Ready. Fire! Aim.
Overview: There’s an old story about Uncle Buster from the backwoods in
Arkansas. Legend had it that Buster had a homemade bow he carved from a hickory
stump, and Buster could shoot his hickory bow more accurately than an Olympic
archer using a custom compound bow. As visitors drove up to Buster’s house,
they would pass his big, wooden barn, which was literally covered with hundreds
of painted targets. Dead center in each target was firmly planted an arrow,
clear evidence of Buster’s incredible marksmanship.
One day, a visitor from up north got lost in
the woods and stumbled upon Buster’s barn. He stopped his car on the one-lane
dirt road (not like there was any traffic to worry about) and stood there,
counting the bull’s eyes on the barn. About the time he had passed 300 targets ,
Buster pulled up in his rusty pickup truck. “Help ya?” Buster asked.
“I am
amazed,” replied the visitor, “as the unbelievable marksmanship here. Do you
know who did this?”
“Yup,”
Buster responded. “I shot every one of them arrows with a bow I carved myself
from a hickory stump over yonder.”
“Absolutely
amazing! How did you learn to shoot so well?”
Buster
grinned. “Simple, mister. I shot first, then painted on the targets.”
Unfortunately
for marketers, Demand Generation isn’t quite so simple. But I often see it
executed Uncle Buster’s way: Ready. Fire! Aim. This leads to Demand Generation
Fail number 2: insufficient planning.
When it
comes to Demand Generation, planning comes in two different flavors:
infrastructure and execution. The chief issue with infrastructure is the “new
toy” syndrome, in which the rush to stand up and turn on a new Marketing
Automation Platform (MAP) is so great, the necessary forethought and planning
required for proper design is ignored in lieu of getting emails out the door.
(More on this later.) Lack of execution planning generally results from the
lack of process or the discipline to consistently follow established process
due to internal or external deadline pressures.
First, let’s
look at the results of failure to plan you infrastructure. If this were a
medical practice, we’d be performing a diagnosis based on your symptoms.
Symptom 1: reporting atrophy! You are constantly scrambling to piece
together reports to indicate the success of your campaign tactics. This symptom
presents as patched-together spreadsheets from your MAP, your CRM and possible
other Legacy systems. In extreme cases, you can’t even tell which assets were
downloaded as a result of your campaign.
Symptom 2: list mania! You are constantly moving “lists” around manually.
Today, you import an acquired list procured by Ted in Sales. Tomorrow you
export “leads” from an event vendor so you can import them into your MAP the
day after tomorrow. In extreme cases, you are managing you lists of lists in
another list.
Symptom 3: Leads, Leads, everywhere a Lead! Every contact in every system
is a “Lead.” Your conversations about Leads with your CMO leave you bewildered.
Sales is complaining about Lead quality. Field Marketing is complaining about
Lead quantity. EMEA had no idea Leads were sitting in their Lead queue. APAC
isn’t in the habit of following up on Leads. LatAm only generates it’s own
Leads. In extreme cases, it just occurred to somebody in Sales Ops that Sales
was only updating Contact records because they don’t know what a Lead is.
Symptom 4: An Army of one! Your last defined segment produced a single
contact in Yuma, Arizona. Your Lead scoring map is predominantly D4s. In your
last meeting with Sales Ops, they asked if you could just make everyone an MQL.
In extreme cases, Your Lead scoring is completely turned off.
These
results are symptomatic of an infrastructure built without regard to process or
not planned to help you manage your processes. Proper process and definition
are necessary parts of your infrastructure planning. Part of the planning is a
clear and precise definition of your Lead flow, Lead stages and process for
actions in stage and triggers for both forward and backward movements. See this {Demand Gen Brief} for more.
Next, let’s
look at the symptoms of execution planning failures.
Symptom 1: Recurring mistakes! Wrong recipients get wrong messages. Links
take prospects to the wrong place, or no place (the dreaded 404 error!). Images
don’t load. HTML doesn’t render correctly. Since deadlines are critical, we
need to skip steps in the process, right? Like QA. In extreme cases, you are
unaware the project management discipline exists.
Symptom 2: Low Sender Scores! Combine high bounceback rates, high opt-out
rates and complaints and you get low sender Scores. And few responses. Extreme
cases result in opt-out rates higher then click-through rates.
Symptom 3: Persona non Grata! You can’t point to a specific content map
with a persona and buying stage. Your content strategy is “turn up the volume.”
In extreme cases, you have no content strategy at all.
Symptom 4: California Customs! Everything is a one-off. You have no template
library, or nobody uses it. Your internal clients begin every proposal with,
“It’s exactly like the Chicago campaign, except…” or “Upper management has
their eyes on this…” In extreme cases, you haven’t seen a “standard” campaign
in three years.
These
execution symptoms are simply the result of insufficient planning, which
generally stems from lack of operational process oversight and control. Lack of
understanding between departments concerning the level of effort required in
each step compounds through the design and development phases of a project
until there is little bandwidth left for testing and deployment. The result is
systemic execution failure, as exhibited in the symptoms above.
Please
remember, you are not alone! Many organizations suffer from these same
symptoms. It is not you, it is a disease called FTP, or failure to plan. There
is hope, because you can begin to plan today. Ready, Fire, Aim never works.
Notes:
You cannot expect to execute flawlessly on a
platform not designed around your process. Take the time to properly document
your Lead Management process before attempting to automate it. You cannot
automate an ambiguous process.
Make sure your data is clean, complete and
standardized before uploading to an automation platform. Incomplete or
incorrect data leads to incomplete and flawed execution.
Were you expecting a toaster? Be sure to read
last week’s edition of Demand Gen Brief.
In next
week’s edition, we will look at Demand Generation FAIL number 3. This one
catches virtually everybody sooner or later. Whether it is trying to execute
too quickly or the repetitive nature of some processes, inattention to detail will
kill your campaign every time!
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