Top Ten Demand Generation FAILS (Part 5) This Building has Structural Issues

Have you ever been to the top of one of those Television towers or the Stratosphere in Las Vegas? These interesting structural designs seem to have a round building perched atop a very tall and very thin pole. What you can’t see is the very large concrete base buried below the surface, without which the entire structure would topple at the first puff of wind.

The same goes for a “structurally sound” Demand Center – much of the “structure” is invisible, below the surface, and absolutely necessary for proper function.

How sound is your demand center’s foundation? Since it is “invisible” how do you measure and keep track of its structural integrity? Let’s pretend for a moment that we’re engineers trying to determine the integrity of your foundation; how would we go about it?

As with any measurement, there are a few key characteristics we need to investigate. Let’s don our hard hats and dive in.

1.     Is the original design sound? Seems like a pretty good question. Does the plan reflect good engineering practices? Does it accommodate the needs of the building’s users with the correct infrastructure (Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing)? Do the specified structural components meet codes and standards?

These are all great parallels to your Demand Center structure. Is your Demand Center plan sound. (Do you even have a set of “blueprints” for your Demand Center infrastructure?) Does the infrastructure suit the needs of your internal clients in terms of its ability to support all of the various Campaign elements necessary for your marketing programs? Do the individual components, such as email engine, website integration, CRM integration and database meet up to industry best practices?

2.     Did the plan accurately consider the building site environment? Were climate, severe weather, seismic and geologic conditions adequately accounted for in the design? How were each of these conditions determined and documented?

To properly design a Demand Center infrastructure, you need to adequately assess your Center’s environment. This requires a thorough Business Process Review (BPR) to determine that actual business requirements you plan to meet. These are your climate histories and soil samples, upon which you can base good infrastructure design. Do you have a set of documented (and agreed upon by the business stakeholders) business processes and associated goals by which your success will be measured?

3.     Is the structure built according to plan? You might have designed a great building, but is it actually built according to those plans? Are the building components exactly as specified in the plan or were there substitutions? Are the as-built measurements precisely as specified in the plan?

When assessing Demand Center structures, the answer 99 times out of 100 is a resounding NO. The correct skill sets for specific roles could not be hired and there isn’t time or budget to properly train them. Specific software or plugins to maintain data hygiene are in next year’s budget. Platforms won’t support needed process or functions. Integrations between critical systems can’t happen because of lack of internal skills or budget to hire external vendors. Once very important caveat to note here: if you don’t begin with a detailed Demand Center blueprint, you cannot claim the infrastructure isn’t built according to plan. You’ve heard it a million times, but failing to plan is planning to fail.

4.     Have environmental factors changed since the building was built? Has increased local development altered the surrounding micro-climate? Have repeated severe weather events altered soil conditions or associated codes?

Has your operational environment changed since you implemented your Demand Center? Mergers, acquisitions and reorganizations will all have an effect on how you operate.  Personnel changes in key positions can affect your operations, changing SLAs or quantity expectations. In general, how has the landscape changed since you originally designed your Demand Center?

5.     Have use factors changed since the original design was created? Has increased use of electronic devices changed the average power consumption per occupant? Does the building structure cause problems with the increased use of wireless devices? Has modern interior office design affected occupant density, affecting dynamic and static structural loads?

Interesting how these very same factors can and should be affecting the way your Demand Center operates. Does your Demand Center design accommodate the increased use of wireless devices, both internally and externally? How does this affect your QA processes? Can you adapt to the ever-changing technology landscape to include multi-screen, location-based advertising and the Internet of Everything?

What’s your plan? Do you have a set of blueprints that adequately document this plan in sufficient detail to build it? There is zero chance that your business environment is going to remain static for the next two, three or five years, so you need to prepare to “remodel” in the future. In order to remodel, you need to have an accurately documented plan to form the basis for that remodel. Design. Document. Build. In that order. Failure to follow that simple, prescriptive process leads to Demand Gen FAIL number 5.

Notes:

Your Demand Center infrastructure is like a building, requiring the necessary design diligence and documentation (blueprint) to build, maintain and remodel it in the future.

When troubleshooting, it is impossible to determine where a system is not working properly without a design document against which you can compare the operating process. This wastes valuable time at (almost always) a critical time in  the production process.

In next week’s edition, we will look at Demand Generation FAIL number 6: Lumpy Pancake Batter. Because we all love inconsistency (not).

Top Ten Demand Generation FAILS (Part 4) Where is the Menu?

Imagine walking into a five-star restaurant, being seated at a table with a million-dollar view and your server approaches the table.

“Sir, Madame,” she begins, “We have prepared your Chateau Briand medium rare and your Chateau LaFitte ’76 is being brought up by the Sommelier. Will you be having an appetizer afterwards?”

What?

The expected order of operations is completely wrong here. You are supposed to order before you eat, drinks and appetizers are first, etc. We have expectations about how things should work in a restaurant, and successful restaurants are very good at meeting our expectations. Great restaurants consistently exceed our expectations, and are paid handsomely for providing that level of service. Restaurants that don’t live up to customers’ expectations simply fail.

We’ve talked in general about process, but now we’re going to talk about formal process.

1.     Process that is documented.

2.     Process that uses specific transmittal vehicles to hand off information between parties.

3.     Process that creates an audit trail.

4.     Process with defined roles and responsibilities.

5.     Process with pre-defined Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

If your organization is executing at a high level, you just mentally “checked” every one of those statements. If your organization is not operating at a high level, read on.

You have a unique organization with unique marketing and selling to an audience with unique buying behaviors (personas). If you are an enterprise-level organization, your customers are probably identified by more than one type of buying persona. Let’s look at some ways you can think of your process in terms of our five-star restaurant catering to your target audience(s).

Where’s the menu? In virtually all restaurants, there is a method of transmitting the critical information about what food is available to the customer. We call it a menu. While there are many varieties of menu – cheap, laminated paper to a recitation of the available items by the waiter – there is always a menu. As a customer, you are not expected to guess at what the restaurant is serving. (Although I admit to having favorite restaurants where I do not require a menu because I have it memorized.) Is your demand center set up with a “menu” of services or do you leave it up to your internal clients to decide what’s on the menu? Are the menu items clearly defined, or is “campaign” open for interpretation?

How would you like your steak? Many five-star restaurants require the wait staff to memorize orders, but most do not leave that to chance. Regardless of the method, every restaurant has a methodology for receiving the customer’s choice of menu items in a reasonable and expected time frame (SLA). Think about the importance of timing here. Time is required to process the menu, make decisions and transmit all the details to the waitress. Not too much time, but enough. And what happens to your order next? Does the waitress go cook your order (meanwhile, ignoring her other customers) or email it piece by piece to the kitchen? Or is there a systematic method of transmitting universally understood terms, such as ribeye, medium-rare with a loaded baked potato?

Order 14 up! Even the great wait staff that can memorize a complex order for a table of eight still have to transmit the order to the kitchen. Flawlessly. Every. Single. Time. Once the order is transmitted to the kitchen, the chef must execute on that order. Flawlessly. Every. Single. Time. Let’s say Bob ordered his $60 ribeye medium rare and it gets to the table well done. Is Bob thrilled with the flawless execution? Maybe it depends on how many cocktails Bob has consumed, but probably not. Now we see the importance of an audit trail. Was Bob’s order transmitted to the kitchen correctly? Was Bob’s order processed by the kitchen correctly? Or did the wait staff accidently pick up Jane at table 16’s ribeye and deliver it to Bob? Audit trails create accountability and accountability leads to flawless execution.

Six Minutes per side. No matter who failed to deliver Bob’s medium-rare ribeye, the wait staff is going to suffer the consequences in terms of the tip amount. Every member of the chain of events is expected to perform their function flawlessly. While the wait staff clearly is not responsible for cooking the steak, they are responsible for delivering a customer experience that lives up to a certain standard – in our case a five-star standard. Without the entire team fulfilling their responsibilities, the five-star experience simply doesn’t happen.

Your order will be right out! Back to the five-star experience, the timing for each phase of the meal is critical to the execution. Not too short and not too long. You neither want to wait an hour for your steak, nor do you want it to instantly appear before you’ve enjoyed your appetizer and/or salad. Nor do you want the bussers to begin gathering your dishware while you’ve still got the last bit on your fork. Timing – known to us as an SLA – is a critical part of the experience. How does the kitchen receive and process the orders so that an entire table’s order can be served at the same time, even though the items ordered might take different amounts of time to prepare? Perhaps the kitchen has an order of operations to prepare each dish?

Like any five-star restaurant, your process must be well established, documented, and be equipped with the transmittal mechanisms necessary for each team member to properly execute his or her job. Roles and responsibilities must be well understood, and each team member must be accountable for performing his or her role within an expected SLA. Without these five components, your five-star demand center experience is not going to fare well on Yelp! And that leads to Demand Gen FAIL number 4.

Notes:

Your Demand Center operations must contain all five components of a formal process. Without all five, you will not be able to deliver flawless execution every single time.

You cannot expect to execute flawlessly without strict adherence to your detailed campaign execution plan. This bears repeating from last week, and is critical. If you have a great process, but don’t consistently adhere to the process, it’s worse than not having a process at all.

In next week’s edition, we will look at Demand Generation FAIL number 5: This Building has Structural Issues! That’s not a problem, right?