Colleagues:
I love March Madness. As a former college athlete, I have always had a huge passion for sports, love to compete, and have felt that many of the attributes you develop in competitive sports carry over to being successful in business. Like many fans, I think this time of year is very exciting. The upsets, the competition, the fan support, the entire atmosphere is the best.
However, for many CMO's March Madness can mean something very different. It can mean that you started the year with less budget than you wanted, had to stretch your marketing staff resources tremendously, and are doing all you can to drive success. Sales teams are out there fighting hard and battling to close deals as well. But, what happens if the sales numbers are behind budgeted forecasts? What do you do? Hope for a Hail Mary shot at the buzzer before the Quarter ends?
As we all know, the question of "WHAT" is wrong, and "WHY" your company is behind plan is the major topic of management team meetings. The CEO wants to put the heat on the CMO and CSO---pushing harder for solutions. I've worked for a few CEO's (they will remain nameless) who loved to see Sales/Marketing execs squirm and fire bullets to see what happened. This is the time when true character and integrity shine or flaws come out and finger pointing begins. It gets worse as the year goes on and numbers don't catch up or meet expectations.
As a CMO what do you do here? Well, I suggest the best course of action always is not to panic or initiate a "knee-jerk" reaction to beginning the year with a slow start. However, I do think you should begin a careful validation process going through major checklist items to make sure you "have it right" in the strategic and tactical marketing efforts. For example, speak to your customers, prospects, sales teams, churned customers---fine tune your listening skills to all your key touch points. What can we do better? Why did you buy from our competitor? Why did you cancel service? What would make you buy from us now? Examine all your marketing metrics and KPI's, ROI's.
This fine tuning process is very important to uncover any "misses" or changes in the marketplace, your assumptions, or the dynamics going on that are affecting Sales. Keep an open and frequent dialogue going on with Sales leaders and make sure your analysis is fact-based. You need to study external and internal KPI's and facts---compare them to what you expected. For anything that seems off, you should perform some root cause analysis and drill into what is happening. You also need to make sure Sales is doing the right things, etc.
The key thing here is don't panic, don't get defensive, don't start shooting people, don't point fingers, don't over-react. But, turn up your hearing and listening, increase the depth of your analysis, and stay focused. Usually, the squirrels emerge from the holes and you can see where the problems are and initiate correction actions. Most of all, be proactive---take charge in a professional, factual, unemotional (I know--easy for me to say given my passion for things) fashion that is data-driven. Get the facts, develop corrective actions and manage the implementation. Stay on top of it each month until you see the positive outcomes.
Of course, if any of that doesn't work you can always polish your half-court shot and hope it goes in:):):) (or update your resume).....
Go Jayhawks!!!!
Greg
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