identify the need and buy on a very short time horizon, such that we need to find them before they have the need?
• Is the message we’ve been telling the “wrong” people strong enough for them to reach out and tell the “better” people?

3. “We need more resources.”

Sometimes you simply need more resources. You need more money; your need enough time; you need the right consultant; you need better-skilled people; you need the right talent; you need the right vendor; you need to justify your opportunity costs, and other variations on this theme.

Bigger questions to explore and ask yourself:

• Do our priorities and goals match our resource allocations?
• Do we commit our resources based on predicted rates of return?
• Do we hold people accountable for those returns when allocating new resources?
• If we don’t have the resources or time to do it correctly now, when will we have the resources or time; when, exactly, will we commit to do it?

4. “We need better testing and usability.”

Sometimes you simply need better testing and usability. You need to make it easy to buy from you; you need to make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for; you need to make it easy to checkout; you need to get feedback from visitors; you need to set up tests and watch how visitors vote with their mice; you need to test to isolate which variables are most important to your visitors; you need to test to see which offers work best, and variations on this theme.

Bigger questions to explore and ask yourself:

• What motivates people to buy even when sites aren’t usability-friendly?
• If usability is the only critical factor, why haven’t conversion rates improved in any meaningful way over the last five years, when attention to usability has increased dramatically?
• What if what we’re testing is only what we can think of, but the problem lies in what we haven’t thought of yet; which variables are truly significant and which are not?
• How do we know that pages further up or down the click-stream don’t affect the test we are conducting on one page?
• Do our scientific tests include an hypothesis of the outcome, a theory for why we expect the outcome and a statistically meaningful sample size so we can validate or refute our hypothesis and learn from the results; can we apply that learning more broadly to other situations?
• Would different click-through paths for different audience segments give us a cumulatively higher conversion than the best average conversion?

5. “We need to redesign.”

Sometimes you simply need to redesign. You need to scrap what isn’t working for you; you need more persuasive copy; you need more persuasive or illustrative images; you need to refresh your company image; you need to update your technology; you’ve added so many pieces to the original design that you need to reconceive it, and variations on this theme.

Bigger questions to explore and ask yourself:

• Do we need a redesign or do we need to make what we have work?
• Why will the redesigned site better serve visitors?
• How, exactly, will the redesigned site better serve visitors?
• Why are the best-converting sites so often boring in their design?
• Will our redesign incorporate a scientific testing methodology that will allow us to optimize click-streams based on a prediction of how different audience segments will engage with the site?

6. “We need better metrics.”

Sometimes you simply need better metrics. You need to measure the impact on conversion of the elements on your website; you need a good web analytics program; you need to turn your data into wisdom so you can act upon it; you need to measure whether your predictions were correct; you need to identify what campaigns, keywords, elements and audience segments give you the best return on your investment, and variations on this theme.

Bigger questions to explore and ask yourself:

• How can we better implement the web analytics program we are currently; do we understand how the data we collect impacts our financial statements?
• Are our metrics based on the way we set up our website to sell or on our visitors’ buying cycles and buying modalities?
• Do our metrics help us refine our website to meet visitor expectations?
• Have we identified and planned an intentional path so that metrics can help us separate the signal from the noise or is our analysis an attempt to divine order from randomness?

7. “We need a better Conversion Rate.”

Sometimes you simply need a better conversion rate. You need a better return on investment on your traffic; you need to remove obstacles to conversion; you need to plug the holes in your leaky bucket; you need to reduce shopping cart abandonment; you need visitors to complete more lead generation forms; you need more business, and variations on this theme.

Bigger questions to explore and ask yourself:

• How does our conversion rate affect our advertising and promotional budget?
• If we could attract a drastically reduced audience that converts better, we’ve increased our conversion rate. Are we prepared to reduce our conversion rate if we can generate more sales at an acceptable return on investment?
• If what we are offering is good, what are all the potential reasons why someone wouldn’t convert today, in 30 days, in 60 days, etc.?
• What is the percentage of visitors we would expect to lose to each of our potential reasons?
• After identifying all the potential reasons why someone wouldn’t convert, if we can’t justify why our conversion rate is less than 20%, why would we set our goals so much lower than that?
• Is it possible that the strategy that helps you increase the average conversion rate isn’t the strategy that would produce the most overall sales or best results?
• Would different click-through paths for different audience segments give us a cumulatively higher conversion than the best average conversion?

Meeting your challenges

Time and again we have learned that the answers to these bigger questions, which depend on a critical appraisal and an intimate knowledge of the business, its marketplace, its audience and its objectives, make the difference when it comes to being successful online.

You can tackle these bigger questions yourself. Objectivity and being able to see outside the box that defines your current situation will best serve the quality of your answers.

What happens if you don’t want to rethink your challenges or to identify more effective marketing solutions? Things stay the same, and you never realize your potential.

What happens if you’re unsure how to, or can’t, rethink your challenges?

Well, that’s why we’re here!