SharpInsights #51: Going Coach Has a Whole New Meaning

The title “coach” used to be reserved for guys like Knute Rockne, Yogi Berra, and John Wooden-leaders who knew that winning took hard work, motivation and perseverance. Now, Americans are hiring coaches to lead them to different kinds of victory.

Letting Miss Daisy drive herself: The number of drivers who are 70 or older is growing and will top 30 million by 2020. Driving coaches prep seniors for their written and road tests, and research the most senior-friendly DMV offices.

Thinking outside the box: Death coaches help clients evaluate their myriad options including home funerals, green burials and low-cost alternatives.

Working 9 to 5 to 9: Career coaches edit resumes, conduct practice interviews, and advise job-seekers about everything from recruiters to social media.

Rewinding the gold watch: Retirement coaches help adults plan for the next phase in their lives which often involves a second career or new venture.

Name an activity, and there’s likely a coach ready to help you succeed. (Mediation coaches? Ohm…yes!) Can you leverage your company’s expertise by offering web-based or phone coaching?

Want more SharpInsights? Visit the archives at http://www.sharpmarket.com/sharpinsights/index.html

When:  Thursday, June 24, 2010
Time:   2 – 3 pm EDT
Where:  Online
Cost:   $195

Webinar by David Grossman ABC, APR, Fellow PRSA and author of the new book, You Can’t Not Communicate.

Since you are always communicating – you might as well be great at it. This webinar is a unique opportunity to learn winning strategies you can use every day to differentiate yourself, elevate your leadership impact, and accelerate business results.

David Grossman will share practical insights, best practices, and proven tools to help communicators and top leaders differentiate themselves as LeaderCommunicators.

Learning topics:

• The three fundamental truisms every leader must understand
• Three myths leaders believe, and that every communicator must address head-on The most common traps leaders face The Great Eight communication basics; what great leaders do The five truths of two-way communication
• The top seven strategies for being a better listener

Register Now

by Mike Bawden
President & CEO; Brand Central Station

There was a recent article that appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer about Procter & Gamble and the financial impact it appears their re-focused charitable efforts are having on the company. (Read it here)

This story caught my eye for two reasons: First, only P&G could pull off a global good-will effort like this. And it’s interesting to read about the groundwork they are laying for a variety of their consumer brands in emerging and developing markets. In addition to the awareness and market-building efforts, P&G’s philanthropic program also enhances the value of the company in the eyes of shareholders who are becoming focused on results beyond the bottom line when evaluating their equity holdings.

But the second reason this article was of interest is that it was sent to me by a client.

This is a company not of hundreds of thousands of employees and billions of dollars in sales but of just over one hundred employees and sales that are, shall we say, significantly less than anything in P&G’s portfolio. Yet we’ve managed to work with this client and establish a national connection to a leading health association (The American Diabetes Association) and put together a corporate social responsibility program that will achieve the same kind of awareness and market-building objectives P&G is striving for on a global scale.

For many marketers, whether they’re inside an agency, working from home or cloistered away in a marketing department somewhere, the marketing strategies and actions of the mega-brands (P&G, Pepsi, AB/Interbev, etc.) can all seem out of reach. The fact is, though, their not … and marketers who don’t seem to understand that are destined to live out their professional lives doing more of the same and wondering why they’re not getting better results than they did the year before.

I’ve written about corporate social responsibility programs before. They’re interesting to put together and, done right, can not only have an impact on your company or brand’s growth; they can re-energize your employee base and help build long-term equity in your brand’s value. That can mean better margins on the sale of products to retailers or consumers and, just as important, it can mean better multiples if you decide to sell your business to an investor group or acquiring company.

Doing the right thing, the right way can be a tremendous benefit to your company.

More on this at another time.

The Focus of Success
by Joe Grant

Some say success in our business has a lot to do with luck. Or hard work. Or both.

Well here’s my little aphorism for success based on years of seeing ad agencies run by many well-meaning and ambitious types. It’s not a catchy cliché but you’ll find it easy to remember: You get what you focus on.

The agencies we’d call successful — steady growth, an ever-enlarging list of 1st-class clients, a talented and respected staff, moving into better quarters every few years — get that way because they know how to concentrate relentlessly on where they want to go.

Read more on Joe’s blog.

Nobody ever likes to think about what they’ll do when things go wrong.  As corporate marketers, a big piece of your job is to make sure things go right.  So, what are you doing to make sure a crisis doesn’t permanently derail your company?

Crisis PR gurus, Deon Binneman and Ned Barnett addressed this in a recen exchange on the PRMindshare Forum.  Deon is from Johannesburg, South Africa has been in the “Reputation Management” business for years and specializes in helping businesses deal with problems tht get out of hand.  (Check out Deon’s blog.)  Ned lives in Las Vegas and has spent years helping clients in healthcare and technology deal with the unexpected.  (Check out Ned’s web site.)

What it boils down to is this – dealing with the unexpected can be expensive and most companies can not afford to have people on staff 24/7 to do it.  Instead, the smart money is spent on planning ad creating a rapid response team that can implement that plan when needed.

According to Deon and Ned, here are some of the organizational and cost factors to keep in mind:

1. The first phase is a comprehensive site evaluation; an in-depth discovery session sometimes lasting as much as a couple of days.

2. Following the audit and interviews, an outside PR pro will develop a crisis plan – either general or specific, based on the identified needs of the client.

3. A key step in comprehensive crisis planning involves the outside consultant returning to the client’s location to present the plan and walk it through the approval process.

4. While a good bit of the plan can be implemented with internal first responders, most PR consultants will als be involved in helping their client implement the plan – this is a widely variable action as different clients have different needs, resources, etc. 

5. Once the plan is in place, most PR consultants will receive a small monthly retainer to be “on call” and to keep up with the changing needs. Depending on the size of the retainer, some consultants will make a site visit once a year, twice a year or quarterly to assess the environment and submit updates to the plan as needed.

6. The bulk of the retainer is to pay the consultant (or consultancy) to stay up-to-speed so if a crisis breaks, the consultant drops everything and rushes in to help manage the crisis.

7. Keep this in mnd: when a crisis breaks, most consultants operate on an hourly basis.  A typical arrangement is for a consultantto charge 1.5x the normal hourly for week-days and 2x normal hourly for weekends and holidays.  If you can negotiate it, it’s better to pay for crisis management time on a day rate rather than by the hour (crisis situations can rack up a lot of hours in a hurry). 

8. Be sure the PR consultant commits to managing a crisis situation on-site – “remote” crisis management has limits.

So, what constitutes a “crisis”?  It’s not all exploding buildings and earthquakes as Bissett Matheson Communication’s Duncan Matheson points out: “People involved in crisis management spend too much time focusing on the potential exploding type crisis, when statistics tracked over well more than a decade now show that exploding crisis have become very much the exception.”

“The much more common type of crisis is the building crisis – the one management should have seen coming, but because of action or inaction, mismanaged.  This is the more common type (and) is potentially just as devistating.” Duncan points to the most recent report from the Institute for Crisis Management as a reference for building (or smouldering) crisis.

The key take-away here:  Be prepared and work with an objective consultant (or team) who can help you spot the building crisis – not just attempt to expect the unexpected.

Do me a favor, would you?  Give it a few minutes and post a list of one to five “building” crisis in your organization.  I think we’ll be surprized to find that most of them fit within five to ten general categories. I’ll update this post based on the response to this and other requests posted to the discussion boards/forums I follow. 

Thanks in advance.

When it comes to advertising creative, it doesn’t always have to come down to an “all or nothing” proposition, does it?  For small and mid-sized businesses especially, the hard reality is that many times the design, content and sometimes finished production of a  piece needs to be done in-house or it won’t get done at all.  Some agencies look the other way, some get all “high and mighty” about it.

Here’s the reality: it’s gonna happen, get over it. 

I lay part of the blame for this conflict on old-line agency thinking (that died off in the early 80′s, although nobody quite realized it then).  Contrary to that particular group-think, the agency/client relationship IS NOT like a marriage.  In fact, it’s not anything like a marriage.

It’s a business relationship – and it’s built on pragmatic, self-interest.

S.A. Habib, writing in the Brand Tracks blog, opined on the dangers of a client taking its creative work inside.  The post made some good points, among them:

[F]or every dollar saved by doing in-house creative, you’re losing five in the erosion of your brand. … I’m not saying that all in-house creative departments are inept. On the contrary, many companies, including some of our own clients, employ talented designers and writers.

The problem is something far more serious — tunnel vision.

Whether it’s a CEO, sales guy or in-house creative person, when people look at the product through the eyes of the company, they’re not thinking about the customer. Over time — and not much time — your brand stops communicating with your customer. Your competitors’ smart ads and creative communications steal your market share, and your marketing director is left trying to explain why sales are down.

But all this good thinking aside, it ignores a financial reality that most small and mid-sized businesses face: sometimes, there just isn’t enough money to use “the experts” on every assignment.

So how should an agency, consultant or hired gun do?  The answer is simple: focus on the big picture.  Make sure the strategy is sound and position yourself to be there if and when the wheels come off.  In S.A.’s defense, he does advocate a collaborative approach between agency and client to make sure the client becomes involved in the process.

From a professional marketer’s perspective, this is about more than just keeping the production work and making the account profitable, though.

At our PR firm, my partner and I concentrate on helping clients define strategy, market position and key messages.  We do a lot of planning and then hand parts of those plans off to other agencies to implement. (Hey, there are only two of us and we don’t want to add a lot of staff.)

But even though it looks like we’re giving away a lot to third parties, we maintain the high ground with the client and help maintain an objectivity that can only be provided by an outsider.

Concentrate on providing the value that can only be provided from outside the four walls of the client and you’ll find plenty of productive (and profitable) middle ground on which to work.

(Company Press Release)

BOSTON – Innoveer Solutions, an award-winning customer strategy and solutions consultancy, today announced the availability of its most recent white paper, “The Pursuit of Partner Relationship Management,” which details how companies can expand their reach, reduce costs, and minimize risks by sharing more sales-related responsibilities with their business partners during uncertain economic times. The paper is now available in the white paper library on Innoveer’s website.

This timely white paper discusses the challenges to achieving a successful and mature Partner Relationship Management (PRM ) program, and outlines the five best practices companies should pursue to overcome these challenges:

• Revising existing business practices
• Creating clear PRM rules
• Selecting the right technology, then integrating it
• Enticing partners to participate
• Identifying the best business partners

“PRM is to business partners what CRM is to customers: strategies, processes and software tools that enable companies to organize and optimize their partner relations,” explains Steve Noone, Vice President, U.S. Operations at Innoveer Solutions. “As with CRM, technology alone will not ensure a successful program. Achieving PRM success starts with revisiting fundamental business assumptions, including current sales and marketing practices, and the degree to which they directly support external operations. With this type of investment, organizations are able to identify which partners will eliminate costs, and help increase market share and revenue.”

The paper also discusses the risks and benefits of PRM strategies and how to identify the partners that will have a direct effect on an organization’s bottom line.

Thanks to blogs, IM’s, discussion boards, social networking sites and micro-blogging tools like Twitter, employees are writing about their personal experiences – and the effect is rippling through organizations that have nothing to do with the layoffs.  Kami Huyse, writing in her Communications Overtones blog, provides seven suggestions to HR directors on how to approach announcing layoffs and handling the resulting need for discussion and empathy inside the organization:

The layoff (especially mass layoffs) will most likely be blogged, Twittered or otherwise related in a public forum

The company should consider putting out an official story about the layoffs and voicing genuine concern

The company will always be the bad guy, but this can be mitigated by doing the right thing

A personal touch is needed for these situations, forget mail, e-mail or SMS messages

Minimize faceless and policy-driven thinking

Remember that investors, future employees and your mother is watching how this is handled

Remaining employees will be demoralized by a brutal layoff – they could be next after all, plus they will have survivors guilt

HR staff and corporate managers shouldn’t fall into a trap of thinking they only have to worry about employees’ feelings when layoffs hit their operation.  The social aspect of online media today means that the losses and trauma experienced by employees at one company are now shared through their informal networks – networks that extend beyond the walls of the enterprise and can include friends, family members and colleagues at other businesses all over the world.

Job loss creates very real grief in both the person losing the job and that person’s friends and family.  According to this piece on job loss grief, written by Carolyn Wilkin at the University of Florida, there are steps to the process of dealing with job loss grief – and there are things people can do to help their friends through those steps.

Corporate owners and managers should be proactive though, recognizing the potential for lost productivity if they fail to recognize and deal with the side effects of the broader economic stresses on the economy.

Over the weekend, this concept kept returning to me as I spent time with my kids and many of the volunteer groups I work with throughout the year.  I suspect, as does Mr. Ylisela, that there are a lot of good mentors out there who have never been given the opportunity or taken the chance to be the mentor they could be just because they don’t feel like they’re ready.

Are you in that category?  Do you think you’re too young, too inexperienced, too busy or too quirky?  Take a look at Jim Ylisela’s list of what it takes to be a good mentor, and then consider some of the opportunities for mentorship I’ve listed at the bottom of this article.

Jim Ylisela’s guide to being a good mentor:

1. Be a good listener. Mentors are like therapists, without the hourly billing. They listen to your problems, and ask good questions, but they don’t necessarily tell you what to do. Instead, they help you think through a problem so you can figure it out for yourself. 

2. Don’t be a blowhard. Everyone likes to hear a war story or two, but don’t overdo it. This isn’t about you; it’s about someone else. Your past experiences can be instructive, but only up to a point. Then it’s time to return to the present and offer real advice.

3. Don’t think you have to be right all the time. You’re not the pope, for God’s sake. This isn’t about infallibility. You don’t have to know it all, just enough to be occasionally helpful. And here’s the most important thing: When a mentor doesn’t know something, he says so.

4. Don’t try to fix everything. Mentors aren’t there to clean up every time a writer makes a mess. Mistakes are valuable experience. Writing a good story gives you that warm, fuzzy feeling, but think about how much you learned from that time you:

1. didn’t check a fact and got it wrong.
2. didn’t make the extra phone call and missed a great opportunity.
3. failed to ask the dumb question for fear of appearing, well, dumb.
4. tried to write a complicated story with no clue as to what it was about.

5. Be critical, but do it nicely. Too many corporate writers work for editors and vice presidents who don’t take the time to explain how to do the job better. Others are overly critical without adding any support, preferring to rewrite everything without showing you how to improve. Neither method gets us anywhere. Mentors hold writers accountable, and when necessary, they give them a kick in the pants. But they also assure writers that if you don’t struggle, fail and try again, you never learn a damn thing.

6. Learn something from the person you’re mentoring. The best part of being a mentor is that it reminds you of why you became a writer: the thrill of telling a good story.

Take advantage of mentoring opportunities when they come up
Don’t think being a mentor has to be a full-time job or long-term committment.  In fact, if you work in an office where there are new employees added every so often, your mentorship commitment might not have to extend beyond a friendly lunch during the first week or a couple of morning “get to know you” sessions with the new person.

Here’s a list of mentoring opportunities for you to sieze in the future and an explanation as to why it’s good for your business (in italics):

• When a new employee starts at your company or, more specifically, in your department.   Some of the easiest way to get into the “mentoring business” is to spend time with a new employee to explain some of the basics that may have been covered in an “orientation process” – but didn’t stick.  No matter how long you’ve been at your current job, you’ll always learn something new about company and department policies once you have to start teaching them to someone else. 
• Junior-level marketing support types hired by clients who often wind up doing the legwork for your clients are always in need of mentoring.  Junior marketing types, if they’re successful, often become senior level marketing types on other brands and will look to their mentors for advice on matters like selecting an agency, choosing a supplier, etc. 
• When direct reports or other work colleagues receive a promotion or a new assignment. Promotions or new account assignments can make a person’s world change in a hurry.  A friendly word and an objective point of view can be tremendously helpful in re-establishing focus and bringing that colleague back into line and contributing to the success of the company.  Try a lunch or two, setting aside a few “quiet hours” for a few weeks or a series of breakfast meetings to help create time to allow the employee to get their days organized and track progress. 
• When a co-worker has a major change in his or her personal life. Obviously, major life events like marriages, deaths, births and moves can have a disruptive effect on an co-worker’s performance on the job.  But smaller changes like the loss of a pet, a child going off to college, or a move into a new home can create just enough stress to “knock someone off their game” for a few weeks and contribute to a bad month, financially.  Be aware of what’s going on in your colleague’s lives enough to spot these disruptions if they occur and offer to step in and provide the support they need to deal with their outside issues outside of work and regain their focus for the work commitments while they’re on the job. 
• In a small business, when children of employees or colleagues get summer jobs at the business. Be careful here.  This can be a tricky one; but for family-owned businesses and owner/managed businesses, summertime can see an influx of family members into the workforce.  A helpful, respectful mentorship of some of these youth can bode well for the business long-term because it’s likely these kids will come back right after college and stay for a while (maybe not permanently).  
• When a school or educational organization asks your business to send a speaker or provide a tour.  Yes, I’d include talks given to schools, educational organizations (like 4-H or the Boy Scouts) or other vocationally-interested groups to be a form of educational mentoring.  The basic rules apply and the benefits can be considerable.  After all, you never know who’s kid might be taking a tour of your office. 

I’ve written about mentoring before.  It’s an important subject for the growth and development of the marketing profession and it’s important for each our personal development.

Take some time out to mentor someone – you’ll be glad you did.

Ben McConnell, from the Church of the Customer blog, wrote a salient post on the subject that appeared on Tuesday.  Here’s a summary of his points on how things are different this time and where the CEO’s are STILL missing the boat (so to speak):

• Instead of traveling by corporate jet, GM CEO Rick Wagoner will drive a Malibu hybrid for the 520-mile trek from Detroit to Capitol Hill; Ford CEO Alan Mulally will drive an Escape hybrid. Chrysler got wise and said they’re CEO, Bob Nardelli, is driving, too.
• All three are to present their plans for $25 billion in taxpayer-backed loans on Thursday and Friday.
• If they were very smart, the CEOs would drive unreleased, next-generation cars that get 100 MPG.
• They’d stop in a half-dozen towns along the way and invite a newspaper editorial board writer to ride shotgun for a dozen miles.
• They’d update their status on Twitter.
• They’d write a few posts for the company blog.
• They’d shoot video on a Flip camera and talk about how they screwed up at their first appearance, how they’re selling their fleet of corporate jets, and their plans for the future.
• If they behave like real people instead of CEO machines, they might arrive in D.C. backed by some pretty good word of mouth.

I have a great deal of respect for Ben and his partner, Jackie Huba.  But I’ll have to disagree with him on some of this.  Ben seems to be advocating turning this excercise in begging for bailout bucks into a promotional roadshow.  That smacks of a spin-job when what’s really needed here is a deadly serious pitch to “save the account.”

There’s a big difference between a pitch made for new business and a pitch made to keep it.  Both need to be engaging and interesting – but you’ve got it hanging out there when YOU’RE the one in review and you’ve got to be buttoned down a little tighter than everyone else to keep your skin in the game.

In short, there are “no excuses” when you’ve got to save the account – and the CEO’s of GM, Ford and Chrysler better understand they have to be in “no excuse mode” when they show up in Washington, DC.

As a counterpoint to Ben’s suggestions, I offer the following:

• Instead of each guy driving this brand’s hybrid to Washington, they should car pool.  The extra time in the car would do the three of them good – they need to be on the same team when they show up on Capitol Hill.
• Instead of stopping at a half-dozen towns along the way to Washington, they should plan on stopping in every town where they have factories after their pitch has been made to meet face-to-face with employees, city officials, school children and others to explain how things are going to be different and how all 300+ million of us in the US need to work together to re-boot the auto industry.
• I highly recommend against Twittering and driving.  For that matter, texting and driving is not a good idea either.
• As for writing a few posts for their respective company blogs – I’d rather have them spend the trip to DC preparing for their pitch and reflecting on what needs to change so all their communication (online via blogs, through broadcast or face-to-face) is clear, concise and consistent.  And most of all – customer-focused.
• Instead of selling the entire fleet of corporate jets, sell half of them and then find a more economical way to use the assets on hand.  Believe it or not, there are times when private air travel is more efficient than commercial. 
• As for the $1-a-year salary cap for CEO’s – that’s great.  These guys have plenty of money (a rather safe assumption, I think).  Instead, they better come to play with C-level concessions from the entire top management team – maybe not at the buck-a-year level, but something very significant.  Consumers and rank-and-filers alike need to know that sincere sacrifice has been at the top.

Maybe my suggestions aren’t as “radical” as some might like.  But I don’t think this is a time to encourage CEO’s to experiment with social media.  Rather, I’d like to see them use their ivy league craniums to crunch the numbers and inject a little discipline back into the businesses they’re supposed to be running.  This is serious business and everyone (CEO’s and commenting marketing experts) should avoid falling into the populist trappings that feel good but have little to no real effect.

All that being said, though.  I can’t agree more with Ben’s final comment on what the CEO’s of GM, Ford and Chrysler need to do to be positioned right with Congress:

In other words, they [need to] prove that in these recessionary times they know what it means to be entrepreneurial, not imperial.