Sales vs. Marketing | Content Machine Ep. #47

Is it marketing or is it sales? This is a classic question that I run into all the time in my world. In this episode of the podcast, let’s dig into what the distinction is between marketing and sales. What’s the role of marketing and what’s the role of sales and why does it even matter? Well, let’s start with what is marketing? Marketing is the effort of getting someone’s attention and motivating them to take your call to action. We believe in a large definition of marketing. It’s anything that interacts with your customer. Unfortunately, that definition alone leads to some blurry lines. Really, practically in most organizations, marketing is all the external factors that help a customer become a customer or help a customer stay a customer. Sales is enabled by marketing and contains the actual transactions that move a business forward. Many times in the B2B world, there’s a relationship that is managed in the sales department, like with an account manager. Why are these distinctions important? In an organization, depending on how large it is, knowing who’s responsible for what is important. It helps people focus on the right activities, and it helps people be evaluated based on what they’re doing.

 

It helps us know what we’re tracking and who’s doing what. But it is a collaborative relationship, and when it’s not a collaborative relationship, there will be issues. How can marketing and sales work together? I view marketing as enabling sales. So marketing should be listening to sales, but sales should be also listening to marketing. It’s a little bit like a marriage. In a healthy marriage, the husband and wife talk and they lead together. Sales might say, ‘Hey, this messaging is not working,’ and marketing shouldn’t be like, ‘Well, I know more than you.’ Sales might say, ‘I need a brochure.’ But marketing might say, ‘instead of a brochure, what if we built a website?’ That way we can control it and make A and B testing and things of that nature. It’s important for both parties to play nice with each other. Let’s talk through the life cycle of a brochure and how might the two work together. Sales might say, ‘We need marketing material.’ When we go out to the marketing place, marketing should respond and say, ‘Absolutely. Let’s help you make that so that you have all the tools you need to be successful in selling.’

 

Marketing and sales should then be able to collaborate on creating that for sure. Sales should be able to say, these are common objections that we face. These are our customers’ common needs that we can fill. And this is the gap in the marketplace that we’re filling. Marketing should be able to say, okay, if this is the objection or this is the gap, this is how we can say that in a manner that helps people see the need if they’re not immediately aware of it. Then marketing can put it all together in a package that allows us to quickly and clearly communicate who we are, but in a way that intrigues the end customer. Marketing can then handle the design, the photography, the writing, the printing. Then sales has this new tool that they can go and use to sell more stuff. Over time, there should be updates to this, and then sales is going to be able to say, Hey, this is working well, or This is not working well, and this is why we think that is, and this is what we hear from our customers. It’s a collaborative relationship, and that should be the same across videography, websites, marketing strategy, all of those types of things.

 

This is similar how we work with our customers. Our customers are doing the sales and we are equipping them to make those sales happen. What happens when conflict arises? Conflict might arise because sales might feel like marketing is not bringing them good leads, or marketing might feel like sales has unrealistic demands or is not using what they need or make. An important thing is, as a leader above both of those, is that you help them work out those conflicts and work together to solve the problems of the business. When each department knows what they’re responsible for and what each is getting graded on, this can mitigate lots of tension. Are you in marketing or sales in a small organization? I do both of those roles for my team, but my team helps me build all the tools that I need to go enable sales. So are you in marketing? Are you in sales? I’d love to hear from you about something from a marketing department or a sales department that has made your job easier. If you’ve got a great one, send me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com. Thank you for tuning into the Content Machine Podcast.

 

I hope to see you on a future episode.

 

Internship Diary #8 – Preparing for Celebrations Through Traditions and Interruptions

We’ve reached a time of year in America when it seems that everyone, everywhere is planning for some kind of landmark. The calendar will change in a couple of months, and companies and people are planning celebrations of every kind: Thanksgiving, End of Year, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and the upcoming New Year itself. 

The season of celebrations produces two things, the opposite of one another. Celebrations are accompanied by traditions, time-honored and reliable practices that give our lives structure and comfortability. This time of year, though, is also accompanied by departures from the routine, new tasks, shopping lists, and boxes to be checked that are not present year-round. These hectic new agenda items exist because, inherently, celebrations necessitate the preparation for celebration. The build up.

Recently, I worked on a small task for the Greater Jackson Chamber’s Annual Celebration. They hosted a game-show type trivia competition, and all the questions centered around Old Hollywood. Do you recognize this actor? This movie? This poster? That type of thing. My job was just to find the pictures, videos, and posters to be used. Somewhere in that process, sifting through photos of actors from the 40s to find shots that weren’t so grainy they couldn’t be used, I saw the iconic poster for It’s a Wonderful Life. If you’re anything like me and you come from one of the thousands of American families for whom that movie is appointment viewing every year, you’ll probably recognize it instantly. It captures the moment near the end of the film when Jimmy Stewart has received his second chance, arriving home, and Donna Reed runs in to meet him. It’s impossible not to be moved. But it got me thinking about the little things we mark our lives by — watching the same movies every year, eating the same pie on Thanksgiving, and so on. I’m sure you have your own list of rituals. This time of year is full of them, both personally and professionally. 

Some people wait with rapt anticipation, like a child on the arrival of Santa Claus, for the day Starbucks tosses out their plain white cups in favor of the bright red and pizzazz of the holiday seasonal cups. Some people leave out their pumpkins and scarecrows until December 24th, waiting out the progressively cooler days of November and most of December with patience. Jackson saw its first actual cold snap of the season this week, enough to frost the grass a glassy white in the morning and freeze a thin layer of ice over the windshields of anyone trying to leave for work. 

After the first cold snap and beginning of this annual season of various celebrations, Brittany Crockett mentioned in one of the non-serious Adelsberger Marketing Slack channels that she had begun the countdown to Christmas. Yesterday, though, I saw someone post on Instagram a picture of their shed, making a not very funny or very original joke about how that is where their Christmas tree would stay until December. I’ll leave you with this, from Brittany in Slack after her early onset holiday spirit was challenged: “We take the wins where we can get them.” 

For that reason, I welcome this season of new tasks, new checklists, and new celebrations. 

 

Content Idea Generation | Content Machine Ep. #46

If you’re a social media marketer or a marketer in general, generating content can be a challenge, especially over the long haul. The internet is a content-hungry beast, and we’ve got to keep feeding it. With all the customers that we work with, we have to always be generating new ideas for content and then implementing them. Here are some thoughts on how you can also generate content in an ongoing manner. The first and most important thing about content generation is understanding who your customers are. Who’s the target market? Every business’s target market is different and without a good understanding of who these customers are, and in the business we call them personas, you’re going to be spitting in the wind. The first step is to take some deep thought or maybe do some persona exercises on who your customers are and what they care about. As we look about what they care about, let’s think about a few things here. One, do they have a relationship with the organization? Or the people at the organization, do they want to see behind the scenes? Do they feel like they’ve got privileged information or are they just there for a deal?

 

Making a list of what’s important to our customers will give us an opportunity for a starting place when we start to generate ideas for content. In a second vein, we want to think about what we want the customer to know. Most businesses start here, but we put it in second place because what the customer wants is the most important part. When we think about what we want them to know and what are things as a business that we want to make sure they know about, that list is different. Gary Vanderchuk’s methodology of a jab, jab, jab, right hook, the jabs are what the customer cares about, the things that are entertaining, the things that satisfy them. And the right hooks are the things that we want to promote. So what do we want them to know about? Maybe it’s what makes us special, what makes us different than our competition. Maybe it’s some new product for sale or a club or a membership opportunity or some way to contact them like an email list or a text messaging service. The things that we want to promote are many, but we have to understand that they are not necessarily exciting for the customer.

 

And then when we think about those two things, we also have to think about what is the level of awareness that this customer has of our goods and services. Are they a current customer and a friend of the business? Do they need a little education on who we are and why we’re important? Are they not aware of us or that our service exists? Or maybe they’ve never heard of us and didn’t know that someone sold what we sold. Depending on that level of awareness, we may need to approach the content we’re creating differently. And then we have to think about is it organic social or paid social? Because the platform affects the content as well. But when we think about whether our customers know us or not, we should be trying to think about how that content reaches different segments at different times. We need not just to focus on experienced customers, but we also need to reach out to new customers and introduce ourselves in different ways. Finally, I like to think about a list of emotions that we can evoke. There’s a long list that we use, including things like being interested, happy, sad, and insightful.

 

These different emotions can help us think about ways that we can interpret the needs of our customers and the things that we want to promote. So instead of just saying we offer X, we want to imply it in an insightful and emotional response. We might say, did you know what X can do for a business and this is what we have done to someone’s business and how we’ve helped them? Or this is why we don’t do this because of X or Y. Pairing the emotions with the content can help you see through a way to make the content more relevant. Having content that can be approached in a different manner can help it be more engaging. Are you producing content? Are you a content producing machine? What’s your favorite piece of content you’ve ever produced? I would love to hear about it. Send me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com. Thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcast and stay tuned for more great episodes. And we’ll see you on the next one.

Fractional CMO | Content Machine Ep. #45

How do you stay up to date with marketing? If you’re leading an organization that is not a marketing organization, how do you stay on top of your marketing? Are you investing in a staff person who’s keeping up with marketing? Is it their sole responsibility? Are they having to do all the areas of marketing or are they focused in just one area? Or do you not have someone in marketing and are you having to try to learn marketing for yourself, even though you might be really good at something else like banking or insurance or roofing? There’s been a new concept that’s becoming more and more popular in our economy called fractional work or outsource work or part time work for chief financial officers and chief marketing officers. This fractional CMO or part time CMO or outsource CMO has become more and more prominent and it’s something that we are doing more of because more and more companies are deciding it’s not worth investing in a marketing person full-time for a couple of reasons. When you hire a full-time marketing person, you want them to do everything. And it’s very difficult to do everything. Very few creatives are capable of doing many things very well across lots of disciplines.

 

Marketing strategy is different from graphic design. Graphic design is different from videography. Videography is different from social media and social media is related to but different from copywriting. Previously, small and medium-sized companies would expect someone, whether they thought it out loud or not, they wanted someone to do all of these things and to do them all well, and that’s just an impossible task. We’ve worked with several companies where we either augment an existing person’s ability or advise those marketing managers to a higher level, or we come in and fill the need completely because we can provide marketing strategy and with our team delivery of that strategy. Additionally, because of our experience in the marketplace, we have a lot more experience than a lot of people who start in these positions because many times these companies hire younger people to fill these roles and we bring a touch of experience and expertise from different industries and cross-pollination from our different accounts. When you hire internally, the hiring and firing of staff members brings a lot of cost and a lot of trouble that can come with it. You have to be thinking about, I’m not just hiring this person for a few hours, I’m hiring them 40 hours a week with salary and benefits and time off and drama and things of that nature.

 

So how do you compensate for all that? The great thing about a fractional CMO is a fractional CMO is responsible for providing value, not punching a clock. You can fire them and hire them, and well, there’s no severance, there’s no insurance, and there’s no drama. David C. Baker pointed out that perspective and seeing the bigger picture are hugely important values that consultants bring to the table. You are dug into the details of your work. You’re looking at the map with a magnifying glass, and we’re standing back and looking at the entire mountain. Outside consultants give perspective that insiders can often miss. Marketing consultants are available. Like I am, you can call me. But the question you need to ask is, is the focus of your organization enough on marketing? Are you properly equipping someone to do the marketing if you’re internal? Or are you spending enough time learning so that you can stay up on top of what’s new in marketing? Because someone has to do it if you want to thrive as organization. So if you’d like to talk about hiring a fractional CMO and maybe that would be us, I would love to set up a Zoom with you.

 

Give me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com or send us a DM. Thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcast. Stay tuned for more insight and future episodes.

Internship Diary #7 – Putting Faces to Names and Personalities to Faces

I remember, as everybody does now, where I was the day the world changed. It was March 13, three years ago, and my job consisted of traveling around the country with a non-profit. Traveling became, literally overnight, taboo. It was the primary thing, in fact, that you should not do at all anymore. The only thing more off limits, I suppose, would have been sneezing directly in someone’s face, but that wasn’t in my job description anyway. I went home, as the whole world went home, and my job changed, as did everyone’s. 

There was a plastic card table on the screened-in brick porch behind my sister’s house, and she had good WiFi, so that became my office. It took exactly one cardboard Amazon box and two paperback novels to elevate my laptop from the surface of the table to an even height with my face for the Zoom conferences that became my daily occupation. I badly wanted to avoid the up the chin and nostrils Zoom camera view, for the sake of my ego and my audience’s sensibilities. 

This became the new normal quickly, and I believe that for the most part we are better for it. My dad, who for my entire life had gotten up before dawn to make the 45-minute commute to the power plant where he has worked for three decades, was suddenly home in the mornings. He sat at the kitchen table with coffee and his laptop and did his work as he always did. He lost nothing in productivity, nor did anyone else from his office. But I got to say good morning to him when I woke up and made my own coffee and began my own work. 

That new normal extends to today, as the American work landscape has changed dramatically and in all likelihood permanently. I’m afforded the luxury and convenience of accomplishing all my work with Adelsberger Marketing from the comfort of the desk in my dorm, or a table at a coffee shop, or as was the case last week, from a camp chair beside the tent I shared with friends in Chattanooga. 

You will hear no screed from me about the dangers of working from home, the terrors of letting people reclaim the little minutes between work that might otherwise be spent staring at the wall of a cubicle. Enough ink has already been spilled on that subject by people who probably reminded the teacher when homework was due in grade school. 

That said, I do think there is distinct value in knowing the people with whom we create. Not every job, or every company, or every internship involves this aspect. But any working creative will tell you that it is vitally important. While there is a time to sit and think and fuel, there is also a time to exercise the muscles that allow us to actually make something. Ricky Santos and Katie Howerton, who together form the design team for Adelsberger Marketing, agree on the importance of collaboration and having a second voice. They bounce ideas off of one another all the time. That requires some baseline relationship, some idea of who the person on the other side of the screen is that includes them in three-dimensional form, a flesh and blood human. 

For all of these reasons, it was particularly refreshing for me to join Alex Russell and Tamara Waller, video team extraordinaire, on a shoot for the Leaders Credit Union podcast recently. One of the primary benefits of working with creative people is that they tend to be fun. This is true of Alex and Tamara. Over the course of the shoot, from the setup to the filming to the takedown to loading the van in the parking lot, easy conversation flowed between them. They knew things, not only about the work itself but about how the other liked to work, about how the clients liked to work, and about how to put the atmosphere at ease by having fun with the whole thing. I asked them questions about their lives and their hobbies and the music they listened to and gently ribbed them for their taste in artists and songs. They did the same to me. Though I have no wish for a permanent office or a cubicle or a desktop computer, I will say this: it’s good to get out and know the people behind the work, to put a face behind the graphic or the video. The workplace has changed, but we still need each other. I don’t think that will change.

How We Market Ourselves | Content Machine Ep. #44

As a marketing company, we think about marketing for other people all the time. It’s what we do for a living. But it also means we think about marketing for ourselves all the time, but we just don’t always have the time to do it. The phrase, The Cobbler’s kids have no shoes comes to mind, even though everyone on my team has never heard that phrase before. A long time ago, we decided to focus on three pillars to conquer our marketing. After talking about those, if you hang on to this episode, we’ll look at the next steps as we invest more in ourselves. Our three pillars of marketing: invest in the community, position ourselves as experts, and build stark raving fans. Investing in the community is actually a part of our mission. It says, in a culture that values our team and community. We invest in our community because we believe we have a responsibility to give back as someone who has had success here with the people and the businesses from here. We believe a rising tide floats all boats. If we support our community and help to make our community a little bit better, we can also prosper a little more together as a whole.

 

When the community improves, we fulfill our mission, and we open up more opportunities for us to do business with people in the future because more businesses will exist and existing businesses will do better. One of the secondary benefits to investing in the community through service to the community is meeting new people. Working shoulder to shoulder with some folks or supporting their causes through discounted work is a way to build better business connections than handing out business cards in an event. It builds a genuine connection and mutual trust, and this sometimes leads to new business opportunities, which I’m never mad about. We believe strongly in positioning ourselves as expert guides for marketing in our area. We want to be viewed as who you want to talk to when marketing is on your mind. Being positioned as the expert leads to new business and helps create top of mind awareness as people move through the community. The more people view us as experts or the people to call, the more likely someone is to refer to us even if we’re not close friends. How do we do that? We do that primarily through education. We are willing to educate others on marketing through blogs, speaking at events, or participating in things like the Co’s Office Hours.

 

At Office Hours, folks can sign up for a free consultation with us and walk away with free action steps. And a nice benefit of being positioned as an expert, it allows you to charge a higher fee for your expertise and sets you up to do advice-only work or consultations. We want to get to a place where a significant part of our revenue comes from head work, not just the work we can do with our hands. But the biggest thing that we’ve done to help our marketing is we make stark, raving fans. Most of the folks we have worked with, not all of them, of course, but most of them love working with us so much so that they’re willing to talk us up and recommend us to the community. How do we create stark, raving fans? Well, one, we deliver. This is actually one of our core values also. We do what we say we are going to do, and if it is within our power, when we say we are going to do it every time we show up and we get stuff done. Also, when we deliver, we deliver good work. We make work that accomplishes goals for our clients, and they appreciate it.

 

While we deliver and we do good work, we also make a great partner. We are fun to work with, and we push people to do better for their companies. Going above and beyond in customer service is a long-term investment in building a reputation that precedes us. Now moving forward, there are two particular things we’re going to do to pour fuel on the fire of our business. The first one is creating more content. We are investing the time in creating content like this podcast or this video to help build our position as an expert and help expose more people to our work. In this, we are taking a little bit of our own advice that we give to clients. More content equals more opportunities to be discovered. So expect to see more content from Adelsberger marketing this year. The second thing is that we’re investing in culture. We want to be the best place to work in West Tennessee. Why? Well, I believe creativity wins the day. How do you have creativity? By having good talent. And how do you attract and retain good talent? By having a great company culture. Having a culture that values our team is part of our mission statement and will give us an advantage in the future talent war.

 

I believe company culture will be the biggest defining feature of a successful company in the next 50 years. And so, we’re doing our best to be ahead of that trend now. Thanks for listening to the podcast. If you found this episode helpful, text it to a friend. If you want to talk about doing business with us, contact us at adelsbergermarketing.com.