Creating the Hero Experience

Today we have a guest blog from Earl Bell:

While coaching Little League baseball during May of 2006, a nine year old boy taught me a very memorable lesson about the power of creating a hero experience.  On our first day of practice, I asked each player to write down what they wanted to accomplish by the end of season.  Most answers were fairly predictable; i.e. they wanted to pitch in a game, learn how to hit a baseball, etc…. but one boy wrote down; “I want to be a hero!” 

Now that was interesting…  I asked this boy what being a hero meant and he replied…  “To get a game winning hit and have everyone cheering for me!”  That’s simple, right?

Well, nearly three months later, this young boy hadn’t gotten a single hit in game.  Most ball players would have been discouraged and want to quit.  Instead, this young boy showed up each day with a smile on his face, simply glad to be playing ball with his friends and I really enjoyed having him on the team.  Fast forward to the first game of the post-season playoffs and during the top half of the last inning, our team was down by one run but had runners on 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd base with two out. Guess who comes up to bat?  Yep, you couldn’t have written a better script.

I called a time-out and walked over to home plate to ask this boy if he knew what time it was?  With a slight smirk he replied, “7:15 pm and time for a pinch-hitter?”  I said, “Nope – it’s time for you to be a hero - and it is totally going to happen, because I believe in you…“ With a whisper, I reminded him of his pre-season goal and then said, “This is your time!”  With a look of determination and an impish smile, an amazing thing happened when our little hero cranked the ball, and I mean hard, deep into left field.  When the dust settled, our hero was on 3^rd base, having driven in three runs.  Everyone was going crazy (even the other team) and the smile on this young boy’s face (and his parent’s faces too) could have lit up the sky at that very moment…  Well, guess who signed up to play baseball next year with a couple of friends?  Yep, you’re right!  So what does this have to do with business?  In a word, “EVERYTHING!”

Imagine building a business where a key business strategy was to create heroes.  Customers become repeat buyers and your advocates when they realize their hero experience (whatever that might be in delivering your product or service.)  If you aren’t creating hero experiences for customers, is this acceptable to you or instead a big business problem?

So here are my questions for you…. “What percentage of your customers or clients would say that you deliver the hero experience to them?”  If you do not know the answer, my question to you is, “why don’t you ask? What’s the harm?  My guess is that you’ll learn a few things along the way, and you’ll be glad you did…

EARL BELL

EARL BELL is the author of, Winning in Baseball and Business, Transforming Little League Principles into Major League Profits for Your Company, which provides a roadmap to success for leaders that desire to build thriving companies in a very competitive 21^stcentury business environment.  Earl believes that “everything you need to know about business, leadership and team building can be learned from Little League baseball.”

Earl conducts workshops, coaches and consults with owners, business leaders and their teams, teaching them how to dramatically reduce the time it takes to improve profitability, customer experience, employee engagement and company value, while simultaneously increasing discretionary time and reducing both stress/employee burnout.  He believes the secret to winning in baseball, business and life can be summarized in a simple formula:  Winning = Service + Humility. His motto is that Winning in Business is a Team Sport!

Earl has served in the Chief Financial Officer role for numerous companies throughout North America. His personal passion is youth sports and he has coached 28 teams since 2002.  Earl is a CPA, graduated from SU (Seattle University) with a BA in Accounting and from the MILL (Mercer Island Little League) with a Master’s in Youth Baseball.

Earl Bell can be reached at  earl@earlbell.com and 206-420-5946

Scorecards, Dashboards & KPIs - Oh My!

Today we have a guest blog from Elizabeth Andreini:

In Q4 we were all thinking about setting budgets and planning for the coming year. Now that we are in the first quarter of the year, are you making sure that the money you are spending on marketing is as effective as possible? Understanding how your marketing efforts are performing can be difficult but will help you better assess what’s working…and what’s not. Make this the year you make smarter marketing decisions!

If you haven’t put them in place, now’s the time to utilize scorecards, dashboards and other measurement tools to ensure that you are spending money most effectively – and making the biggest impact on your bottom line. Here is a quick briefing on scorecards and dashboards with five hints on using these tools:

•       Scorecards: help you understand performance relative to plan, and enable you to align operational execution with business strategy

•       Dashboards: tie to operational goals and leverage reports containing Key Performance Indicator data to help you gain insight into Key Performance Drivers so you can “pull the right levers”

5 important factors to consider when using scorecards and dashboards:

1. Have a clear purpose in what you are tracking and what you are going to do with it.
2. Be SMART (specific, measureable, achievable, realistic and time bound) in your data requirements.
   - Use “good” data. That means data that is not averages, is reasonably accurate, complete AND easy to get.
3. Align the use of the scorecards and dashboards with your company’s business processes so the information can get used in decision making to drive company behavior and decisions for optimal impact.
4. Look beyond outcome data showing history to gain insights on how your decisions and processes can be modified to get a different result – identify your Key Performance Drivers.
5. Provide a frame of reference using targets or benchmarks, whether internal and/or industry specific as a point of comparison.

As the CEO, the questions you should ask about your marketing efforts are:

1. What are the success measures of my marketing efforts? Do I know which marketing efforts are the most effective?
2. Do I have the right information easily accessible in the company so marketing can use it to track their marketing efforts and spend? How can I help ensure the company and those in it are helping capture the information we need?
3. Is my marketing more or less effective than my competitors? Is it more or less effective than others in my industry? Does my marketing department regularly track their progress and make adjustments based on the results so we are making better/smarter marketing decisions than last year?

Here’s hoping 2013 is the year your marketing efforts have even more impact on your company’s success!

ELIZABETH ANDREINI

As the President of Accelerate Marketing, LLC, Elizabeth Andreini, is the “secret weapon” CEOs turn to at key growth points when they need to transform marketing and product management to grow their customer base, increase revenue & scale their business. In addition to providing experienced executive insight and guidance, Elizabeth often works as an interim CMO or VP to provide the hands-on leadership needed to rearchitect marketing and product management and improve execution from the inside.

Elizabeth Andreini, founder & president of Accelerate Marketing, LLC 

Accelerate Marketing, LLC

206-769-3420 or elizabeth@accelerate-marketing.com

www.accelerate-marketing.com

Twitter: @acceler8mkting

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethandreini

3 Tips for More Effectively Setting Marketing Budgets

Today we have a guest blog from Elizabeth Andreini:


One of my favorite quotes comes from Peter Drucker. Considered the father of business consulting, he made an insightful observation:

"Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two--and only two--basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business."

For many CEOs though, marketing somehow seems like a cost, rather than an investment. They come to me seeking benchmarks and comparisons with competitors to know how much they have to spend. What no one wants to hear is the real answer to the question of how much should be spent in marketing, which is “it depends.” Since we are in budgeting and planning season right now, I thought I would give you some practical advice and guidelines to consider.

First, consider the type of business you are in, your target market and how you sell. The size of a marketing budget can vary based on a company’s industry, position in the industry, whether it is selling products, services or both, size, stage of development, the target market, etc. (In general B2B marketing spend is less than that for a B2C focused company.) Most companies allocate between 5 and 12% of revenue for marketing, but it can vary widely depending on a company’s business and marketing objectives. Having said that, if you need a ballpark, start with 8% and adjust from there.

Secondly, make sure your marketing strategy and budget support a clear, focused business strategy (grow market share, expand into new markets, launch new revenue-producing products/services, increase customer retention, etc.). To grow market share you may need to spend more. If you go into new markets, you’ll need to spend more or decrease spending on other initiatives or in other markets. Also, add a budget amount for “unexpected opportunities” which you won’t want to pass up when the time comes – even if you don’t know what it will be!

Lastly, consistently and accurately track the impact of marketing activities to determine what drives revenue (short & long term), customer retention and other metrics. Rank the marketing activities based on expected “bang for the buck” payback. Now build a marketing budget from the ground up. Those activities with the biggest payback go into the budget. Then execute, measure, adjust and repeat!

As the CEO, the questions you should ask about your marketing budget are:

1.    Is our business strategy aligned across the company so initiatives in each department, especially in marketing, support the company’s goals? How does our marketing budget support those goals and the way we sell?

2.    If we spent more could we significantly increase our market awareness or grow our customer base and market share? Can we afford or are we willing to make that investment now, and what are the implications or tradeoffs?

3.    Do we have reliable (and consistently used) tracking systems in place to know whether we are spending our limited marketing dollars on the right things? How do we know our marketing dollars are being invested in the most productive way?

Additional Resources

One free resource about marketing budgets is an annual report summarizing an August survey of CMOs available at www.cmosurvey.org/results/. The survey results are broken out based on industry and company size. (Note: Marketing budgets as a percentage of revenue have been rising steadily since February 2011 according to the August 2012 survey of CMOs. www.cmosurvey.org/blog/marketing-spend-on-the-rise-%E2%80%93-three-trends-worth-watching/)

If you are interested in reading some more articles about the marketing during recessions, here are some links:

www.hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5878.html

www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Learning_to_love_recessions_1197

www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2009/04/20/090420ta_talk_surowiecki

www.oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2009/mar/advertising-during-recession-may-yield-increased-earnings-later

ELIZABETH ANDREINI

As the President of Accelerate Marketing, LLC, Elizabeth Andreini, is the “secret weapon” CEOs turn to at key growth points when they need to transform marketing and product management to grow their customer base, increase revenue & scale their business. In addition to providing experienced executive insight and guidance, Elizabeth often works as an interim CMO or VP to provide the hands-on leadership needed to rearchitect marketing and product management and improve execution from the inside.

Elizabeth Andreini, founder & president of Accelerate Marketing, LLC 

Accelerate Marketing, LLC

206-769-3420 or elizabeth@accelerate-marketing.com

www.accelerate-marketing.com

Twitter: @acceler8mkting

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethandreini