Here is the poster

The older I get the more simple things seem to become. A long time ago (nearly 20 years!) there was a book that was popular that stated “Everything I learned I Learned in Kindergarten.” You’ve probably heard of it. It was cute and playful and reminiscent. When I first saw the poster (version) I didn’t have much to reminisce upon – I was 8 years old. I looked at it like most things I did in my youth – with contempt. I thought that it oversimplified life and was a “stupid” generalization of someone who undoubtedly was a gigantic failure (I was an aggressive and opinionated 8 year old). There were things on it such as “Share Everything”, “Flush” and “Play Fair”. SUPER! Thanks for the obvious tips! Now let me continue living my complicated 8 year old life of attempting to NEVER compromise, avoiding vegetables and never, at any cost playing fair.

I continued on that same path for all of my teenage years and well into adulthood. It wasn’t until you run headfirst into your 100th or 100,000th wall that you start to realize there may be an easier path around those walls – and one that is in fact paved, well marked and in great condition. It’s been there the whole time, while you and your own stubborn nature pushes you past those big glaring signs – and safely back into the solid brick wall mortared mainly by your own lack of vision, bad attitudes and uncompromising nature. It wasn’t until I lost my first business in 2008 when I took a step back and considered another way. First, I didn’t “lose” the business – we all just lost our friendships – which led to my eventual departure. It takes a huge life event like that to change someone’s thinking – it doesn’t just happen overnight. The realization I came to in those following months were the same I had mocked as a child – “everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten.

Wow, look at this guy

One of those things was playing fair. It doesn’t sound positive but I actually think sometimes conflict can be. Sometimes it’s the only way to break down barriers causing an extreme amount of tension – just remember to keep it fair. Obviously fewer fists are thrown in the boardroom than on the playground but not all conflict is physical either. Some struggles evolve into an all out battle. It seems like that age old battle between people and machines has taken center stage in the marketing space – the latest area of business to be targeted by cloud software. Marketing Automation they call it – and it’s all the rage. The amount of messaging hitting the presses and general online space is staggering. Vendors, consultants, naysayers, proponents, journalists, analysts, developers, users, prospects, hangers-on, leeches – they all have an opinion. The problem is, it’s ending up to be a pretty unfair fight.

Gratuitous fighting cat pic

Still in its infancy, the majority of messaging falls within the manna from Heaven category. Some of it is actually useful and most is pure crap. Regardless, the underlying tone cannot be ignored. Anytime you bring automation into the benefits statement, you also bring the flag of war. War against those currently making their living doing what now will reportedly be automated at a much more efficient cost point. The battle cry is clear, evolve or a machine is waiting to fire you. Going back to the school analogy, it is that moment of no return where someone publicly throws down the challenge and you have only two choices, turn tail and run or meet at the old oak tree after the last bell. Marketing Automation has kicked dirt in the faces of many marketers but rather than showing up, sleeves rolled and fist clenched – instead they are headed home in the back of their mom’s station wagon, complaining of a stomachache. Sissy.

The thing I learned in kindergarten was that in a fight often there are no winners – often it’s just a release of tension and after the dust clears some of the strongest bonds are formed. Ultimately, no one wants to lose. Because losing is often such a traumatic event everyone can often feel for the loser. Many may be thinking about the time they lost or how much they wouldn’t want to be in those shoes. I’ve been in a few fights in my day. I’ll never forget my first real fight though. It was with another kid at school and it happened at the bus stop. It had been building all week and I was nervous. Everything happened very quickly and before I knew it, it was over. I didn’t feel like I had won though – I felt bad. I helped the kid up and after that we actually became good friends, which lasted through grade school and into high school. The key wasn’t winning – the key was playing fair and how you acted afterward. That was the lesson I took from the whole ordeal.

When it comes to marketing automation, most marketers aren’t even showing up to play at all. They have played into the buzz that Marketing Automation, in and of itself is the key. Unfortunately that’s false. Marketers are STILL the key. Marketers create the process, which Marketing Automation… well, automates. It’s on us to develop these innovative communication strategies, it’s our responsibility to create super compelling content and it falls firmly on our plates to create predictive models that actually forecast revenue BEFORE campaign execution. It’s on us!

Perhaps marketers should revisit this helpful list of basic knowledge, who’s simplicity makes it impossible to deny. Look hard at the list and focus specifically on the fifth bullet point – and Clean Up Your Own Mess.

Our guest for this episode of the Marketing Automation Podcast is Justin Gray, CEO & Chief Marketing Evangelist for LeadMD.  Justin founded LeadMD in 2009 and has spent the last 12 years helping companies overhaul and optimize their marketing and sales departments. Most recently Gray served as the CEO for MaaS Impact, a Marketing Automation start-up. Prior to that he was Vice President of Sales & Marketing at BillingTree and founded RootOne Marketing while in college at the age of 17.

This interview covers the following topics.

• Background on LeadMD how they help companies with marketing automation.
• When an organization should engage a marketing automation consultant.
• How to use marketing automation software to improve the lead scoring process.
• The biggest mistake most companies make in their marketing automation efforts.

The holidays are here again and every year I exclaim a combination of the same things: “Man, that year flew by” and “I really want to keep things simpler this next go around.”  The fact that I say these statements each year is a testament to the difficulty that surrounds simplicity, and also the fact that I’ve yet again failed at my goal.  Most of our major struggles in life arise out of learned behaviors growing up. The themes that we carry with us regarding relationships, love, success, business and money are all perceptions that we grasp on to and hold as truths.  In most cases they never fail to prohibit us from achieving our true goals and cause us to fail time and time again.  I’m not one of those people who attends motivational seminars but Tony Robbins has always had some great things to say on the subject of “changing your story” for results.  You can check out a video here that does a good job of explaining his outlook.

In my opinion the best way to change our story is to ask why. Most of the truths we cling to cannot be explained when someone asks the simple question of, “why?”

I had one of these moments while having coffee with an investor last week.  We were discussing some new tools available and how they would fit in the marketing mix.  Marketing for the most part has become education, so we were more or less having a discussion about how people learn and what types of mediums really access engagement.  He asked something that really put me on my heels – “why do we believe everyone learns in a different way?”  I myself can remember being taught this in school somewhere around the time of entry into my teens.  There were auditory learners, visual learners, and kinesthetic learners… WRONG!  Those are actually learning styles.  This does not mean that people learn in different ways, and this is something he caused me to pause on.  We all learn in pretty much the same way — and normally with a combination of the above – but always with the achievement of certain milestones.

First, someone garners our attention. We are asked to process it and apply it to prior knowledge. Then we arrive at conclusions and understand it. Finally we apply it.

The learning styles we employ along the way help us to process information but our actual learning path is the same.  By having coffee and simply asking the question, “why,” I had freed myself from a myth.  I didn’t call the discovery channel and scramble the myth busters crew but it did get me thinking about my favorite topic, Marketing and Marketing Automation.

Carlos Hidalgo recently put out a two-part whiteboard video on Marketing Automation Software Advice that I thought was interesting because they were so damn simple.  As most of you who have worked with me know, the idea of simplicity is one I really struggle with.  As this post suggests, I covet simplicity daily.  I love it and loathe it.  I love it because on one side it is all I want – I want to take time for myself and my loved ones, I want to go to work and have an extreme amount of impact by making the complex simple, I want to allow time to do things right the first time and to retreat into my simple hobbies, I want to see the world and bask in its majestic simplicity.  At the same time I loathe it because I see all of the complexities necessary to make that a reality.  Carlos was talking about the difference between Demand Gen and Lead Management and to support his case he had a lovely picture of a sales funnel.  The video was very simple and to the point and frankly I didn’t see much need for it until I considered the tendency for most marketers to completely overlook the obvious.

http://blog.softwareadvice.com/articles/crm/demand-generation-vs-lead-management-1120811/

Pretty simple right?  By distilling marketing down to it’s simplest points we start to get at the only thing that marketing should be – and that’s “simple.”

Here’s part two: http://blog.softwareadvice.com/articles/crm/marketing-automation-supports-demand-gen-lead-management-1121211/

We all may claim to like simplicity but we are pretty quick to complicate things – and often times for no good reason.  We ask our clients to begin the process of adopting Marketing Automation by re-evaluating everything they’re done in the past.  “Un-learn” and all that good stuff.  The templates we use to try to promote this are very simple – what we get back in return looks like the schematics to a Russian nuclear facility.  From our beginnings we are taught that things that look complex are rewarded and the simple route means lazy. This approach is completely backwards and you see organizations like Apple and Dropbox and many other “2.0” companies doing just that.  Keep the message simple; make it simple to buy and simple to use and make telling others about it a no-brainer.

This all leads back to what we should have been taught all along and for me this is how I change my story.   Know just this one thing – Things will get complicated on their own; there’s no need to help it along.  By keeping things simple in the beginning you will help them grow on a strong foundation and you will avoid complexity for as long as possible.  Ask yourself, why do we need that?  How does it benefit the process?  What will it allow us to do that we couldn’t do before? And my personal favorite, Is it sustainable? If the answers to those questions aren’t positive ones and you are adding something simply to build a bigger birds nest – stop – or at least don’t do it near me.

When it comes to Marketing Automation consider that you are making a long term investment in this software – what will it look like after you’ve operated on it for a year, how about two or three years?  There is a lot of time to build out that machine and it WILL get complicated on some level.  Try to make the decisions you make now rooted in simplicity, make sure they scale and make sure you can train others on your methodology.  What you do now will make or break your effort 12 months from now.  Everything matters – the way you name something, the way we structure simple campaigns or programs and the way we pass leads through our funnel.  Less truly is more and on the quest for simplicity there is no need for a detour sign.

So, what is the #1 key to success with Marketing Automation?  Commit to keeping it simple.  When you feel that urge to add a few more arrows or lines for good measure – don’t.  If you can say it in 5 words – don’t use 50.  Your buyer, your bottom line and your sanity will thank you in the long run.  We can use this year to strive for simplicity of design, of message and of process and when we look back at the end of 2012 we just may find that we are actually closer to our goal; no longer obscured by a maze we made for ourselves.  As for me, I’m starting right now, I’m leaving the office on this Christmas holiday and I’m going to take a nap.

As I was allowing a 60 year old Italian man to straight shave my neck last week at my regular barber (pretty cool old style barber shop – they call it a “whack”), I was suddenly struck by the notion of trust.  It’s funny how the implied consent of placing your tender neck in the hands of a half blind, mostly in-comprehendible aging man from the old country will cause you to consider such things.   Working with a consultant is much like being a barber.  You only go to one when you absolutely need it, it’s hard to find a good one, sometimes you walk away wondering if you could do a better job yourself and when you do find one you like you wonder why you didn’t go earlier.

Much of the “Marketing Automation” landscape is made up of what I would consider to be “do-it-yourself” haircuts.  The notion of asking for help is perpetually tied with shame and plagued with trust issues.  Everyone wants to be trusted – at work it defines our value.  As marketers we are forced to prove value on a daily basis, and much of that value comes from knowing the business, the product, and most of all, the buyer.  For the most part we don’t trust that anyone knows our space better than ourselves.  When buying new tools to help us better communicate with those buyers we want to be the champions and we want to justify any new expenses with real results.  The only problem with that equation is all of the baggage we bring with us.  You simply can’t start cutting that new “do” with gobs of Aqua Net, molding paste and years of buildup weighing you down. You have to start clean.

This brings us back to trust.  What’s the basis for trust?  Results – and you don’t see the result before taking the plunge.  Often times this leads to an ill timed high-top fade right before that big family photo shoot.  Have I beat the haircut analogy to death yet? So how then can marketers ever establish trust or reach for help when they don’t know what will work before beginning.  Just like looking for a barber, get out there and talk to people.  Anyone claiming to be an expert should have no problem-producing customers who can attest to it.  They also should be using their services themselves.  I’ll spare everyone the gross overload of analogies that exist to illustrate this, often-involving dog food, champagne etc. – but it’s true.  If you believe in something, and you believe in your team, you should use it.  And you should pay for it.  Any consultant who hasn’t purchased the system they support and doesn’t run it to drive revenue should be cast out and stoned.  Seriously.  That’s the same as lying in my book.

So we know what we should look for when we reach out for help, great customers, use the solution themselves and put their money where their mouth is – so what’s the problem.  Well, for starters, people are liars.  Someone trying to sell you something will say some pretty amazing things.   In order to sift through the BS use the above as an initial qualifier and then invite your short list to prove themselves with a limited engagement.  I think limited engagements are awesome – and you should walk away feeling that way too.  You’ll know when you feel comfortable bestowing that trust, and it will be warranted because the equation is balanced.  You got what you need and the consultant was paid appropriately.

I never knew how important it was to have a fair trade when establishing trust until I got into the services business.  Growing up we are mostly taught that getting more than you deserve is the goal.  In business that translates to price negotiations and it has become standard in the software business – that price on the site is not what you will end up paying.  I wrote a rant a while back about this (which I’m convinced my father liked more than anyone else) but it still hold true.  When you are providing services, your price is your price.  Set it fairly and you will profit – set it too high and you will starve, set it too low and you will eventually allow your level of service to align with the price you charge.  For those consultants reading between the lines, this means – YOU WILL GET LAZY.  Maybe not at first, but take it from someone who has done hundreds of them over many years – you cannot provide premium service at bargain basement prices.  And because premium services are what the consultant should be providing, the client should want to pay a fair price.  During the limited engagement you should have to opportunity to see if the service lives up to the hype and should walk away feeling like you received true value.  Trust is born.

It’s normally pretty easy to determine the trust level a client has going into an engagement.  I feel strongly that if a client shows those signs its best to start off slowly, rather than jump in headfirst.  I’ve had legal departments re-write my agreement, I’ve had clients ask for payment to be broken up into 20 parts scattered throughout the project all tied to milestones with penalties involved, I’ve had prospects yell at me in the BUYING stage before.  Warning signs – all of them.  There are crazy people in life and guess what – a lot of them have jobs.  They’re crazy at work too.  Here’s the trick – the limited engagement works both ways!  If the consultant sees a bad fit during that time they can complete the committed work and opt out.  Sometimes you just have to get out – trust me.

So, what’s the point?  As usual, I find that most modern ideas tie back to very well known, overused clichés.  Walk before you run, don’t bite off more than you can chew, don’t take candy from strangers – wait, maybe that one doesn’t work.  Regardless, don’t walk away from the possibility of help just because it’s difficult to trust that someone else can provide the help you need.  Try them out, really talk to them, and talk to their customers.  Find out who they are as people – marketing is subjective, at the end of the day, you are going to end up with someone’s opinion of how things should be.  Speaking of opinions, if you’re ever in Scottsdale, stop by Goodfellas barber shop, they do a great job…that is if you are willing to trust a 60 year old man with a razor to your neck.

I remember when I was a kid my parents loaded up the family van and we went on a bit of a road trip.  The destination was “camping”.  No one seemed to know where camping is exactly; maybe that’s the idea. In my mind at the time I remember pretending that the van was something cool like the A-Team van (it wasn’t.)  It was one of those big conversion vans, with a table inside.  That alone says something about the chosen mode of transportation – it had a table inside.  I hope that never happens to me again.  I don’t feel comfortable as the sort of person who drives a kitchen.  This particular kitchen had huge (at least they seemed so at the time) exhaust pipes that ran down each side.  The van had an identity problem – part kitchen, part optimums prime.  To begin our trip I promptly stuck out my youthful, ignorant, un-knowing calf and placed it squarely on that industrial looking, pre-safety regulation, disco era glowing red manifold.  It hurt like a sonofabitch.   I doubt I said that word, but I did scream like one.  That was the last time I did that.

Not that many people knowingly touch their skin to hot exhaust pipes but doing it once will make you more than cautious of the experience.  Fortunately these days there are fewer and fewer conversion vans and an even smaller number of them sport the kind of free-love era carelessness necessary to put two huge pipes on either side of a van, right below the exit doors.  Still there are plenty of these experiences that have taught me life long lessons and general areas to avoid.  We all have to go through this process.  A lot of people have different names for it, some call it trial and error, some call it maturity, some call it wisdom, and I call it denial.

You’d have to be in denial about how painful pain is in order to make it the main process by which you learn. That doesn’t sound fun.  Denial to me would be waking up every morning and running face first into a wall to see if it still hurts.  It sounds completely stupid but people seem to do it a lot.  I don’t want to do that – I want to cheat.  Cheating in my opinion has too many bad connotations.  Cheating at someone’s expense, bad – cheating the learning curve, good.  Another way to put this is simply learning from those who have already run into the wall and expressed the pain. And that’s a good goal to have.  Trust me you will still have plenty of opportunities to fail and experience pain – but lets jump over the obvious hurdles shall we?

Everyday I see marketers getting in their own way.  Doing the same old thing, or even worse the same old thing with new technology.  Are they doing this learn what works and what doesn’t? If that’s what you are after I can think of a ton of better odds on far less valuable things to gamble with.  It’s easy to gamble with the tangibles involved, it only takes money.  Go ahead and buy that new Marketing Automation Software, dump some more money into website design; pay that list vendor for a ton of “opt in” lead data.  Eventually the pain will expose itself – that pain is the fact that nothing, not the best software, or amount of money will work without skill to run it all and a process to back it all up.

We have clients of all shapes and sizes but every so often I see something come across that puzzles me.  One of those scenarios came across my desk the other day and I’m going to share it here. They had been using a popular Marketing Automation platform for just about a year.  Like most of our clients when we first meet them, they weren’t using the platform for anything I couldn’t do with constant contact.  Their CEO was fed up with the platform and they were fed up with several other services agencies and after talking with Dave for a few months they wanted to get their feet wet.  They purchased a very small engagement.  Their goal?  Get leads.  How?  Email.  What’s the offer?  A download.

On the surface it almost doesn’t sound as bad as it is.  This campaign is to be their “make or break” with their Marketing Automation vendor – as if that were the problem.  The campaign is completely ridiculous.  Send an email to their database, offer them a whitepaper – if you download the whitepaper you’re considered a lead and sent to sales.  What happens if you don’t download it?  That’s right, you get sent to sales.

Now this type of situation really circles the wagons out west at LeadMD.  We spent far more hours than we even had within the engagement trying to convince this client of how this campaign should have been structured.  We went as far to research the firm, build out a sample lead scoring methodology, build the campaigns we wanted to execute, have them in the office three times, conduct a half dozen conference calls and no, we did not change their minds.  Why?  Because they learn via pain.  In this case even the lesson is false.  Their take-away is that the technology isn’t right for them.  Wrong, your process and your strategy and your learned behavior are preventing you from truly learning – about your customers, about your business and even about yourselves.  They haven’t even executed this campaign yet and already it has failed.  After all that effort my services team donated the hours to build their simple terrible campaign in the way they wanted.  It made my team feel terrible to – they told me.

The clients view of lead generation is a big, prehistoric exhaust pipe and their insistence upon not evolving has them burning on that pipe daily.  At what point will that lesson finally be learned?  Maybe never.  Companies go out of business all the time, which is fine.  Better organizations take their place and clients get better services and solutions as a result.  That’s a painful experience however that I think most would agree is one that we’d like to avoid.  As for us, we learned a lesson as well. We wont be sticking our legs back on that exhaust pipe.  There are plenty of organizations out there that are hungry for change; we don’t need to fight the ones starving, due to lack of it,

After Dreamforce last week, 95% of Dreamforce attendee’s blogged about Dreamforce in a “Top (fill in the blank)” take-a-ways format, with a statistic somewhere in the first paragraph – So there, I’ve done both, can we move on now?

We all know Dreamforce is a great event – and I say that because Salesforce.com spent millions of dollars to convince me of that.  I respect Salesforce simply because they are after my heart in terms of marketing spending.  With an annual marketing spend that consistently flirts with the 75% of annual run rate (approaching $2bn at this point – up 2x from 2009) Salesforce knows that a well told story is just as important as having a story to tell.  And what better audience to market innovation to than an exponentially growing group of indoctrinated cloud junkies looking, for that next fix.

A Marketing Juggernaut

I remember I had a friend who worked at Sage in 2005 (I still have the friend, however she no longer has the job).  I was looking at buying Salesforce.com for the first time.  This was when cloud computing was under heavy attack from IT departments, traditionalists and basically anyone who hates change.  I loved it, because I despise that group in its entirety.  She was selling against Salesforce.com by touting their marketing spend in relation to revenues saying it was irresponsible and couldn’t sustain product innovation – 6 years later Saleslogix is dead (Sage’s largest CRM at the time) and Sage products aren’t even in the top 10 CRM’s any longer.  I say I made a good decision.

One of the reasons I went with Salesforce was, in fact, their commitment to marketing.  We are marketers, and it’s what we love.  People like doing business with businesses they like – simple as that.  I’m still surprised, even more so after seeing 45,000 strong at this years Dreamforce, that companies still think Salesforce.com is a fad.  Salesforce.com is not the top CRM – but they certainly are the fastest growing.  Much of that momentum (take note Marketing Automation) is driven by community and ecosystem.  Salesforce.com has taken the partner space and re-invented it.  App Exchange changed the way CRM was enhanced and their partner program changed the way partner’s marketed solutions.  Want to grow a business – make other successful businesses depend on it.  Salesforce.com did this not only from a customer perspective, but to a greater return built a co-dependent system of partnerships ranging from, consultants, to developers to VAR’s and ISV’s.  It’s impressive.

Don’t Believe the Hype

The full Salesforce.com ecosystem was out in full force at Dreamforce 2011 – dressed to impress (thanks for all the swag, booth babes!).  Beyond the slurry of pens and stress balls and gift cards and t-shirts, Salesforce vendors hand out ideas.  They sell the ease of complete business redesign, they tout the ability to provide “kick in the pants” impact on the bottom line and they inebriate the more than willing with thoughts of NOW, MUST and CHANGE!  It’s the land of the lotus-eaters with motivation.  When an attendee leaves the exhibit hall or one of the carefully executed sales pitches (they call them “classes”), they are pumped.  Dammit, it’s time to change the world.  This is SPARTA!!!

Well, its two weeks later… has the world changed?  Will the Radian 6 or Jigsaw acquisitions (which are both old news BTW) change your life?  Is the ‘Social Enterprise’ something new in concept?  Honestly, their impact will be a lot greater in 2 to 3 years when the data around both matures further, but the short answer is no.  We have gotten no less than 20 calls and emails from clients saying that their workload for us is going to dramatically increase.  That’s great news for a service based business – I love to hear that.  However, a lot of that focus transitions to a glazed over look as the Dreamforce memories begin to gather a little dust, and the hearing returns to all of our ears after Metallica rocked it loose a couple weeks ago.  Business as usual starts to take over, and many of the thoughts Dreamforce provoked are placed back on the shelf, simply because there are pressing issues to deal with.

We will come back to that thought.  One of the things I’ve often thought about is the opportunity cost of Dreamforce.  Anyone remember those fun little games that Google placed on their homepage a while back?  If not you can see their effect here.  That’s right, 4.8 Million hours lost because of a simple online distraction.  The example is based around an average employee salary of 25/hr.  So what happens when we take that same thinking and apply it to Dreamforce?  To start, the average hourly salary is quite a bit higher!  Most of us spent 4 days out of the office at not including travel time and expense.  That’s a large amount of cost that demands ROI.

Focus on What’s Definable and Attainable

So, we return to how to keep that momentum going.  The issue with Dreamforce is the same we see time and time again with Marketing Automation.  It’s new, it’s glossy, but to really dig in you need a plan.  The number one question we deal with is “Where do we start?”  It’s a great question.  My answer is, start where you can achieve the most impact.

Consider the problems you are facing.   Make sure that each of the attendees at Dreamforce is focused on finding solutions to those specific challenges.  Use the access you have to staff and developers at the show.  Discuss the solutions you found and see if they have a better one.  Dreamforce provides an opportunity to cut through organizational layers at get access to resources that would not normally be next door.  The key, we have found is actually formulating and executing on some of the plan AT the conference.  When we return, half of the battle is already complete.  Have your CEO at the show?  Bring him in too.  Executives love to get access to what is happening in their organization and, trust me, they want to know about small problems that are costing them big money.

If you follow this one step in defining the problem you want to solve, I promise you the ROI for your next Dreamforce will be measurable – because you’ll know what success will mean before you ever go.  This way instead of simply attending those sales sessions or getting some free grub in the expo hall you’ll retain the goal of what Dreamforce is actually supposed to be – a user conference, masked by a vast marketing ploy.

I am terrible at hiring.  It’s a fact.  On the lifetime I have fired as many people as I have hired.  That’s a pretty big number.  I’m not proud of that metric.

With my hiring epiphany out of the way, I have said many times that my only talent in life is spotting talent.  I have an excellent “gut” for what people can accomplish, what motivates people and how far they can go.  One of my first and most influential bosses said of employee workload, “I’m going to keep throwing you balls until you drop one – and then I’m going to scale it back 20%”.  I’ve latched on to that and continue to use it with what I consider to be success.  Through this process I’ve been fortunate enough to find some of the best, brightest and most talented individuals who have truly enriched my life and provided a much-needed diversity of perspectives.  The people you surround yourself truly dictate your own success.

So considering that these two areas (hiring and talent spotting) seem to bring completely desperate results for me I started giving it much thought a few weeks ago.   Most would probably say that if I’m such a good judge of talent why am I such a terrible failure of a recruiter.  Well the answer lays in the fact that hiring is such a one-dimensional process.  Its like a first date.  No one goes on a date and starts revealing their faults.  It’s only on date five where the autoerotic asphyxiation fetish is revealed in the midst of a crying temper tantrum over an awesome blossom at Chilis.   I also have the defeatist personality trait of immediate trust.  This leads to a lot of very positive first dates, and a lot of very short relationships.

37 Signals has some interesting comments on hiring in their book re-work, if you haven’t read it I strongly suggest the book.  I read this book a little over a year ago and as a result SOME of my hiring woes have been alleviated.  I hire everyone with a 90 day “courting” period.  You come, you work – some work out, some don’t.

To complicate my problem, we operate in a space that is “budding” to say the least.  The talent pool is shallow and the ocean of individuals trying to claim talent is vast.  Because of this paradigm I was excited to hear about the newly formed Marketing Automation Institute (MAI).  LeadMD was asked to join and sponsor to which we pretty much immediately acquiesced.  For me this is an interesting concept this early on in a product lifecycle – and a very necessary one.  If you’re not familiar with it yet – and why would you be, it’s days old – the MAI is a vendor agnostic training and certification center focused on Marketing Automation best practices.

The idea of a Marketing Automation “certified” individual would certainly make my job as a makeshift recruiter much easier, but more importantly it makes my clients lives easier.  While I was embroiled in my own hiring woes, one of my clients called a few weeks back in a panic.  They had just lost their Salesforce and Marketo administrator and thus the gatekeeper to the hub of all their marketing activity company-wide.  They are a large organization with an even larger problem.  Fortunately we were able to step in as both their overall project lead and day-to-day administrator without any downtime.  That’s the purpose of our Extended Management (ExM) solution and this was a perfect use case for it.  I would normally call that a shameless plug, but it’s really not.  We see this all the time.  One member in an organization holds all the cards and creates a growing silo – which lends itself to this type of issue.  One of our immediate initiatives was to document, cleanup and streamline their process around Marketing Automation and CRM.  If you only have one perspective when setting up processes or campaigns you WILL miss something or create a broken process.  They key is getting enough technical knowledge about process and platform into the minds of both planners and doers in your organization.  This is currently a tough thing to do, if not approaching impossible.

Time, resources, money and skillset are all constraints in opening up silos, however the biggest constraint is education.  Most organizations that have bought or are buying Marketing Automation simply are not aware of the depth of the change that they are about to undergo.  In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that if you are running a Marketing Automation solution and it has not changed every component of your days as a marketer, you are failing.  And you will fail with the platform.  Whatever your projected spend is on your technology platform you must be prepared to spend 2x on training, education and implementation/consulting.  This is not a new concept, it happens everyday in CRM, and Marketing Automation is no different.

The MAI is the first step in this direction.  Unfortunately most organizations wont see the need for education and help for some time – or in some cases after a crisis – that’s just the way new technology works.  I’d encourage you to join MAI or at least begin adding it to your budget for 2012.  While you do so take a look at what you have slated for support around Marketing Automation.  Most of our Extended Management clients started out with a mush smaller footprint.  We were asked to come in and stop the bleeding or fix an issue.  When that was fixed we made a few suggestions, showed them strong returns and worked on culture as much as technology.  Ultimately, we went on that first date, and it worked out.

When I was a kid my father had this plaque hanging on the wall in his office.  The simple plaque of wood and metal read bluntly

‘Quality is Like Buying Oats’.

Like most children I grew up with very idyllic views of both my parents, and especially my father.  Over the years some feelings fade – and eventually we all realize no one is the superman/woman we envisioned them to be when we were small (when superhuman strength was defined mainly by lifting things) – but some things never fade.  For me that was the quality that my fathers work represented.

It read like this but looked much cooler

An Architect and a Builder, to say that my father did things his way was an understatement.  Un-compromising. Driven.  Relentless.  Those are some of the words I use to describe him.  Now into his 60’s he still exhibits those traits and unlike many people’s fathers – he has not gotten soft with age.  In fact he and I own a business together – an organic farm – just to make sure I have enough aggravation and stress in my life.

Anyway, back to the plaque.  He kept this plaque up on the wall and although he never cited it with a client or with me, that maxim seemed to drive his actions everyday – in a very uncompromising way.  Below the heading was a bit more of an explanation.  It read,

‘If you want nice fresh oats you have to pay a fair price. If you can be satisfied with oats that have already been thru the horse, that comes a little cheaper.’

I always thought that saying was both funny and extremely true, even at a young age.  I never really stopped and considered how that phrase would shape my life, but it has.  I’ve worked in a lot of environments and sold a lot of things and services.  Some have been good, some have been great.  You always know when something is great because the fear, the apprehension, the doubt seems to immediately float away, and are replaced by passion.  When I got my first job I got a swift lesson in ‘good’.  Shortly after September 11 no one was hiring.  The first employment opportunity that popped up, I jumped on.  It sucked.  It was a dying product sold by dying people.  I stayed there for the longest three years of my life and at the end I knew that I never wanted to do ‘good’ again.

This brings us many years into the future and into the realm of the ‘great’.   If you are a marketer and you are somehow progressive enough to know what Marketing Automation is, and perhaps more importantly what it represents, then you just may be on the edge of ‘great’.  If you’re like many organizations you may be considering working with a consulting firm to shorten the learning curve or to streamline your sales and marketing funnel during the rollout.  And if you’re like all buyers who buy, you want to get more than you pay for.  There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s simply human nature.  But think twice about what discounting a service means.  At the end of the day, service based organizations (like LeadMD) trade time for money.  If you’re considering a service organization that discounts their time – what does that say?  Why is their time worth less?

30 Years of Gold to US dollar Value

Maybe more importantly, why in a blue ocean of business where information is worth its weight in Gold (and these days that’s saying something) would someone bend over backward to de-value his or her time?  I don’t have the answer here, I certainly have an opinion.

What I can tell you for a fact is that an imbalance will always correct itself.  Before you ever consider working with a service based business I would strongly advise you to speak with their past customers.  We do. We speak to them all the time after they have gone through an “implementation” or “consulting session” with a competitor.  By that time they’ve not only wasted money with a “cheaper” provider but they’re also been throwing hefty Marketing Automation software costs down the drain waiting for help.  That’s where that imbalance comes in. The old triangle of Time, Money, Quality comes into play.  You can have two, but not all three.  Anytime you feel like you were sold all three – one will fail.  I choose to remove price from the equation.  I will charge you what is fair and with that I will promise a timely project and more importantly one rooted in quality that you will not need to do twice.

Don’t have the money?  That’s fine; we often provide some building block items free of charge, like worksheets, tips, or our plethora of online resources.  I believe not only in educating buyers but also forming relationships that will nurture over time.  I’ll make recommendations on where to start, software to consider in the meantime or even firms to work with if they are looking for more basic help – but the competitors that promise all three sides of that triangle – I never recommend.  Those oats have already been through the horse.

It’s Monday.  Last week on Friday I got sick.  Really sick.  I never get sick and I hate being sick – the aches, the fever and resultant sweating, the sore throat, the stuffiness – the complete and utter incapacitation.  I’m not talking a head cold or hangover, I’m talking SICK.  It sucks.  I entered bed on Thursday night and just never really left… for the entire weekend.

Sometime on Friday afternoon I managed to crawl and retrieve my ipad, that then replaced my phone, which I had been relying upon for intermittent communication with the outside world – mainly demands for medicine or small, easy to swallow Jell-O based foods.  The ipad gave me access to on-demand movies that I stream to my TV, watch 5 minutes of and then fall back into a Theraflu induced coma.  I think this weekend alone I probably wasted 40 to 50 bucks on movies that I know the opening credits to very well but have never seen anything past the 10-minute mark.

Technology had failed me.  My friends on Facebook aren’t that interesting at 11am on a Friday – they are working or on a beach somewhere which means they don’t want to talk to my leprous ass.  Yelp reminds me of how un-hungry I am.  I’ve grown sick all over again about the money I’m throwing down the toilet on Vudu.  I can’t talk on the phone because my throat hurts, besides, who talks on the phone these days anyway?   Basically, I’m in a dark place.

I start to think about work, which started me thinking about Marketing Automation, which started me thinking about disease, which started me thinking about being sick which led to me crying (ok, not really but I really do hate being sick).  Then it hit me.  I knew I was getting sick the previous Tuesday.  I woke up and was like, “man, why are my glands swollen?”.  I didn’t feel bad; it was just something that I noticed.  Then Wednesday came; a Wednesday followed a VERY Loooong company dinner on Tuesday night that led to a VERY painful Wednesday morning.  That can’t be good for the immune system.  And by now my throat was a little scratchy.  By lunch that day everything was back to normal, no problem right?  Well by the time Thursday rolls around now my neck is a bit achy, this seems to be a pattern this week.  I plow through a client training that morning during which I talk for about 5 hours straight and now my throat is scratchy again, my neck hurts, and head is a bit light.  Uh oh.  Maybe sleep will help.  It didn’t.

This takes us back to the present.  But what I’m now marveling at as I lay in my tomb of a bed, sweating, head throbbing, hemorrhaging money on Vudu, is why didn’t I see this coming and take better care of myself on Tuesday?

I’m a big believer in holistic medicine.  To grow up in my house as a child was to NEVER take traditional medication.  My mother the ex-hippie believed as I do that homeopathic remedies are a very viable alternative, and have a ton of benefit.  However, that doesn’t mean I won’t reach for the hard stuff when I’m in the throws of pain, I’m just saying there are great alternatives if you pay attention to what your body is telling you.  This is what I should have done Tuesday.  If I were smart, I would have listened to my body’s early warning signs and stayed home, gotten rest and taken some of the lovely vitamins and homeopathic care my mother bestows on me several times a year.  I didn’t.  Because I don’t have time for that crap right?  I run businesses, I change the world, and I’ll sleep when I’m dead and all that crap.  Well deep into my second day of the death flu, I knew that I had gone terribly wrong in ignoring what my body was telling me.

The parallel I drew while laying in my dungeon of sickness was how all of this relates to the sate of Marketing Automation software.  The symptoms are there.  The warning signs have presented themselves but marketers ignore them, because they know best.  It isn’t until that contract comes up for renewal, or until the CEO asks for some metrics about ROI around marketing’s latest purchase is the true health of the system is revealed.

The biggest hurdle we face in implementing and designing processes around marketing automation software, are the marketers we are dealing with.  That’s crazy to think that the biggest obstacle is not the brand new, fairly untested technology platform but instead the people who purchased that software.  The process they have in place is sick; it’s wheezing and dizzy.  That was the reason for the purchase.  Marketing Automation was supposed to be the brand new hypoallergenic house that enabled them to move in and create a better way.  Instead they moved in the same sickly process as they had before and it has contaminated the whole place.  No one saw the signs at first, some swollen glands here, and a sneeze there.  But soon the whole place was coughing up a lung and now we might have to burn the whole thing down to sterilize it again?  And what’s going to happen next time?  We’re going to go shopping for a new piece of software and then… that’s right, we’re going to move that same sickly process back in and ignore all of the same warning signs all over again.

The point?  Being sick sucks, and make no mistake, most Marketing Automation implementations are sick.  The key is to spot it early and avoid some black plague style cleanse.  The key is to bring your process back to health first and then once you’ve designed something great, use Marketing Automation to make it repeatable.  Even better design that healthy process through the eyes of the MA system you are going to use.  There’s a thought.  A healthy sales and marketing funnel is a happy funnel.  And, when it starts out healthy, you’ll be able to see when symptoms of sickness are arising – and address them early.  Trust me you want to catch things like this early, if not you’ll end up alone in a dark room watching the first 10 minutes of Shrek the Third whimpering and wondering how you got there.

A day trip to San Francisco, wireless Internet on the plane, and beautiful Bay Area weather all had me in a great mood.  Point of my quick trip?  Hobnob with the Marketo crew and customers during their 2011 product launch event.

The theme of the event was clear… marketing automation is fast becoming “revenue performance management”.  Basically, no more excuses for marketing spend to be looked at as an expense.  Rather, marketing is an investment that should have a direct and measurable link to revenue production.  Agreed.  Marketo’s mission?  Drive $2.5 trillion in incremental growth across their customers. Nice.

“Marketo Next” will start rolling out to customers June 25th, 2011 and will be their largest release to date.  Here’s a sneak peak of the more significant features along with screen shots swiped from the back table:

Influence Analyzer – visually see how different marketing activities influence accounts throughout the life cycle… powerful intel for marketers and executives.

Program Analyzer – another analytics enhancement that visually shows effectiveness across different marketing programs based on adjustments to variables and slider bars on-screen. Translation:  visually see which marketing efforts are bringing in the cash.

Visual Modeling – it’s hard to remember how everything fits together sometimes (i.e., initial email driving smart list members to a landing page to a thank you page with multiple follow-up flows).  This enhancement provides a single area where you can see all the pieces of your elegant marketing puzzle.

Event Module – integrated with WebEx and other event hosting apps (GoToWebinar/Meeting?), this new module will let you easily manage online events, reminders, messaging to attendees vs. non-attendees, etc.

Social Scoring & Messaging – move lead score based on social engagement and movements. Automatically send marketing materials to individuals based on their tweets, Facebook posts, etc.

Social Publishing & Sharing – publish landing pages to Twitter and Facebook, and enable email recipients to share great content with their followers and friends.

Looking forward to June 25th and getting our hands on these significant changes! In case you were really expecting unicorns in this post, sorry.