Working Smarter : Marketing

How Org Charts Will Help All Departments in Your Business

Rich — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:22:00 GMT

In most organizations, org charts are used for a single purpose – to give new employees a visual representation of the company’s hierarchy. Beyond that, most companies don’t utilize the power of org charts for much else.

Most companies view org charts for simply that purpose and that purpose only. But did you know that you can use org charts to improve virtually every area of your organization? Using org charts can lead to sales proposals closing more quickly, marketing initiatives producing augmented results, and the enhancement of the overall business intelligence and management of the company.

Here are three org chart tactics that will help you improve your organization’s productivity.

Using Org Charts in the Sales Department

Sales people are in a constant state of flux. Data turns to leads, leads to opportunities, opportunities to deals. Along the way sales teams and agents are collecting additional data to help close the sale. Although every prospect has different needs that the sales agent must attend to, the sales agent’s most important piece of information is to know who the decision makers are within the organization. An org chart is a simple way of tracking that information for better, smarter results.

During the sales qualification process any sales person involved should create and update an org chart for a visual representation of the customer’s organization in order to better understand who needs to be persuaded in order for the sale to actually go through. By building an org chart with this information on it the agent now becomes better equipped to find and contact the appropriate person for decision making and future return sales opportunities.

Org charts also have the added benefit of being able to help sales people rapidly communicate all of the information they’ve gathered during the communication process to each other should multiple sales people need to be involved. An org chart should be part of every client file you open.

For example, say you are a sales agent for a company that sells web analytics tools to track web traffic on websites. Your primary client relationships that you forge within various organizations would be the Marketing Director. But if the Marketing Director, Bill Jones, of one of your biggest clients named ABC Company leaves, will your relationship with the company remain intact? You may find that transitioning the client relationship to the next Marketing Director might be far less turbulent if you have an org chart of the entire marketing department and have developed relationships with some people on the team. In fact, one of those people may be the eventual person who assumes the role now left vacant (see below).

Using Org Charts in the Marketing Department

The marketing department of your organization should employ a similar tactic as the sales department using org charts to track the hierarchy and organizational structure of clients. Marketing departments are constantly challenged with communicating the benefits of the company’s products and services in order to create a pipeline of leads and opportunities for the sales department.

One of the ways to achieve this is to look for additional opportunities among your existing pool of clients. So, why not create a clear picture of your clients’ organizational structure by creating org charts to identify other cross-selling and undeveloped relationship opportunities?

Again, these client org charts provide terrific business intelligence to understanding your clients more thoroughly, how each one functions, what roles the individuals play, and, what opportunities have yet to be realized.

For example, say you are an intellectual property attorney at a large full service law firm and one of your clients is a new video game maker. Currently, as the attorney for the company you are the only one that serves their legal needs, but your firm marketing director creates an org chart (below) and together you realize that the company has grown in size in a short period of time and may have some employment and labor law needs like employee handbooks and policies that your firm could handle on their behalf. Because of the org chart, you now have a possible cross-selling opportunity to pitch and potentially have a larger scale client than previously though.

Click to see a larger version of this image.

Using Org Charts in Executive Management

As previously mentioned, org charts provide a unique source of business intelligence which is the crux of the decision making process for members of the executive management team in a company. While the sales and marketing teams are tracking prospects and clients with org charts, the executive management team can plan organizational change of the business with org charts.

This is expanded in greater detail in two previous Working Smarter articles entitled “Playing ‘What If?’ with Your Organization” and “What Do You Do When There Are Not Enough People to Get the Work Done”. The executive management team of a company benefits from knowing the hierarchical structure of the business and the functional relationship with each member. Org charts allow them to look into how lean the organization is or not, and how to plan for growth. Bloated departments may be trimmed, and other departments that may be under realized can be bulked up for the betterment of the organization.

In summary, if you begin using org charts for more than the hierarchy of your own company, your business will augment the overall intelligence regarding prospects, clients, competitors and strategic partners.

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Everyone in Your Organization Should Understand Marketing

Aaron Stannard — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 21:22:00 GMT

People tend to incorrectly equate marketing with advertising – and believe that marketing is just this thing that some slick cologne-splashed creative types do in order to get people to notice an organization and its products or services. Although I’m not big on cologne, the rest of the stereotype certainly includes a key facet of marketing, but marketing has a greater purpose that often goes unappreciated or unnoticed by most.

Marketing Defined

The primary function of marketing is to align every aspect of a company’s operations towards a common end (a value proposition) in mind – marketing is the glue that unites every person in the organization into a purposeful unit.

SmartDraw’s primary organizational goal, also known as its value proposition, is to make the task of communicating visually as easy and convenient as possible. That’s why our product development team spends so much time testing and improving the product’s user interface, why we have a well-trained in-house customer support team, and why our marketing communications team builds so many screencasts and eCourses to help explain the product and its concepts to users and non-users alike.

Our organization’s marketing aligns all of our operations towards achieving this common goal. Even though many people in our organization are not “marketers,” they are all an important part of the “marketing” of the organization.

If we didn’t have a good customer service unit to help augment the ease-of-use of SmartDraw, then our product would effectively be less usable, customers would stop giving us return business, and our bottom line would suffer as a result. It also would be much more difficult for us to achieve our goal of providing the world’s easiest and most complete visual communication software. Whether our customer service people know it or not, they too are marketers who help us achieve our goals and sell product.

Everyone Should Know Their Role

Everybody in your organization is a part of your organization’s marketing efforts, whether they know it or not. The trouble is that they should know it. If someone doesn’t understand how their work helps the organization achieve its value proposition, then they probably aren’t being as effective as they could be.

Everyone from the System Administrator to the Shipping Clerk needs to understand how their work helps the organization advance – they need to understand their organization’s value proposition and how their work fulfills it. If they don’t understand, then they are much more likely to make counter-productive decisions which ultimately hurt your organization’s ability to meet its goals.

When someone can’t see the forest from the trees, they’re much more likely to get lost. So here’s how you can help your co-workers find their way:

Ask “what is our organization’s ultimate goal?” If their answer is out-of-sync with what you perceive the goal to be, then find out why.
Ask “how does your work help us advance this goal?” If they aren’t sure, then come prepared with an answer for them.

It’s not rocket science – it’s just a reminder. Help your team understand how exactly their work impacts the bottom line and they will not only make less counter-productive choices, but they will also see and appreciate the value of their own work.

Update:

If you'd like to try SmartDraw, you can download a free trial of SmartDraw here.

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The Four Most Common Marketing Mistakes Every Manager Makes

Rich — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Mistakes result in lost business, time, and resources. Nobody is perfect, but it is everyone’s responsibility to minimize errors and make the best decisions possible.

Below are examples of routinely made poor decisions and big picture blunders that you can avoid as a manager, marketer, or business owner. How many of these do you routinely commit?

Failing to properly understand your market – Don’t think that because you have found success in one geographic region that the same plan will have the same or better results in other regions.

Take the time to understand your target market, how your product is positioned in that market, and how to properly communicate the benefits. Seems simple and logical enough, but even big companies make this mistake.

Legend has it that when a large American manufacturer of baby food first decided to introduce their brand in Africa, sales were sluggish. After looking into the matter, the company discovered that their trademark baby picture on the label was a hindrance because most products sold in Africa with pictures on the labels were used to communicate the contents of the package because of the low literacy rate. Whether legend or an enormous management mistake, it does serve as a reminder that not taking the time to understand who you are selling to can be disastrous.

Resisting change – Sometimes your routine and the your team’s routine need to change. In one of my previous posts, “In Bad Times, We Need to Get Back to Basics,” I describe this in greater detail, but the essential thing to keep in mind is that as a manager you constantly need to evaluate your processes and projects to determine if they are still viable. If not, and yet you continue to proceed with them, the results may not meet your expectations-.

You should keep your fingers on the pulse of your business so that if there is a shift in your market or industry, you can notice it, understand it, and make the proper adjustments.

Thinking “my product is so good it sells itself” – I think of that line from the movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it, he will come” when I hear a business owner or sales person say that their product sells itself. It’s great to be confident and proud of what you sell, but are you sure you want to hang your hat on your confidence alone? 80% of small businesses fail within the first year of opening and I bet that none of these failed owners would have opened the business in the first place had they known it would fail by year’s end. And what is the most common mistake these failed owners make? They don’t invest sufficient time into marketing their business.

Never documenting processes (or anything else) – Let’s face it we live in a “what have you done for me lately” business culture, and as a manager you have to keep up with the competition or your business can be in serious trouble. However, the need to document and communicate processes is vitally important to the survival and growth of your organization, yet it is routinely passed up for other matters.

Documenting processes gives you the ability to standardize procedures which will help you work more productively and efficiently and train new employees. If the processes are not documented, this becomes far more difficult to facilitate. For example, perhaps you hire a new employee to work as a staff copywriter and proofreader. To begin getting the person experience and up to speed with your companies processes, you task the person to proofread all of the copy developed from the staff writers. You share the flowchart below with the new employee to understand how the copywriting process proceeds and so that he knows what to do next when he receives material for his review.

Because you have taken the time to properly document the process, the employee now has a visual representation for him to reference when the task needs to be performed. By doing this, you will find that you will spend a lot less time explaining company and team processes, and the delegated tasks will be done the correct way each time cutting down mistakes. Also, new employees will get up to speed more quickly, and seasoned employees will remain focused.

Producing results, minimizing errors, and making informed decisions are the centralized responsibilities of any manager.

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Founding Members of the Working Smarter Network – Presentations

Aaron Stannard — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Today I’d like to introduce all of the presentation experts who are founding members of the Working Smarter Network:

The PowerPoint FAQ
By Steve Rindsberg

Questions about PowerPoint? Answers are here! You'll find PowerPoint Help, PowerPoint Templates, PowerPoint Tips, PowerPoint Add-ins, How-Tos, Links and much more at The PowerPoint FAQ.

Altman’s Better PowerPoint
By Rick Altman

Rick Altman (betterppt.com) has been hired by hundreds of companies, listened to by tens of thousands of professionals, and read by millions of people, all of whom seek better results with their presentation content and delivery. He covers the whole of the presentation community from message crafting, through slide design, and software technique, and his common-sense approach and pragmatic advice have resonated throughout the industry. All of that came about because he was not a good enough tennis player to make it onto the professional tour. All the rest of this has been his Plan B... Author of Why Most PowerPoint Presentations Suck and Host of the PowerPoint Live annual conference, Rick brings strategy and pragmatic, real-world advice to the PowerPoint community.

Indezine – PowerPoint & Presentations
By Geetesh Bajaj

Geetesh Bajaj, author of Cutting Edge PowerPoint for Dummies, has been designing PowerPoint presentations and templates for over a decade now, and heads Indezine, a presentation design studio. Indezine.com has hundreds of free PowerPoint templates, product reviews, personality interviews, a busy blog, a presentation bank, and other goodies for visitors to download.

The YouBlog - Presentations & Communication
By John Windsor

John combines a unique background in innovation, communications, sales and marketing. He’s a former Broadway actor and novelist with an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. An award-winning marketer and creator of the You-Me Framework™, John has held Vice President positions in Marketing, Sales, and Business Development. Fluent in one language, John has lived and worked in New York, L.A., London, Silicon Valley, and Colorado. Read John’s practical ideas on presentations, persuasion, selling and communications at The YouBlog.

Wilder Presentations
By Claudyne Wilder

Claudyne Wilder, author of Point, Click, Wow! - Techniques & Habits of Successful Presenters, is an acclaimed speaker and coach who trains executives, entrepreneurs and professionals on how to coherently and passionately present their messages and share their stories. You can’t judge a book by its cover, but people judge a business by its communications and formal presentations…WilderPresentations.com is filled with content to help improve those skills.

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Founding Members of the Working Smarter Network - Marketing

Aaron Stannard — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 23:18:00 GMT

Today I’d like to introduce all of the marketers who are founding members of the Working Smarter Network:

B2B Marketing Confidential
By Andy Hasselwander

Andy Hasselwander is VP of Analytics and Measurement for MarketBridge, a professional services firm focused exclusively on sales and marketing. As a ten year veteran of B2B marketing, Andy has worked with many Fortune 500 companies in the U.S., Europe, and Asia on a wide range of marketing problems. In B2B Marketing Confidential, Andy takes a scientific approach to B2B marketing, believing that it is possible to measure ROI even in large transaction sizes and long sales cycle businesses.

B2B Sales & Marketing Knowledge Sharing
By Scott Gillum

Scott Gillum leads the Emerging Vertical of MarketBridge, a professional services provider focused on the B2B Sales & Marketing segment. The world of B2B Sales and Marketing is constantly changing; the purpose of the B2B Sales & Marketing Knowledge Sharing blog is to allow sales and marketing professionals to exchange ideas, share best practices, and get answers to important questions.

Drew’s Marketing Minute
By Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan, a 20+ year agency veteran, gets branding and marketing and he wants you to get it too. So he tells stories, asks questions, and milks sacred cows… all to help clients discover their brand so they can create authentic love affairs with their customers. Drew wrote 99.3 Random Acts of Marketing and co-edited the new book Age of Conversation 2, sequel to the widely successful original. Readers can expect frank, pointed marketing and branding commentary, practical ideas, and ready to implement tips at Drew’sMarketingMinute.com.

Marketing Interactions
By Ardath Albee

Ardath Albee is an expert at creating contagious content and e-marketing strategies that engage prospects-from initial attention until they're sales ready. She has a unique ability to develop content strategies that work hand-in-glove with overall corporate and product positioning to deliver hard hitting e-marketing programs and tools that compel customers to buy. Ardath helps her clients generate more opportunities by optimizing how they leverage marketing automation and CRM technology investments. Visit her industry-leading blog to learn more: Marketing Interactions

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How Not to Make a Marketing Presentation

Aaron Stannard — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:23:00 GMT

Recently, one of my coworkers slid a handout from a marketing presentation he had attended across my desk and asked me what I thought of the material. This company was trying to sell us something that would increase our revenue, cut our costs, etc… the typical promises in every business-to-business pitch. This company was trying to sell us on some new advertising opportunities, specifically, and we receive at least a dozen proposals of this sort per week.

The marketing materials were very polished and it was clear that the salespeople from this company had done their homework on the nature of our business—well, most of their homework anyway. The pitch was very detailed; it told us exactly what we were paying for and outlined how we would potentially benefit from this company’s services. It was, in my book, one of the best-presented pitches I’ve ever seen. But it contained a handful of fatal errors that forced me and others to say “no thanks.”

Error #1: Make Your Customers Feel like Soviet Space Dogs

The first mistake this company made was not including any testimonials from other customers who tried this service and had a good experience. The proposal in this instance was extraordinarily expensive, and the company didn’t do much to assuage our concerns over the price tag by way of sharing the hopefully positive experiences of other customers.

No customer wants to feel like a guinea pig or a Soviet space dog. They want to know that other customers who’ve tried your product or service have achieved positive results and satisfaction. If you fail to provide that kind of reassurance over the course of your presentation, it leaves each potential customer feeling exposed. No amount of good presentation skills or masterfully-designed PowerPoint® slides will be able to overcome the lack of assurance left by not including any meaningful, specific testimonial information.

Error #2: Don’t Stand By Your Product

If a customer asks you “so, if we agree to spend all of this money on your product, what will you do if it doesn’t deliver everything that you’ve promised?” during the course of a marketing or sales presentation, you should probably avoid all of the following responses:

“We can’t guarantee that it will work, but we’re pretty sure that it will work!”
“Well, it may not work out the first time; you might actually have to use the service a couple of times before you get the results that you’re looking for. But we’re sure that we can deliver them eventually.”
“Well we won’t be able to refund your money, but we will be able to help you figure out how to use the service better down the road!”

The little handout I read made it clear that we had to pay for the service upfront and all of the risk was on us. When faced with a risky or expensive proposal, customers want to know that there’s a degree of shared risk between both the vendor and the buyer; it helps ease whatever concerns customers may have about purchasing your product, knowing they won’t absorb the full damage if the product or service doesn't pan out.

There are a number of ways to let customers get a taste of whether or not your product will work for them, and it’s an easier sell when you can offer them a guarantee or a trial of some kind. Telling your prospects to essentially roll the dice on you, however, is the last thing you should do—unless you’re presenting to tourists in Las Vegas.

Customers want to feel safe and confident when they commit to a purchase—especially large ones. And this company, despite their professional-looking slide deck and knowledge of how our company works, actually made us feel more uncomfortable about committing to a large advertising purchase. This is because they did nothing to mitigate our concerns about the risks. This presentation didn’t fail because of bad design aesthetics or because it looked unprofessional; the presentation failed because it lacked the critical substance of testimonials and risk-sharing opportunities. Presentation can’t mend the gaps created by lack of substance.

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Screencast: Refine Your Sales Process with SmartDraw

Paul — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In this screencast I show you how to refine your sales process using a Sales Funnel Chart, a chart designed to help you map out your sales process and discover where you might be losing a disproportionately large number of potential sales.

This SmartDraw screencast requires Adobe Flash Player 9.

Download a free trial of SmartDraw here.

Learn More

If you'd like to learn more about this topic then be sure to read our companion PDF - Working Smarter with Sales Funnel Charts.

Discover Your Ideal Customers Using Market Focus Diagrams

Aaron Stannard — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:00:00 GMT

Just before I began working for SmartDraw I worked as a consultant who specialized in building online marketing solutions.

One time when I began working with a new client I sat him down at our first meeting and asked him “who are your customers?” He told me “anyone who is willing to buy what I have to sell.” Immediately I concluded that this client would need a better definition of his target market if he had any interest in actually selling anything.

I wish I could have sent him our most recent Working Smarter article, “Working Smarter with Market Focus Diagrams.”

The premise of the article is that you can use market focus diagrams, more commonly referred to as Venn diagrams, to help you identify a specific target market within the context of larger, broader markets.

The market focus diagram is useful for quickly explaining who your target market is to members of your organization, investors, or potential partners. However, it’s really the process of creating the diagram which benefits small business owners and managers.

Venn Diagrams Aren’t Obvious, Contrary to Popular Belief

Venn diagrams are a simple concept but not an obvious one.

The first step to understanding the value of a Venn Diagram is understanding the significance of the sizes of the circles.

As you probably know a Venn diagram is meant to illustrate the commonalities between different groups. A market focus diagram is a specific application of a Venn diagram meant to show overlaps between different groups of customers.

In our SmartDraw example, we defined SmartDraw’s broad “target market” in our unique selling proposition as “Office Users.”

We start with the circle which represents all Microsoft Office users:

This circle is going to be largest given that it’s the broadest definition of our target market. Most of our potential customers will be contained inside this group.

The next group that we want to add into our market focus diagrams is “managers” – people who manage something, whether it’s people, projects, or operations.

Notice that while both groups mostly overlap, some managers fall outside the purview of “Microsoft Office Users.” This is something that we thought about when we were going through the process of determining SmartDraw’s target market: do all managers use Office?

Naturally, there are some who don’t and they are not our ideal customers because chances are that if they do not own Office then they will not be interested in SmartDraw either.

As the SmartDraw marketing team pondered our ideal target market some more, we determined that there was another important group of people who need our software: presenters. We defined presenters as “anyone who has to invest significant resources into preparing presentations on a regular basis.” So we added them to our market focus diagram:

There are more managers than there are presenters, thus the “presenters” group is smaller than the “managers” group. However, there are still a large number of managers who have to make formal presentations to their supervisors, investors, or customers, thus there is a decent amount of overlap between the two groups.

And this is our ideal target market – “managers who use Microsoft Office to prepare presentations.” The process of drawing a market focus diagram makes it easy to spell out a relatively specific target market like the one I just provided.

Learn More about Market Focus Diagrams

If you'd like to see how to draw a market focus diagram, please view our screencast "Find Your Target Market with SmartDraw."

Also, if you'd like to try SmartDraw, you can download a free trial of SmartDraw.

Positioning Products Across Multiple Markets

Aaron Stannard — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:57:00 GMT

Working Smarter reader Elhamy Kamel left an interesting comment on last Friday’s entry about being able to see your product through the eyes of your customers:

I do not know if the traditional positioning matrix can solve today's confusing markets, statements like think global and act local sounds like someone wants to be everything to everyone.

With the advent of globalization, organizations are blurring their traditional boundaries, to fit into a business model "I am everything to everyone."

Do you have a positioning matrix that can handle these new confusing market positioning?

Elhamy raises a good point – when it comes to businesses who offer multiple products in different regional markets one positioning matrix simply cannot account for all of the factors that differentiate all of the competitors in those markets.

If your company competes in multiple markets and if those markets all have different competitors then you are going to need positioning matrices for each market. If the competition changes then the positioning matrices must change.

Rather than try to use one large positioning matrix to factor in all of the complexities that come with competing in multiple international markets I recommend creating positioning matrices for each product that your company offers.

An Example: Procter & Gamble’s Laundry Detergent Lines

A good example of a complex, multi-product/multi-market offering is Procter and Gamble’s laundry detergent line. Here are all of the laundry detergent brands offered by P&G:

Cheer™
Tide™
Dreft™
Gain™

These four brand names are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to P&G’s detergents; each brand contains several products. I’m not going to list all of them, but let’s just say that P&G’s offers a large variety of laundry detergent products.

Example: Procter & Gamble in American Laundry Detergent Markets

Let’s take a look at how P&G might position its own brands against each other in a single American detergent market. A good market to observe might be middle class homeowners with children over the age of six years old. Let’s suppose that there are two major factors that divide up this market for laundry detergents:

The color of the fabrics that the detergents treat: colored fabrics or white fabrics; and
The impact of the detergent’s cleansing ability – do homeowners want something that does a good job removing stains and odors while producing fabric that feels soft and fresh or do they want something that is really tough on stains and dirt at the expense of being hard on the fabric?

Here’s what a positioning matrix for some of P&G’s detergent products might look like:

P&G’s detergents with bleach are used to treat white fabrics whereas Cheer (P&G’s specialty detergent for colors) and Gain without bleach are more suitable for regular, colored fabrics. Gain is P&G’s detergent designed to add freshness and bounce to the fabrics, whereas Tide and Cheer are designed to be more potent cleansers thus they are harder on the fabrics.

But how would this positioning matrix change for American middle-class homeowners with children under the age of six?

The competitive picture of this market is totally different because the factors that influence consumer purchasing decisions are different – when consumers have young children they want their children’s clothes to be especially soft and free from chemical odors (perfumes.) This is why P&G has built a special detergent, Dreft™, specifically for this purpose.

So what does the competition look like for detergent for families with young children? Here’s what it might look like:

The competitive landscape for laundry detergent for American homeowners with children under six is obviously different from the competitive landscape for homeowners with older children due to the different consumer influence factors. Different factors, different competitors, different markets, and thus we must have different positioning matrices.

The Lesson Here

What this shows you is that it’s vitally important to accurately define your target market before you attempt to determine your company’s and your product’s positioning within a given market. In a sense, you do have to think globally and act locally, simply because there factors that influence consumer behavior and the competitors change at the local level.

Positioning matrices are a great tool for clarifying market position, but different competitors require you to draw different positioning matrices for those markets.

Positioning for broad, confusing markets is difficult simply because there are too many factors to represent on a single matrix – a better practice is to create new positioning matrices when the competition is different in any market that your company has entered.