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How Marketing Success is Ruined by a Rotten Foundation
71 Plays3 years ago
When marketing fails to perform, a frenzy of fixes happens.
It’s about tactical optimization and doing things differently.
But often marketers are addressing symptoms, not root problems.
Sometimes, bad marketing is caused by a rotten foundation.
Marketing execution stumbles when it’s not underpinned properly.
Michelle Tresemer describes this problem as “compounding defects”, a term that she borrowed from the construction industry.
Compounding defects happen when there is no strategic vision or purpose.
This leads to marketing that isn’t focused, structured, or aligned.
Michelle says that “by the time you to tactics, there are no guardrails or no direction. Everyone is just doing what they think is best and it doesn't work”.
In the physical world, compounding defects is what happens when a skyscraper’s foundations are slightly off.
As the building is constructed the foundational flaws are magnified and exacerbated.
In the marketing world, compounding defects can involve a lack of leads or sales, or content that a CMO finds difficult to approve because it’s somehow off the mark.
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Transcript
Busyness vs Productivity in Marketing
00:00:03
Speaker
Hey, it's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. Marketers like being busy. Busy suggests that we're moving the ball forward and making the boss happy. But marketers waste a lot of time on things that don't matter. It's tools, side projects, channels that aren't working, and the list goes on. Michelle Tressimer is what I would call a marketing realist. A key part of her MO is helping companies focus on what matters. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Michelle.
00:00:33
Speaker
Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here.
Compounding Defects & Vision in Marketing
00:00:37
Speaker
Let's start with something that's a little bit of a twist or something that I haven't run across before. And this is a topic that you suggested around compounding defects. It's the idea of what happens to B2B marketing tactics when the vision and leadership strategy aren't clear. I would love it if you could provide a definition of compounding defects, why you think
00:00:58
Speaker
It's such an important concept for marketers to understand and embrace and how you avoid this compacting defects problem. Loaded question, lots of moving parts. No, it's great. A few months ago, I was trying to come up with a term or look and research to find an industry term to describe
00:01:19
Speaker
What happens down in the weeds of B2B marketing? And I'm talking tactics. I'm talking your SEO titles and descriptions every single tweet. I couldn't figure out what it was that was causing all of that busyness for the sake of being busy and this obsession with the shiny objects in
00:01:39
Speaker
Let's add TikTok. Let's add all of this stuff. And I couldn't figure out the term for that. And I actually came across a construction term. And the term is compounding defects. So let me unpack that in terms of marketing, because it kind of fits perfectly. So Mark, you are CMO. You are way up here.
00:02:00
Speaker
If that is not clear, and I'm going to use your podcast as an example if you don't mind, if that vision, if your purpose, the reason why you exist is not clear, so that's at the foundational level of marketing, by the time you get all the way down to tactics, there are no guardrails. There is no direction, so everyone is just doing what they think is best.
00:02:24
Speaker
and it doesn't work. So the construction term, compounding defects, let me back it up. This is if you're building a foundation of a building. So think of a skyscraper. When you're doing those foundations, you might think, oh, I'm just like a quarter of an inch off. No big deal. Well, by the time you get to the 30th floor, that quarter of an inch has compounded with each and every floor. So by the time you get up there, you're off by several feet and it's gonna wobble and gonna fall apart.
00:02:56
Speaker
So when we talk marketing, if that foundation is not solid, when you get down to tactics, it all falls
Foundational Issues in Marketing Teams
00:03:03
Speaker
apart. So I think I need you to elaborate. When you talk about the foundation, are you talking about the vision? Are you talking about strategic plans? Are you talking about goal setting? Are you talking about all of those things in terms of establishing a rock solid foundation upon which tactical execution can happen?
00:03:26
Speaker
We actually consider there's 20 marketing foundations. But what you're talking about, really, it's the leadership and management level. So let's take your podcast and walk through that if you don't mind. So way up at the top, you are clear on B2B SaaS. And you've got all these podcast episodes way down at the bottom in tactical execution.
00:03:48
Speaker
So if you are not clear on B2B SaaS, six months from now, you might have topics all over the place, and it's going to confuse your market. And you're going to have a ton of wasted time and energy, and it's going to destroy your brand. But because you're clear, your message is clear. Who you hire, your vendors, your staff, your VAs, whomever that is, they are all clear on your key performance indicators. They know what you're trying to accomplish.
00:04:17
Speaker
It's all B2B SaaS, right? So no waste. But most companies we work with, they don't do that. They are not communicating the vision, the KPIs, the goals downstream. So they're hiring the wrong skill sets that are not aligned with their core vision.
00:04:37
Speaker
Interesting. What are the symptoms of compounding defects? How can an organization, the CEO, the CMO, recognize that what they've been doing for the last three, six, nine months isn't working because the foundation wasn't right? That leads are not as qualified all of a sudden or the numbers have dropped. That's a huge one. I am very
00:05:00
Speaker
tactical. So I like to be in the weeds. One of the things that CMOs can watch out for is if they have a whole bunch of drafts of content sitting in their inbox or on their desktop. This is a very specific example, but I see it without fail
00:05:17
Speaker
at all of the B2B companies that don't have this stuff together. So if the CMO, so your role, for example, if you don't feel good about approving a white paper or an ebook and you just think, ah, you know, technically this is written really well, but something's not quite right about it, it just sits there and it never gets approved.
00:05:41
Speaker
That's interesting because in some respects it sounds like gut feel. Like when you see content as a CMO and you need to approve it and it doesn't.
00:05:50
Speaker
Doesn't like your spider sense goes off. Yes. Yes. There's no data involved because you haven't released it in the wild yet, but it's more like a feel. And I guess what you're saying is that if you have a solid foundation in place, those decisions go or no go are a lot clearer because there's a, there's a clear path forward in terms of how you should do marketing.
CEO Vision & Marketing Strategy
00:06:13
Speaker
Absolutely. You just did that wonderful webinar workshop on brand messaging. Right.
00:06:19
Speaker
If that is not in line, the content team has no litmus test to understand, is this gonna resonate with the target audience? Am I hitting the key pain points? They're not doing that. So they're just writing it off of their gut feel. So by the time it gets to the CMO, you're right. Something is off, but you don't have that document to check it against.
00:06:43
Speaker
So then you just never approve it because you're busy doing other things, right? It's like, go rewrite it. But having those guidelines, that foundation, so it's super clear, it makes it really easy to approve things. Here's a little question. If you're the CMO and you recognize that compounding defects is a problem and you don't want to be there because that's a waste of people, time, and money,
00:07:09
Speaker
Where do you start? It is a loaded question, but what are the first steps that a CMO should take and their marketing organization for that matter in terms of making sure that the foundation's right so you can avoid compounding defects?
00:07:24
Speaker
You know, it's so funny. This is always the hardest thing to do. It's talking to the founder and the CEO. It starts with that vision for where the company is going. Everything else falls from that. And I know you work with a lot of probably B2B startups, the SaaS world. Sometimes the founders and CEOs aren't sure. But let me give you an example that I've experienced a lot in the past year. It's in terms of acquisition.
00:07:51
Speaker
Some CEOs, and I've had them tell this to my face, they don't have a big lofty vision. They just want to get acquired. Totally fine. But getting that honesty out of them upfront completely changes how we build that marketing infrastructure. We know, OK, we've got to push it hard for 12 to 18 months because we're going to get acquired.
00:08:15
Speaker
That's a very different strategy than thinking, okay, five years from now, we need to be in this position. It's just different how you market. You're thinking more long-term instead of short-term, we need to look like big deals, so our price goes up, right? What about when you run into an entrepreneur or a co-founder who, when you ask them about their goals, they say more leads. That's it.
00:08:39
Speaker
Maybe they're not sophisticated from a sales and marketing perspective. At the end of the day, all they matter about is leads and sales. So you're dealing with a little bit of information to tackle a big problem. And there's lots of different variables that are involved. How do you build a foundation when the entrepreneur or co-founder doesn't give you much guidance? Sometimes it's like pulling teeth. Not going to lie. There is a reason that founder woke up one morning and decided, you know what? I'm going to solve this problem in our industry.
00:09:09
Speaker
There is a reason deep in there, I save your webinar and your information and send it to people because it's amazing. They need to dig in and figure out why they exist and what they want for their company. If they're just thinking in terms of leads, which is not the end of the world, it's good to track those things obviously, but they want to be somewhere in five years. And sometimes it takes a little bit of digging to figure out, do you want to get acquired? Do you want to IPO?
00:09:35
Speaker
Do you want to be something very lofty like Microsoft? I was just looking at their original vision when they started. They wanted a desktop computer in every home. There is some sort of vision like that that the founder has. They maybe just haven't articulated it yet.
00:09:53
Speaker
If you've got a foundation in place and you've got a strategic and tactical vision, one of the things I do wonder about is the idea of building a B2B digital marketing, like a toolbox.
Effective Use of Digital Marketing Tools
00:10:08
Speaker
I mean, we talk a lot these days about marketing stacks, and there are thousands of tools out there that can seduce
00:10:17
Speaker
marketers and distract them at the same time. Can you define what a marketing toolbox looks like? What's in it? And how many tools should marketers be using realistically? There's dozens we can have in our portfolio, but how big is it? I guess that's the basic question.
00:10:36
Speaker
Sure. In my brain, there are eight digital marketing tools, and I'll talk about those in a second. But I love the toolbox analogy more than anything else. I always use the example, if you're a hammer, all you see is nails. If you are a social media specialist, you are going to try to use social media to solve all of your lead generation problems. If you're an SEO, you're going to look for organic search and SEO to solve the problem.
00:11:03
Speaker
As marketers, and I've seen this happen with companies, we need to take that step back and be more like the general contractor and know when to use each of those tools.
00:11:14
Speaker
It's really difficult because, you know, as CMOs, we have to understand how they all work and when to use each one. What mix of tools are we going to use? So it's the, you know, the basic ones, digital PR, I consider a tool, SEO, PPC, social media, email marketing, and your CRM usage, those kinds of things, content marketing, obviously.
00:11:37
Speaker
One of the things that a lot of marketers battle is what we would call shiny object syndrome. We see something, we get enchanted by it, we try it. Before long, we've got accounts with dozens of different services and there's an overlap between many of them. A lot of them we try once and we never use again. Then I think what happens is that
00:11:59
Speaker
We get away from using three or four core tools that deliver a lot of value because we're just checking stuff up and maybe not getting as much value from the tools that we have. So why do marketers suffer from shiny object syndrome? And how do you counter that? How do you get discipline and structure so that you can focus on the tools that matter? It's bizarre. We have analyzed this for years and I think it comes down to fear.
00:12:30
Speaker
at the upper levels, it's a fear of, oh, we're missing out. Everybody else is doing this thing. Our competitors are trying this thing. We should be doing the thing.
00:12:40
Speaker
It's all fear. But if your data, your tracking is hooked up and you are laser focused on your target markets, that fixes all of that fear.
Understanding Customer Needs in B2B Marketing
00:12:51
Speaker
You know, you can have the confidence to say, you know what? Our target market isn't ready for that. They're not using it. We are not going to spend our time going down that rabbit hole. This is really difficult, you know, down in the weeds because it's usually the higher ups.
00:13:05
Speaker
that are asking about the new thing. They heard about it at a networking event. No joke. I've had CEOs come into my office and say, Hey, my niece just graduated college. See, she said we absolutely have to be on Instagram. Right. It's like, no, no, our target market isn't there. But if you don't have it documented, you can't refer to it. So I wouldn't have power to tell them no.
00:13:30
Speaker
But when you have that target market, you can say, Hey, CEO, here's our target market. This is why that tool is not a good fit. Right. If you don't do what you're end up with marketing bloat. And when COVID hit, when the pandemic hit, the companies that were bloated kind of got screwed a bit because they don't know what to cut first. They know they have to cut budget.
00:13:55
Speaker
they're just bloated. So you got to get back to that lean team. Having in that target market, the vision, everything clear, it prevents that bloat from happening. I think one of the biggest issues that I run into is that companies guess when it comes to who their customers are. They build these buyer personas or these ideal customer profiles. And in some respects, they may be fictional because they haven't talked to their customers enough
00:14:21
Speaker
Or at all. Or at all for that matter. And one of the things I mentioned on LinkedIn recently was why are so many marketers talking about the value of knowing your customers? Is it Marketing 101 that they want everyone to know? Or is it maybe in some ways it's a subconscious admission that they're not doing the grunt work that they need to do to do better marketing?
00:14:46
Speaker
Yeah, it's amazing how many of our clients even haven't called customers recently just to check in. There is this hesitation and fear, and I'm not sure exactly where it comes from, but I mean, I've hesitated to get testimonials from people before, and it's ridiculous. Like, I know I'm awesome. You know you're awesome. So why do we hesitate? So there's ways around that to find meaningful ways to still add value to the customer and also get that feedback.
00:15:15
Speaker
It's just kind of tricky to navigate. Any best practices in terms of talking to customers? Because I see that a lot. What do you use? What do you advise your clients on when it comes to really connecting with customers and getting the feedback and the direction that you need?
00:15:31
Speaker
Yeah, it all comes down to that relationship building and I got to admit I am a huge introvert. So it is incredibly difficult for me, but what has worked is processing it. I have a very strict calendar and I make sure to, you know, ping my, my customers every couple months with no ask, just a, Hey, checking in. I saw you did ABC thought that was super cool. So when I go to ask for feedback, there's that relationship built. It is tough.
00:16:03
Speaker
The other thing I wanted to cover is, and this is an interesting conversation because in many interviews that I do, we're focused on things you should do right, best practices, and that's great. It does provide people with prescriptive and tangible guidance.
00:16:18
Speaker
The interesting thing about this conversation, it's almost the flip side, is that how to tell when things are going wrong or when things are going wrong. I guess one of the ways that we got connected is I downloaded an ebook from your website looking at the five common cracks and B2B marketing foundations and how to avoid them. Great ebook, very prescriptive. It's a little bit of
00:16:39
Speaker
clickbait because you see that you go, I got to read that obviously good marketing by a marketer. But let one of you look at some of these cracks. What are the cracks and as important, how do you identify them?
00:16:50
Speaker
thank you for referencing that ebook. It was super fun to write. It is probably the top five things that we have seen in working with over 120 companies over the last 10 years. And it's things you wouldn't consider that painful until it happens so often you start seeing morale tank in a marketing department, you see a lot of turnover. And sometimes it's difficult for a CMO or CEO to identify what is going on.
00:17:17
Speaker
in the marketing department because it's death by a thousand cuts. Right. So yeah, if you have, I don't know if you have the ebook handy because I'm trying to remember all the five cracks. Why don't you give me the highlights in terms of the cracks. What are some of the biggest cracks that marketers should be able to recognize and then go about fixing them?
Auditing & Halting Ineffective Strategies
00:17:35
Speaker
busy for business sakes is a huge one. It's your marketing team running around doing tactics and it's all at the last minute. So if anybody's listening to this and they are on the marketing team, kind of lower like junior or specialist for sure, you've heard it happen. Your boss will come in on a Friday afternoon at four o'clock and say, Hey, we have a board meeting on Monday. I need these stats.
00:18:02
Speaker
There is absolutely no reason for that with modern marketing. You know, when those meetings are coming up, you know what you need to present. So why are these last minute things all rushed? It's everyone just running around like chickens with their heads cut off scrambling and that's scattered tactics, right? There is no strategy. There's no team meeting every quarter where you all decide this is our focus for the quarter. It lends itself to another topic that
00:18:32
Speaker
came up when we were arranging this podcast is when and how to turn off marketing tactics. Because as marketers, we like to be busy. We like to be seen as doing stuff. And as important, our bosses, the CMO, the CEO, wants to see us doing stuff. Business means that we're getting stuff done. In theory, sometimes it's like you're spinning your wheels. You're doing marketing, but it's not going anywhere. How do you stop marketing tactics, especially when
00:19:02
Speaker
those tactics are seen as a key part of the marketing mix. Essentially what you're doing is you're, in some respects, admitting defeat, saying this isn't working, but it's hard to do. It really is hard, for example, to stop blogging because your blog doesn't generate any traffic. What are the steps to saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we got to stop doing this and do something different?
00:19:21
Speaker
On the emotional side, again, it does come back to that fear. There is a fear of just stopping social media. That is a big one and I pick on it a lot because a lot of B2B companies are just using it badly. They are using it as quote unquote free advertising where they're just spamming people with their calls to action and that's it. They're not actually engaging. So generally when I meet with clients, I'll ask, okay, how much time are you spending on social media? What is the cost of that thing?
00:19:51
Speaker
Once we get that established, which sometimes they don't know right away, great, how much is coming in? Are you getting leads? Are you getting traffic? Are you getting anything tangible from this effort? And I know there's ghost audiences, people are gonna see it. There's some awareness there, absolutely. But at the end of the day, if you're really not getting anything from it, shut it off. And it's so fun to watch, because I used to get more pushback when I would say, shut it off for a month.
00:20:19
Speaker
See if you lose anything. Most of the time, they lose nothing, because they weren't using it correctly to begin with. Company newsletters, another one. Why are you spending time on this? No one's opening this. Like, go look at your data. They hate to shut it off. I mean, the panic that goes over these founders' faces when I say no one wants to hear you gas on about yourself in the company newsletter, like knock it off.
00:20:46
Speaker
It's fear, but when I put some stats to it, bring it back to that target market, all of a sudden they're doing less. So they're using less of those tools. They're getting way more from it because they know which ones are giving them a higher return. So we're reallocating resources. So it's pretty magical once it happens, but you got to get over that fear.
00:21:07
Speaker
One of the things that I do when I have a new client, I do a marketing audit and it's very simplistic. It has nothing to do with data. It's more qualitative than anything else. And I'll ask them to list all their marketing activities and then score them from a scale of one to five. So be honest, they have to be honest in terms of how they're doing and they'll say, well, it's a four. Okay. So what's going on? What's going well, what's not going well. And when they look at it from a top level perspective, when they get a sense of the whole landscape,
00:21:37
Speaker
then it really is an eye opener many ways because i understand that they're doing lots of things and some of them are working some of them are but i think. What happens is that no one wants to be seen as doing something different used to be that you never made a mistake if you bought ibm then it said we never made a buy mistake if you bought microsoft but.
00:21:57
Speaker
What that lends itself is we're going to use LinkedIn. We're going to use a newsletter. We're going to use a blog. We're going to do a podcast. We're going to do webinars because every other B2B SaaS company is doing that. And to do something different to go against the grain is almost seen as making a mistake. And I think maybe that's the lesson for any marketers. You can carve out your own path that's unique to your brand and your customers. And that's OK. But to your point,
00:22:25
Speaker
It takes a lot of courage to do that. It does. And you brought up the toolbox earlier. What you're talking about is being that general contractor and saying, what tools are we going to use to accomplish this thing? But most of the time, no one even thinks about what are we trying to accomplish? They're more worried about, oh, we got to be on LinkedIn. We got to be on TikTok. We have to be
00:22:48
Speaker
doing emails and webinars and white papers, maybe not.
Future of B2B Marketing
00:22:52
Speaker
Like, it's OK. And there's different ways to get to that end. But people forget that an end exists. A year ago, when I had people on the podcast, I would ask them, so what's your take on the B2B SaaS landscape or the B2B landscape, given the fact that you're in the midst of a pandemic and we're locked down?
00:23:12
Speaker
Now conferences starting to happen. People are starting to get together and meet for lunch or coffee, the normal things that we're used to. I'm curious about your take on the B2B landscape. How do you see it different from what happened a year ago or a year and a half ago for that matter? Do you think we're just going to go back to what we did before or
00:23:38
Speaker
From what you're seeing, are companies going to do? I think they're going to do it differently. I think they're going to ask why a lot more. And I've seen my clients do it as conferences start to open back up. They're finally asking, wait, why are we going to this again? Are we only going because our competitor is going to be there? Are there other ways to invest in that trade show or conference without requiring us to send our sales team there?
00:24:04
Speaker
So they really are getting really lean and being really careful where they're putting their time and energy. And I think because they were forced to cut and forced to go lean, they're not going to go crazy on that marketing bloat. They're going to be a little more careful when they add new tools.
00:24:22
Speaker
One of the things that struck me this morning when I was doing some reading is that there's a marketer, a French marketer named Louis Grenier. And he was talking about conferences and the fact that most content, most programming at conferences is pretty at best okay. But what he loves is the connections and relationships. And I would love to see a conference
00:24:44
Speaker
that places a heavy emphasis on helping people meet with each other, connect with like-minded people, facilitating places where we can compare notes and establish new connections. And the content could be secondary. I really don't go to a conference for the content. Any thoughts about how that might happen, how you might want to meet other people at conferences? That would be amazing if someone pulls that off. It's really tough to sell that for whoever's in charge of the budget.
00:25:12
Speaker
Right. Cause you're, you're totally right. Conferences are all about the networking. I mean, when I used to go all the time, I would skip most of the sessions, no offense to any conference speakers, but I would have meetings during that time and build those relationships. Um, so you've got to have some sort of framework for that, but I agree. It's got to be about those relationship building. Thanks for all the great insight, Michelle.
Engagement & Contact Information
00:25:36
Speaker
Where can people learn more about you and the foundation's first marketing?
00:25:40
Speaker
You can go to foundationsfirstmarketing.com, download that ebook that Mark recommended. Definitely hit me up on LinkedIn as well. I love to nerd out about marketing strategy.
00:25:51
Speaker
Thanks for all your time and thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. To learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor and coach, send an email to mark at marketingspark.co or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you later.