Arranged C-Level Meetings are Like Time-Share Pitches
When my wife and I were in Maui last time we got roped into one of those time-share pitches. The offer was just too good to avoid: Suffer through a time-share pitch and get tickets to one of the shows going on at one of the hotels. As we knew the tickets were hard to get we decided to “suck it up” and go.
We don’t fit the profile for time-shares. We have young children and pets. Our ‘vacations’ are limited to weekend escapes. This didn’t matter to the sales guy, he put us right into his high-pressure canned pitch anyway. We suffered through it and got vouchers for our tickets. We swore we’d never do it again.
Those services where your company gets matched with C-Level executives at a resort are very similar to time-share pitches. The service provider gets executives from large companies to show up at a resort for a few days at no cost to them. They get free transportation, lodging, meals, golf, etc. In return they need to suffer through a series of 15-minute pitches from the CEOs and VPs of Sales from desperate emerging companies. These C-Level executives are essentially like my wife and I suffering through the time-share pitch to get our vouchers.
The desperate entrepreneurs feel great because they have spent one-on-one time with C-Level executives that are seemingly impossible to reach. The prospects are always polite and professional and make the entrepreneurs feel ‘swell.’ However, at roughly $5,000 / meeting, these are mostly just a waste of time, effort and money. They rarely turn into business. The only ones that make out are the service providers and the executives that get free 5-Star vacations.
You can get meetings with C-Level executives without being desperate and wasting money. In fact, I wrote about how to do it here: http://bit.ly/d6wFJY. Avoid these C-Level matchmaking services. There are alternatives with much better ROIs.
Going to Market is Like Going to War
bill at design-works dot com
A Simple Memory Aid for More Effective Social Media Marketing
There are three main elements to any social media marketing effort and one must consider them in a precise order for the effort to be worthwhile. They are:
1) Members: Who do you want to communicate with? Note that I specifically said “communicate with.” Your goal is to open an ongoing dialog, not just stuff sales messaging down the members’ throats.
2) Messages: What information do you want to discuss? Within the same company you may want to have multiple conversations depending on the role.
3) Mediums: Where are your targeted members congregating? Knowing who you want to communicate with and what you want to discuss with them will often help make it clear which medium to explore.
We often encounter executives that open a discussion with “We *have* to have a Facebook page!” When we go through the process of questioning them as to who they want to communicate with and what they want to communicate, it often turns out that Facebook isn’t where they should be investing their time, money and resources.
Make your social media marketing efforts more valuable by remembering the simple “3 M’s of Social Media Marketing”: Members, Messages and Mediums.
How We Help Our Clients Create Useful Marketing Plans
We use a process elegant in its simplicity for helping our clients create meaningful, credible and executable 12-month marketing plans. The end result is a marketing roadmap that all key company stakeholders (sales, marketing, finance, operations, etc.) are aligned with. Marketing then no longer has to continually keep “going back to well” and justifying budgets and tactics as they are all tied to strategic initiatives and revenue goals.
Here’s what we do:
- Have our client agree upon between 2-4 overall 12-month company GOALS
- Help the client translate these goals into (SMART) OBJECTIVES
- Specific
- Measurable
- Aggressive
- Realistic
- Time-bound (i.e. 12 months)
- Mutually determine STRATEGIC Initiatives to meet the goals
- Document sales processes (current and proposed)
- Develop profiles of prospect stakeholders in the sales process (helps ensure ultimate tactics are rifle-shots vs. shotgun blasts)
- Tie them to revenue objectives and realistic budgets
- Investigate and detail the TACTICS to execute the strategic initiatives
- Document the budgetary costs, resource requirements and timeframes for each
Prior to coming onsite to begin the GOAL session we create questionnaires to be completed by various client stakeholders (execs, employees, customers, partners, etc.) A competitive matrix and initial SWOT analysis is created. We then go onsite and meet with all of the main stakeholders. The onsite component is either one full day, or optimally, 2 half-days back-to-back. During these sessions (often heated, frankly) we nail down the GOALS, OBJECTIVES and STRATEGIC Initiatives.
Upon conclusion of the onsite sessions we use the agreed upon strategic initiatives to investigate, analyze, compare and document recommended TACTICS. The deliverable is a credible, executable 12-month marketing plan that has precise tactics tied directly to the goals of the company.
In an ideal world we can get this done in 3 weeks but our experience with our clients demonstrates that it takes four to five weeks. Doing the investigative work prior to the onsite meetings makes the meetings a lot more meaningful and valuable. It is very difficult to get senior executives in a room all together so it is important that the time with them as a group is well spent. Further, to do a credible job recommending tactics requires a lot of expertise, analysis and thought. We do not ‘cookie-cutter’ these.
Our clients find the process and the result extremely valuable and find that it saves them money by not wasting budgets on useless and/or misaligned tactics. One of our clients is using the plan to present to its investors to justify their marketing spend for the next fiscal year.
Going to Market is Like Going to War, without a thoughtful plan you are doomed.
Contact me to learn more.
bill@design-works.com
(408) 827-8484