What You Can Learn From Ed Whitacre

It is always interesting when the new sheriff arrives in town. Look at GM. "You are accountable and responsible," said Ed Whitacre, the company's new chief executive, during a recent interview with Bill Vlasic of the New York Times. "The success of the company depends on you, and the things you do. Now go out and do it."

He continued, "I want to make sure people understand that the responsibility for this company to be successful is not just with the C.E.O. It's them. My style is really just to say, 'let's get going.' Let's do something, let's move, and let's not be constrained by something that has happened in the past. Nobody is going to be fired for trying something new around here."

Time will tell if Whitacre, who had a successful career at AT&T before being brought into GM earlier this year, will be able to truly shake up the historically bureaucratic culture of General Motors, but his words ring just as true for a multi-billion dollar corporation as they do for companies at $50 to $500 million in revenue.

Everybody shares in the success or failure of a company - from the worker on the line to the senior management staff. That idea tends to get lost in translation, though, particularly in entrepreneurial companies that have grown up. These organizations were usually built around a strong founder who, by necessity, made or influenced all key decisions in the early days. As these companies grow and expand into new markets, products, and profit centers, though, there may still be a tendency to keep deferring the decision making up the ladder. Many times the leadership team demands it.

Doing so saps the company's employees of responsibility and accountability. Doing so saps the company of innovation and responsiveness to market changes.

I suggest you think about Ed Whitacre's call to action at GM and then take a few minutes to think about your organization. How responsible and accountable are you. How responsible and accountable are the members of your team? If you think there is room for improvement, then try this:

1. Align with corporate strategic goals. Know the goal and know your role. Are the activities that you and your team are doing aligning with the key strategic goals of the company? If not, why are you spending time and resources on them?


2. Make an action plan. What steps can you take to improve performance, what projects can you or your team take on that will drive towards meeting the company's overall objectives? As Whitacre implores, "The success of this company depends on you, and the things you do. Now go out and do it."


3. Create buy in. More than likely what you and your team will want to accomplish will need the support of other parts of the organization. Go out and get buy-in for the big ideas. This is an acid test to see if your team is allowed to, as Whitacre says, "Let's do something, let's move, and let's not be constrained by something that has happened in the past."


4. Set a time-line and deadline. Talk and plans are cheap, setting a time-line and deadline to get things done starts to move you from talking to doing. This also acts as a reality check to see your actions are doable in the time allowed. If not, rework the plan.


5. Quantify your progress. You must be able to quantify what you or your teams actions are bringing or will bring to the table. This creates a benchmark to evaluate your progress against. If your organization truly wants people to be accountable and responsible, then also heed Whitacre's advice, "Nobody is going to be fired for trying something new around here."


6. Follow up. By creating the time line and deadlines, you are designing toll gates to evaluate the progress of the action plans. Follow up is key. This shows that the actions are important and that people will be truly responsible and accountable for they have committed to.

Accountability and responsibility of your team members is crucial in developing a successful and winning company. Get going and get started by taking the first step - aligning your team to the company's strategic goals.

It Takes A Company To Sell A Customer

It could have been a disaster. But instead it turned into an opportunity to allow our company to shine, and showed the importance of teamwork in developing new business.

First, a little background. My organization is in the process of on-boarding a very large customer who has been incumbent with our competitors for the past 10 years. This is the kind of customer you want, the kind that challenges your organization to do better, to stretch, to push beyond how you've done things in the past. On top of that, they represent ongoing business (even through the recession) and have other business units that can use the products and services we provide.

On a typically cold Midwestern morning a few weeks ago, my team and theirs got our wires crossed on the timing of a visit and face to face meeting. Our customer team showed up two hours earlier than we expected - literally as we were all driving into the parking lot first thing in the morning. Nothing prepared, nothing ready to go, and nothing we could do about it.

But here's the remarkable thing. Our receptionist, though completely caught off guard first thing in the morning, understood the importance this new customer and poured on the charm while getting the word out to members of the team. Though scattered across multiple buildings at our location, all of our team members assembled quickly, got focused, and got their thoughts and materials ready to go.

The conference room was opened. Coffee, properly branded drinks, and food suddenly appeared. And we used the opportunity to show our flexibility, adaptability, and commitment to the account. One topic turned into another, opening the door to more potential business. What could have been a black eye for our company turned into a shining moment. Keep in mind that the key to setting the tone was the first interaction by the first person our customers met that morning, set up by her understanding of the importance of this customer to the company.

It is usually not the lone sales person who brings in new business, but the efforts by a mix of people at all levels and functions in the organization.

The important step in all of this is getting your company aligned to your sales goals - not just a top line revenue number but also who you are targeting and what they could mean to everybody. With the level of layoffs, closures, and reductions that have occurred in the past few years, the folks who are left standing in your organization should have a real sense of the importance of customer sales to securing their paychecks.

Get Going.

So, is your company aligned to your sales goals and your customer goals? If your not confident that they are, here's some thoughts:

• Walk Around and Ask. Take a stroll today and ask various folks about who they think your major customers are, who your company is pursuing, and what they think the company's sales goal is. Be broad and open ended in your questions - what you want is a gauge of how well this has been communicated so you know where the organization stands.


• Know The Goal. Know Your Role. Everybody shares in the bottom line goal of the company...and in the top line. The key is translating a P&L number into the daily actions of your company's people. This goes beyond the management team into employees at all levels of your organization. Can your team translate what they are doing into the effect on the top or bottom line? Do they seem to have a common sense of purpose? Ask the questions to find out.


• Take The Next Step. The first two steps may be eye opening for you. But what you find doesn't add up to much if you don't take action. Follow through with your team and have them define three steps that they will take (along with their completion date) to support your company's sales goals. Get specifics - what are you going to do to support the goals?

Take the time to take three steps to position your entire company to shine with customers, not just your sales team.

Segmentation - Getting To No

Sales is all about getting to "yes". Marketing is all about getting to "no".

As counter intuitive as that sounds, think about it. Sales people are charged with turning prospects into customers by getting them to say "yes" to your products and services. With marketing the goal is to get qualified leads (prospects) into the sales channel.

To do that, your marketing team needs to sort through the sea of potential customers to identify, target, and qualify only those market segments that ultimately may want and have the resources to purchase your wares.

In other words, disqualifying large portions of the available market to qualify your most likely prospects. Your marketing team needs to say "no" to certain segments so your sales teams can get to "yes" with the rest.

I first saw this put into practice years ago as a young marketing manager overseeing my company's lawn care marketing. After a careful analysis of our customer database, we discovered specific segments that consistently purchased and repurchased our products - regardless of geography.

Using this information and the marketing tools we had at the time, I launched a lead generation direct mail campaign into a target city in Florida, aiming at zip codes and neighborhoods that best matched our existing customers.

Not being familiar with the metro area I did not know how many of our current buyers actually lived in the targeted zip codes. Turns out, we inadvertently hit uncharted territory.

I can still recall the local branch manager's absolute surprise at the new leads they were receiving from neighborhoods that his sales team had never before penetrated. The marketing team brought the leads in and the sales team turned them into revenue producing customers. From that day forward, I was sold on the power of segmentation.

The interactive marketing tools available today are a far cry from the direct mail campaigns of the 1990's, thank goodness. Immensely measurable, simple to change, and quick to create, tools such as Search Engine Marketing (SEM), pay-per-click advertising, or web site display ads allow you stretch your marketing dollars and hone in on those segments that may say "yes" to your products, converting them into a lead.

Given the economic fall out of the past couple of years, mid-sized companies are really pressed to deploy their limited sales and marketing dollars into segments that should be their most profitable or hold the best potential for growth. How are you doing with segmentation at your company?

Get Going.

Before the week is out, take the time to do some simple analytical work on your current customer base. Think about how you can segment those customers that are or should be buying from you:

• How can you segment or break down both your customers or your sales channels into different groups?
  
• Specifically, how is each different from one another? Is it they way they buy, the reasons they buy, how often they buy, or how much they buy?
  
• Which segment gives you the best margins?
  
• What motivates each segment to make a decision on a product like yours?
  
• Given that, what makes your specific product or service stand out versus your competitor - what is it that your company brings to this market segment?
  
• What key words or adjectives describe how your company, product, or service stands outs to these segments? How are you working those key words into your on-line and off-line marketing tools?
  
• What assumptions about these market segments, as they relate to your product categories, may have changed over the last two years since the start of the Great Recession? Has the recession created a potentially new segment for your company?

And finally, based on questions above what three changes could you make this week to allocate your marketing funding to focus on saying "yes" to profitable segments and getting to "no" with the others?

Does Your Marketing Staff Match Your On-line Strategy?

Structure follows strategy. It is one of the basic tenants of organizational management. The question is, does your marketing structure match your on-line strategy?

There have been so many changes with interactive marketing in the last few years that the skill level and focus of your marketing staff may no longer be effective. Think about all that has happened since the middle of the decade - a company's basic on-line strategy has evolved from a single web site to search marketing to display ads to social media. The way you interact with your customers and prospects has evolved from simple emails to email marketing to social media and twitter. If your marketing team is still structured around "the web site" as your only on-line marketing element, then it is time to reevaluate your staff's skills and your team's structure.

Don't get me wrong, there is a healthy mix between on-line and off-line marketing. Each may have their place as an element your product's marketing mix. But as a leader you need to make sure your tactics and team are evolving with the times.

Companies between $50 to $500 million have quite the range of marketing sophistication and staffing - from a one person show to a specialized team of over 20. Though the tactics used to market products and services have evolved since my early days as a Marketing Analyst with a freshly minted MBA, we are still trying to accomplish the same goals - build brand awareness within target segments, convert a prospect into a lead or sale, and reinforce the buying decision so a customer comes back to buy again. You need the right team structure and talent to achieve these goals in the rapidly evolving reality of interactive marketing.

I suggest that you take a step back and look at your group. Ask yourself these questions to see how well your structure is matching your interactive strategy.

• Are you still staffed and structured to the off-line world of print brochures and catalogs, old media advertising, or direct mail?


• How deep of a role does interactive marketing play in your current marketing mix and in your future marketing plans?


• Do you have the talent, skill level, and structure to explore and implement the range of interactive marketing tactics such as Search (SEO & SEM), Display Advertising, E-mail Marketing, Social Media, or Mobile Marketing?


• What three steps can you take this week to begin aligning your team's skill level and structure to your interactive strategy?

Marketing is evolving at a rapid pace, make sure your team is keeping up or your company will be left behind.

Why Branding Matters

It conjures up images of John Wayne leading a cattle drive across the Red River and into Oklahoma. Branding.

But whereas brands in old westerns would help sort out the cattle once the Duke got to Dodge City, your company and product branding tells customers and prospects who you are on both a rational and emotional level.

What I have found over the years however is that many mid-sized companies, especially those B2B companies selling industrial or technical products, fail in establishing their brand identity. They get enamored with their product and features, but not with their brand.

Branding is the starting point for thousands of marketing decisions that go into creating an integrated marketing strategy. While the ultimate goal of marketing is to drive qualified leads to the sales channel, the first step in doing so is establishing the company or product brand in the mind of a prospect. Before you can get into the mind of a prospect, you must have already created your brand personality.

You may be thinking, "we sell technical products by the part number, there is no brand personality to what we do." Actually, there is a personality to your product brand and you are allowing your customers and competition to define it. Taking a page from PR 101, if you are not out telling people who you are, somebody else will.

As you consider your brand personality, consider the following:

• Branding tells the world who you are. The market is cluttered, but here's the chance to stake your claim to key ideas. What specific adjectives would you use to describe your company or product line? What do you want a prospect to think when they see or hear your brand? What sets you apart from competitor A, B, and C?


• Branding forces your company or product to define what they are. If you don't think that there is an emotional element to branding, bring in board with new company logos to your next executive staff meeting and watch the reaction. Creating a brand personality forces choices as to what your product or company stands for in the eyes of a buyer. I have seen simple branding definition exercises become the spark that ignites a larger strategic discussion about what the company or product line is trying to accomplish.


• Branding should be consistent across your on-line and off-line marketing. The colors, tone, words, or images that are used to define your brand should be consistent from your web site and interactive marketing to your sales channel support materials and training to your traditional advertising and PR. No matter how a prospect interacts with your brand the message should be the same, with each marketing element reinforcing the other.


• Branding is too valuable, don't be shy to call in the pros. I will repeat again, branding is the starting point for thousands of marketing decisions that go into creating an integrated marketing strategy. It may be worth the few thousand dollars you'll pay a professional marketing / branding / advertising firm to work with you on creating your brand. Ask to see their work for other clients first including tone boards, the process they went through to define the brand, and how the final product was used across both on-line and off-line marketing elements.

Take the time to define your brand. You may not drive cattle to market, but you may drive new customers to your product.

Five Things To Ask About Your Web Site

Your web site is the cornerstone of your company's Internet presence, but have you taken a serious look at it recently?

Don't get me wrong. There are plenty of great sites out there, usually created for Fortune 1,000 companies or for well funded not-for-profit organizations. But one thing I have noticed about the web sites of mid-sized companies, particularly those in the manufacturing arena where I've spent the bulk of my career, is how their sites have not really evolved beyond the "catalog on-line" mindset.

That mindset may have gotten the job done in years past, but today a company's web site is more than an easy to access product catalog, it is the face of the company - sometimes the only face - to millions of perspective buyers, investors, and partners. The problem is that as buyers, investors, and partners expectations of their web experience have grown over the years, many sites for companies from $50 million to $500 million have not.

If your organization is like many medium sized companies, then you have ample opportunity to not only enhance the experience of your web site's users, but to also increase key conversions from your site such as leads, quotes, request for information, e-newsletter sign ups, transactions, and on and on.

When evaluating your current site or planning a new web site, there are five base questions you need to ask. Implement the answers to these questions into your site design, and you may very well best your competitors' web site - their face to your mutual perspective customers.

1. Who is the audience for your web site? You must understand who you want to attract to the site, and the days of "everybody" are long gone. Understanding who the target audience is will drive site design, content, key word placement, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and the conversions you hope to drive.


2. What do you want them to do on the site? Once you bring your target audience onto your site, what is it that you want to accomplish? Is it to increase awareness of your brand, introduce a product or service, convert them into a lead, sell them your product through a shopping cart, gather information about them? The possibilities are endless and only you can define what want to accomplish. These decisions will help your web designers understand the main goal of the site.


3. What does your audience want to do on the site? Now put yourself in front of your user's key board or mobile key pad - what experience are you looking for? Why have you come to the site and what do you want do you want to get out of being there? Understanding what motivates your audience will help guide your web designer with how a user interfaces and experiences your site.


4. What is your definition of web site success? Define what success means up front. For example, if your key conversion is leads, then how many leads per week or month are expected? Being clear with your web designer about expectations before the first line of code is written is important. Doing so may also uncover a budget constraint to meeting your expectation, which could lead you down a different path altogether.


5. How will you measure the key conversions that define success? The web is immensely measurable - with the analytic tools readily available you can easily get a good read on what is working and what is not on both your web site and your interactive marketing programs. Before the design work is started make sure you have all agreed to the analytics that will be used to evaluate the site.

So, take 20 minutes to take a serious look at your current web site and see how well you can answer these five questions. Then, take 10 minutes and look at your top competitor's site and ask yourself the same thing. A half hour's worth of work may uncover a good opportunity for your marketing and your company.

The Right Person For The Job

It may be one of the oldest corporate bromides around - people are our most important asset. But talent really does make the difference between winning and losing in the marketplace.

Especially in medium sized companies where resources were constrained even before the Great Recession took its toll on the bottom line, you no longer have the luxury of fielding a team of mediocre players.

"If you are not working with "A" list talent, then you are not getting grade "A" results. "

As many industries begin to stabilize, albeit at much lower levels than a few years ago, now is an excellent time to evaluate the talent that remains in your organization to see if your current team can truly bring outstanding future results. With so many talented people to choose from in the job market, after being cast off due to downsizing, retrenchment, or corporate bankruptcy, mid-sized companies should not be shy about taking a hard look at the skill level of those that remain on the payroll.

If your organization can get more talented employees, then it is time to upgrade the staff.

Get Going.

This week take a step back, look at the members of your executive or department team, and ask yourself three questions:

1. Do I have the right person?
2. In the right job?
3. Doing the right things?

Many times you may have a very talented individual who can bring in great results, but you have placed him or her in the wrong job - in which they are either struggling or are not being challenged. Other times, you may have the right person in the best position to match his or her talent, but they are not focused on the right actions. You both need to sit down together and gain a clearer understanding of expectations and goals.

Of course, there will be those who are not a good fit for the position and, realistically, will be hard pressed to ever bring in the results that are required. In those cases, I suggest that you quickly move that person out and upgrade with a better suited individual.

Now is the time for companies to fish in a very large and deep talent pool, upgrade their teams, and position themselves with the right players today who will lead their growth tomorrow.