Be a leader, sans the title!

Leadership is not defined by the title; instead it is personified by each and every selfless act of ours, as we go about our daily routine.

In my first job in corporate world, we were a group of analysts who had started around the same time in a rapidly expanding division. There was a person in the group, who appeared to be more engaged with everyone. He was the one to inquire about your previous job, your fist day at the new work place, your office space and how you were adjusting to it, etc. He was also the one who organized our first offsite lunch and introduced us to each other, even before we could do it ourselves. In essence, he appeared to be most interested in us, the people on the team and appeared to be trusted by all. Needless to say, that he was the unheralded leader of the group and we would all unwittingly look to him to plan our next outing or carry on the conversation, when there was an extended silence at the table. I remember being in awe of his people skills.

More recently, while leading a new product launch, I had pulled together a team of operations, marketing and IT analysts to help build the business case. When I had to shift focus to the marketing plan, I had operations analyst run scenarios on the business case model. In a few days, during the management presentation, I called out the help from the operations analyst and credited him with the good job he did at building the business model. Although impromptu, my gesture was greatly appreciated by this person and he acknowledged how empowered he felt in his role. I remember the episode, not because it was an impromptu call-out, but how good it made me feel somewhere deep inside. It clearly made my associate's day. We get plenty of similar opportunities daily to recognize someone new or junior on the team and help them grow. Sometimes, we just need to shift our focus away from ourselves!

We know good leaders are people oriented and selfless, but there is no rule that "non leaders" can't do it - that is, make a difference! Here's what I have stored away from these musings:

1. Show genuine interest in your associates and listen to "who they are"
2. Help your colleagues make new friends and encourage them to participate
3. Hand out recognition and praise to highlight smallest of contributions

Good leaders start early, and nurture themselves and their surroundings equally. Titles are meant for business cards anyway!

Marketers - Re-assess Your Marketing Plan Now!

With a quarter gone, marketers ought to be digging into business performance and results. The lessons learnt and course-correction (if needed) should be clearly outlined for the remainder of the year. While the lessons are one for the books, the insights about course-correction dictate how we end the year. And, irrespective of how deep we are into our marketing commitments for Q2, I have found that this is a crucial time to revisit the marketing plan. Slow down after the frenetic pace of Q1 (as it often is in many industries), and spend some time to analyze and level-set the expectations for the rest of the year. Yes, I am suggesting slow down – just think of the benefits:

1. You will most certainly have a better sense of any corporate-level tactical shifts, and their likely impact on revenue projections and upcoming marketing campaigns
2. You will likely learn something new about your product performance and customer-buying propensities
3. You will be able to devise tactics to ensure revenue commitments stay on-course, based on 1 & 2 above
4. You will end the year with a bang – guaranteed!

So, what are we to consider now? 

• Analytics – make sure Q1 results are in and being analyzed for ROI by product, customer segment and marketing channel, not only for attribution, but also for tactical moves in Q2 and Q3. What is going to be the marketing goal based on these results? Is it better engagement with customers, or drive more sales, or brand promotion, or product updates? The answers to these will greatly impact your acquisition and retention models for 2016!
• Seasonality – you probably have a good grasp of the seasonality in your industry, sales, etc. But, make sure that there are no extraneous factors that may warrant changes to your campaign strategy. For example, consumer-spending tends go into a lull in Q2, before picking up again in Back-to-School and Holiday seasons. How is it being projected to be this year for your line of business?
• Customer Targeting – with slower months, it is also imperative that, to maintain a healthy ROIs and CPAs, more valuable leads are targeted with relevant offers. Sharpen your mailing list and tailor the products to the segments that are more likely to buy now. Predictive acquisition and retention models ought to be able with better campaign design and retention efforts!
• Communication Channel by Product – In my multi-product environment, I always look at what products are more likely to appeal to a buyer, through which channel. It could be based on demographics, geography, interest, etc., but that email, or content marketing, or newsletter that is in the works, better be "more" relevant. For example, online Travel used to take precedence over online Shopping during these months. What makes sense to sell to your target customers during the lean months?
• Budgets – understand the budget spends and make adjustments based on any new corporate imperatives. Usually, any over- or under-spending in Q1 could be corrected quickly during this phase. The ROIs and attribution by channel will shed more light on how is each channel performing for the brand.

A little postmortem of marketing performance from Q1 is probably one of the more important projects that are often inadequately addressed or staffed. If done right, it instills discipline and focus, which in turn, promotes efficiency and effectiveness of marketing operations. As I said above, we want to end the year with a bang!

5 Considerations for a Subscription Model

In my previous post on modeling a subscription business, I had mentioned acquisition and retention modeling of subscriber business. Here are a few factors to investigate and consider, as we go about creating a sustainable subscription based product/service portfolio. 

1. Focus on quality acquisition – do your research on what will be a good take rate for the product among your target base. Do not over-sell it – sales channels are prone to doing that.
2. Reinforce Price to value – this falls in the same league as product life. We need to make sure that the price per month is relevant and the product value is continuously emphasized in customer’s mind. Pricing may need adjustments, as markets change and technologies evolve. Keep the customer apprised of such changes and emphasize the value - always! 
3. Continuously measure product engagement – how frequently is the product used? The more a customer engages with the product, the better – this is to reinforce the value your product offers that is relevant to customer need. Further, how easy is it to switch? If there are switching costs, customer decides for you, but if these are manageable (for customer), it becomes imperative that we keep the customer engaged and away from the competitor offers.
4. Tackle the 0-90 day churn head-on. Buyer’s remorse is most pronounced within the first 90 days of the purchase. Keep the product relevant and incentivize the customer to stay on. Listen to your sales channels, customer support and customer surveys for continuous feedback. However, the churn curve will be always at its peak during this period, so make sure to take the higher churn into account, when modeling for subscribers or revenue projections.
5. Strive to be an engaging brand – don’t forget the acquired customer and let them drift towards the retention category. Engage with them through updates, enhancements, thank you notes, newsletters, etc. Whatever works and is relevant, for developing a culture of subtle brand reinforcement in customer minds. These engaged and happy customers are your currency.

Subscriber growth modeling can be refined if due attention is paid to the above parameters and the teams are aligned to engage the customers as outlined above. Forecasting growth and performance, in turn, becomes lot more rewarding, literally!

3 E's of Effective Leadership

The greatest responsibility of a leader is to make their employees successful. This is, more often than not, the one trait that does not garner enough attention from those measuring leadership success. It is about how well the employees are flourishing under one's leadership!

Use the 3 E's to answer this question; perhaps a better measure than (or in addition to) the usual promotions, team size, numbers, etc.

• Empower your employees (go do it!) – set clear goals and expectations, but don’t stymie free thinking. Establish the culture where managers can think freely and are “empowered” to make decisions that move the project forward.

• Enable your employees (provide the required resources!) – get down from the “I know all” pedestal and learn about the daily struggles of a manager in balancing deliverables and getting projects prioritized for delivery. Then make sure to provide the required resources and/or remove the organizational hurdles to “enable” employee success.

• Engage your employees (give a pat on the back more often!). Employees are more engaged when they are recognized. But, do it on a regular basis, not just once a year. Even the small achievements should be called out at weekly reviews or other team gatherings. It will go a long way in keeping them motivated and “engaged” towards the company’s success.

Just like the other assets within the company, employees also need nurturing, albeit with a human touch!

Align Sales Strategy with Customer Growth Strategy

Kind of obvious – isn’t it? After all, sales are meant to grow the customer base! But not so fast.

Sales organizations are by default programmed to increase their numbers period over period. However, quality has a different task – to retain the customers and optimize inflow such that churn is reasonable and within industry benchmark limits. So more is not always better! As we evaluate the quality of customer intake, we should also be cognizant of its downstream impact. Sales-only focus, beyond a certain threshold, invariably leads to greater customer dissatisfaction, higher churn and lower revenue for the organization.

In a recent test, changing the incentive plan on sales of price differentiated products led to a dramatic shift in customer take rate and early-life churn. In essence, the metrics improved, as the product was more aligned with customer need, rather than which one offered more commission to the sales agent. Aligning our sales with customer needs usually leads to a happy customer, which in turn, promises to deliver a greater Life-Time Value (LTV).

The analytics for assessing customer growth, therefore, should look at optimizing a wider set of determining factors, including; sales drivers, product/service pricing and customer segments. I shared some insights into a similar strategy for subscription based businesses. However, the sales and customer growth optimization discussed above is bound to benefit any organization that thrives on long-term contracts with its customers.

Maximizing Marketing ROI in 2016!

A plethora of advice exists about how to maximize your marketing ROI, so it might be helpful to review a few ideas, based solely on my own experience with planning and designing marketing campaigns. These are real world lessons that I wish I knew before embarking on each of the several marketing exercise in the past.

1. Allow for creative testing for all your campaigns. There is no one-size-fits-all anymore, and we need to understand that testing and campaign messaging needs time. Make sure to plan for time and budgets to accommodate these variables. Outline what products you want to focus on, what customer base you want to target, what are their buying behaviors, what are the industry changes influencing those behaviors, resources that you will need to gather and analyze data, etc. 
2. Understand uniqueness in your customer base. All customers are not alike and all don’t see your products the way you do. Run surveys, understand customer demographics, decipher their purchase tendencies from research or past campaign results, segment the customers based on their product liking, relevance and ability to purchase, identify product categories to target to specific segments, etc. You get the idea – segment the customers based on their propensity and ability to buy and ROI of your campaigns will automatically get better.
3. Define your product categories and seasonality. There are different product features that appeal to different customer segments. In addition, there is seasonality of when customers tend to purchase products and how much do they spend on it. Make sure to account for this analysis in your planning cycle to ensure that these products and customer segments are adequately aligned. You may even get a head start on this analysis by looking at any current data that you may have gathered from previous campaigns. However, don’t forget to take into account any new products and customer segments that may be called for as you go through the year. 
4. Plan simultaneous campaigns through your marketing channels. Establishing multiple simultaneous touch-points with your customers usually results in greater exposure and better conversion, if product adoption is the primary goal. Here I am referring to a multi-channel approach through DM, email, social media and other avenues of reaching your customers. This will require a well thought out marketing plan, with an emphasis on consistent messaging, product positioning, seasonality and customer segmentation (refer my post on the topic here). Expect to see 5% to 15% better results, as I saw in my tests.
5. Monitor customer quality from the promotions. Goes without saying, yet we don’t allow for quality monitoring in our planning. Customers acquired through the due diligence as discussed above are likely to be highly valuable. However, plan your processes and resources to allow for adequate data gathering, analysis and monitoring of customer quality. Are the customers loyal to product, brand, offer, other? Define metrics to measure customer engagement with your product and brand, which will be a good indicator of the success of your campaigns and drive up your ROI.
6. Invest in marketing infrastructure and talent. Most organizations stumble on this one. We may believe we have all it takes, but without the right process and infrastructure to support your marketing efforts, none of the tricks discussed thus far in this series are going to be effective. We marketers need data gathering and processing capabilities to collate results from tests, campaigns, etc., to define and implement our next steps. Most organizations are ill-equipped to handle multi-channel data and lack the talent to make sense out of it. Invest now or plan for it, so you are building up to this capability and preparing yourself for success in the years to come. 
7. Always question “what worked last time” theories. This could be a tricky one. In some cases past performance may be an indicator of future success, but given the variability in our products and customers, we ought to continuously test and re-learn. The tricks above are geared towards better targeting and segmentation, which renders each effort rather unique and requires careful reporting such that we define campaigns and success based on relevant parameters. The take-away is that, don’t take a short cut and compromise on research-and-learn simply because we may have results from the past tests/campaigns and we could save time/money on the next one. Build your plans and budgets now to allow for the continuous learning cycle – your marketing ROI depends on it, so should you.

Hope the above helps in a better marketing management and calendar that suits the "continuous learning" in our highly competitive marketplaces.