The Art of War Metaphor

The first time I heard about Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, I was 18 and watching the video for the Oliver Stone film Wall Street at my girlfriend’s house. In the film, Michael Douglas plays Gordon Gecko, a Wall Street raider instructing his protégé Bud Fox, played by Charlie Sheen.

Early in the story, Gecko paraphrases The Art of War, “I don’t throw darts at a board. I bet on sure things. Read Sun Tzu, The Art of War. Every battle is won before it is ever fought.”

Later in the film, Bud demonstrates he is catching on by paraphrasing Sun-Tzu back to Gecko, “If your enemy is superior, evade him. If angry, irritate him. If equally matched, fight, and if not, split and reevaluate.”

Those lines stuck with me. But at 18, I wasn’t about to read a book on Chinese philosophy. I was more interested in the things the movie showed me success could buy, like a cell phone the size of a loaf of bread that allowed Gecko to call Bud from the beach and deliver the line, “money never sleeps, pal.”

Ten years later, I was working the phones selling commodities in Denver and my sales manager and mentor, quoted Sun Tzu. That was it, I went out and bought the book.

Why is this ancient text so "sticky" in business today? The Art of War is an instruction manual, each of its 13 chapters are independent lesson. The title is a memorable and elegant paradox. The word "art" evokes sophistication and beauty. The word "war" evokes brutality. Yet somehow these conflicting ideas complement each other in this context.

My CEO uses war metaphors all the time. When I first met him, he talked about our core product as the “sharpest point of our spear.” He defines our growth strategy as “land and expand” where we first have to establish a “beachhead.” New tools for our business become “arrows in our quiver.”

I am attracted to the war metaphor in business. I'm inspired me to work harder and longer on a project if I think of myself as being “in the trenches” shoulder to shoulder with my “brothers in arms” fighting for something great.

Business may be like war, in that success depends upon a great strategy, tactical execution and camaraderie but fortunately, it’s not life or death. As much as war metaphors stir and inspire me to action, I do occasionally remind myself that people at war are fighting for their lives. I’m fighting for a paycheck.

Hello, I love you: CRM and Advertising

Seth Godin wrote that marketing is like dating. It’s a sensible analogy; the trust building, making a good impression, each side giving and taking. I’m not sure how I feel about extending it to closing the deal. You can use your imagination there.

If marketing is like dating, then advertising is the first time you say hello. It matters what you’re wearing, what you say and how your breath smells. A first impression is a lasting one.

We know CRM helps convert prospects into customers and keep those customers but the question is, can CRM help make them love us at first sight? If you’re synchronizing your advertising to your CRM process, the answer is yes. Just keep these four requirements in mind:

-Market an advertising asset
-Place it in the right media
-Allow prospects to access it after filling out a form
-Follow up

Cover your Assets
Godin also wrote that if you want to build trust, you should give away something of value. This free offer can be a product or service but it can also be a bit of knowledge. Since we’ve moved from the information age into the information overload age, I like concise, entertaining documents covering a specific area of business.

To develop a new advertising asset, the first thing I do is interview the people who talk to our prospects and customers every day. I find out what kinds of information our prospects are asking for and what research they’ve done before they found us. Then, I collect and organize what I can find on that topic and condense it into a consumable document.

The advertising asset needs to be many things. It needs to entice the prospect into an initial engagement, make them want more, and be an honest representation of who you are and what you do. Even if they aren’t buying what you are selling today, if you build and maintain a reputation for giving away good stuff, you’re going to get a lot of dates.

Looking for love in all the right places
I stay close to our business development and sales groups. After all, I’m filling the top of their funnel and I don’t want to give them garbage. I’m kind of a matchmaker. I want to make both our prospects and our salespeople happy with the union.

Nobody wants to go trolling the bars just before closing time. That’s why I never rent or buy mailing lists. I look for leads where the highest quality prospects are likely to be, which is usually in communities where experts are engaging in conversations about our industry and the media is covering it. Buying and selling requires a commitment and investment from both sides, so improve your odds by focusing on attracting quality. Go where the odds are good, not where the goods are odd.

Can I call you sometime?
You’ve got the perfect assets in the right locations, now what?

Prospects who do research on-line understand there will be a form they’ll need to fill out in order to download a premium asset. The length of your form should depend on the minimum amount of information you need that can’t be automated. You’ll need a name and contact information of course, and maybe the size of the business. You can also include other questions but I wouldn’t make them mandatory fields.

When they hit submit, send them the asset immediately. This is where the right CRM tools and processes come in. The lead should be routed to the appropriate person on your biz dev team. Your routing rules can be built around geography or subject matter.

Smooth Operator
Besides the basics like contact information, it’s nice to know which asset the prospect downloaded and from where. This will help your biz dev team start the follow up conversation. You ought to be able to set up your campaign URL so it tells your CRM tool which asset and media it represents. The URL should also include the date of the advertisement.

Timing the follow-up call is critical. There should be a mechanism for your biz dev team to prioritize their in-bound leads. Like getting a phone number at a party, you don’t want to call as soon as you get home, but you don’t want to wait a week either.

From Click to Contact
We’ve known for a while that the right CRM application is critical to turning prospects into customers and customers into repeat business and advocates but it’s also imperative that your CRM is tuned into your advertising which, after all, is feeding the top of your sales funnel.

Turn a click into a connection and you’ll have customer chemistry.

Born to Brand and Manage Demand

I was born a brand guy. In the 1970s, I distressed my father with how much TV I watched. What he didn’t understand was that I wasn’t just watching Chips, BJ and The Bear, Gilligan’s Island and The Dukes of Hazard. I was also watching the commercials. I loved them.

To me, a good commercial is better than a half hour show. To be able to tell a humorous story in less than thirty seconds and at the same time convince someone to buy something appealed to my budding sense of both storytelling and capitalism.

In college, I studied PR, but during a summer internship at an ad agency, fell in love with writing commercials. After graduation, I worked for an agency in Cincinnati writing TV spots and running focus groups. Then I moved to the west coast. It seemed to me that the best creative in the early to mid nineties was coming out of Seattle. But instead of getting back into agency work, I happened into a position with a start-up wakeboard manufacturer and became their customer service manager.

It was natural for me to use my marketing and PR experience to handle service issues. Converting complaints into sales opportunities was my specialty and it got me noticed. One year in, I was asked to manage our international sales efforts.

PR to Advertising then Service to Sales may sound all over the place but the transition from one to the other seems natural to me. I view these disciplines as more connected than not.

I spent the next ten years in sales and became an advocate of the technology and processes around Customer Relationship Management (CRM.) Some of my peers thought that being a successful salesman meant having a winning personality and being able to dodge or counter objections. My opinion is that what really matters is understanding customer needs, following up when you say you're going to, and tracking your progress.

Today, I’m doing advertising again and thanks to digital media, my ads are lead generation focused. There is a direct and measurable correlation between my ad work and the top of the sales funnel. For the past five years I've done demand generation for RightNow, a cloud based CRM software provider. Here, all of the brand disciplines I’ve learned have intersected.

I think that Service, Sales, Advertising, PR, CRM, Customer Experience Management and Lead Generation can all be considered what I call Demand Management, so that’s what this blog is about.