Transcript

In this episode, Jason and Jeff talk about some of the useless activities marketing should not be doing in professional services firms. The topic for this episode is based on Jeff’s blog post and infographic.

For the sake of time, Jason puts the 20 things on the list into four buckets and encourages listeners visit Jeff’s website and download the infographic to reference while listening.

Bucket 1—Low value admin stuff, which includes things like the following:

– Making your presentation pretty
– Managing an office picnic or an HR event
– Getting client tickets
– Holiday cards

Bucket 2—A collection of one off, nonstrategic activities

These are things that marketing gets asked to do all the time, and on the surface it seems perfectly fine. Except that there’s no tie to a broader business strategy.

– Do another brand study
– Sponsor a charity event
– Brainstorm about a one off marketing program
– Brand a new product with one client project
– A one-time ad or brochure

“What drives you nuts about those one off things? Why are they ridiculous?”

“There’s so much noise in the market and doing one offs make partners feel good that they’re doing something, but they simply have no ROI. They suck off people resources, financial resources, time resources. Oftentimes I think they confuse the market more than educate it. If a partner is really, really fired up about doing something, we’ll turn it from a one off into a multidimensional campaign of some kind. But I always try to take it another step to give it more legs. And that’s to tie it back to firm-wide themes and positioning.”

Bucket 3—Activities you should own

– Posting to your personal social media account
– Update or clean up your CRM data
– Make your presentation pretty

“Why are these flawed things to ask of the marketing team?”

“I would refer to [social media] as social selling, is about engagement, interaction, being attune to what’s going on there. Not just posting to either a company profile or a personal profile. So to me it just shows a complete misunderstanding of the channel and what it takes to be successful. And it falls into that one off again because it’s going to take a lot of resources, but it’s not going to produce much ROI. If you were going to do social, then you have to jump in social on your own and educate yourself and make a commitment to doing it.”

“If you’re managing relationships, then your CRM data should be impeccable. You should have the sales discipline to manage contact information and where people are in their careers and what they’re doing and what their roles and responsibilities are. A lot of information, company records and stuff like that can be automated. But the contact information that really adds value is the personal notes, the tasks, the followups, things associated with it. And having emails in there for example, it’s just absolutely critical for your own personal communication. And if a partner’s so inept that they can’t manage email contacts, and they have to delegate that to marketing who has no or a very limited relationship, again, it’s a waste of time and it’s an abdication of real relationship building responsibility.”

“Sure, marketing can clean [your presentation] up, maintain brands and bring graphics that tell complex stories quickly and easily to life. But if you’re just dumping your speaker notes into a presentation and hoping marketing is going to make that better, it’s just a ridiculous waste of time. Partners should be investing the time and being incredibly effective at delivering presentations. Whether that’s an introductory meetings or proposals or client update meetings. And they probably shouldn’t even be using PowerPoint hardly at all anyway. But those are things that they should just own as part of relationship and effective selling in my mind.”

Bucket 4—Stuff that could be worth doing, but needs a change of focus

– Build your personal brand
– Pursuing growth for your firm or practice without a coherent, realistic business strategy

“I would argue both of those things are just really interesting things that clearly marketing should be helping you do. But the lens in which they’re presented here is wrong.”

“I wrote a piece a while ago on mismanaging personal brands and the basis of the piece was that there are two types of firms. There’s team firms and group firms. Oftentimes I find people that are obsessed with personal brands…are often narcissistic, self-serving in managing a fiefdom for their own gain. And they’re not concerned about the broader firm. Team firms are primarily concerned about the overarching brand of their firm, and their personal brand is a contribution to building up the firm’s brand.”

“If somebody comes in and says to me, “I want to elevate the visibility of my thinking around such and such a subject,” and the reason they want to do that is to drive growth and serve clients and contribute to the firm. And that visibility around that expertise reinforces the firm, I have no trouble doing that. And it goes back to the earlier conversation about what’s one off and what’s really integrated into smarter, strategic investments in growing the firm? So to me, personal brand is just a red flag term for something can have really negative repercussions and suck life away from the firm’s brand if it’s not managed properly.”

“Your job as the marketing lead for the firm is not to build up the reputation of an individual, it’s to build up the elective expertise of the firm and its point of view and its reputation in the marketplace.”

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Transcript

Jason Mlicki: Hey Jeff, how are you doing?

Jeff McKay: Good morning. I’m wonderful.

Jason Mlicki: Is it negative 50?

Jeff McKay: No, it is beautiful 12 degrees and sunny.

Jason Mlicki: So the tracks aren’t on fire on the L?

Jeff McKay: No.

Jason Mlicki: Okay, so what I want to talk about today is about something you wrote, which you so elegantly titled, “Stupid Shenanigans Marketing Should Not Do.”

Jeff McKay: That’s what I named it.

Jason Mlicki: Well you didn’t actually name it that. You named it something kind of like that. There was a swear word in there, but since we’re trying to keep a PG rating here. Tell us actually why named it what you did, S-H something else. And maybe why you wrote it. Maybe actually that’s the better question really.

Jeff McKay: I think I had a bad day.

Jason Mlicki: The train tracks were on fire and …

Jeff McKay: So I think this was 20 plus years of frustration. Actually there was a catalyst.

Jason Mlicki: Okay.

Jeff McKay: I had met with a CMO. And the CMO was starting a new role. And she outlined what she was planning to do in her first 90 days. And then from there, and as she detailed it, I was just like, no, don’t. No, don’t. No, no.

Jason Mlicki: Don’t do any of these things.

Jeff McKay: Don’t do any of that crap. So it inspired me to write a blog post on it. And the things in the blog post weren’t everything that she described, but they were a lot of things that marketing just should not be doing because it wastes time and there’s no ROI. And then I turned it into an infographic and it is the most popular infographic I have on my website. Marketers look at it, they laugh, they get it, they print it out. They put it up in their cubicle. And it’s a great conversation starter. And it gives a nomenclature for partners and marketers to have a dialogue. Why shouldn’t you do that? So that’s why I created it. I should probably change the name, but people laugh.

Jason Mlicki: No, I don’t think you should change the name at all. I love it by the way. I hadn’t read it in a while. In fact when we decided to talk about this today, I sort of dug it back out because I hadn’t read it in a while. And yeah, I enjoy it. And what I enjoy about it is that you wrote from the heart and you wrote from a moment of frustration along those lines. And my sense is that there’s a lot of marketers that have these moments as well when … I can honestly say we haven’t done this is in a long time but we have designed holiday cards for clients. And I mean complex, interactive experiences, personalized, multidimensional, these crazy amounts of resources put at this. And we haven’t done that in at least eight or 10 years.
But that’s on your list, that’s why I obviously bring it up. But yeah, just incredible waste of resources. Months of time devoted to this eight second experience that’s really meaningless to a client, of no value. And in fact it actually pushed me so far, we don’t even send holiday cards anymore. We don’t even do it. We don’t even buy them. We don’t even send them. We don’t even do it. I just said, we’re not doing that at all.

Jeff McKay: Good for you.

Jason Mlicki: I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Maybe it’s just rude.

Jeff McKay: Well did any of your clients ask where your Christmas card was?

Jason Mlicki: No. And I can’t say we’ve seen any significant change in client relationships. Oh my God, we didn’t get a holiday card from Rattleback. Oh my God, we shouldn’t hire them anymore. So since there’s 20 things on this list and this podcast is supposed to be a 20 to 22 minute podcast, I took the liberty of grouping these into buckets. And what I’d like to do is just rattle off some of the stuff that I would argue is fairly obvious. And then get into some of the stuff that’s a little more nuanced. So I’ve got four buckets. I’ll share maybe my bucket one. And obviously I would encourage listeners to go to Jeff’s website and download the infographic because the infographic has all 20 so you can reference it while you’re listening. I put a group of the first stuff, which I call low value admin stuff.

Which is stuff I lumped in that sort of this idea of making your presentation pretty, managing an office picnic or an HR event. Getting client tickets, holiday cards since we just talked about it. And that stuff to me is just sort of obvious. It’s like why is marketing even being asked to do these things in the first place? I would be inclined to sort of set those aside and say, well let’s not even talk about those. My group two I have as you poignantly mark off a collection of one off, nonstrategic activities. These are things that marketing gets asked to do all the time, and on the surface it seems perfectly fine. Except that there’s no tie to a broader business strategy. And I’ll rattle these six off and maybe we can spend a few minutes talking about them.

But you have I think you said do another brand study, sponsor a charity event, brainstorm about a one off marketing program, you actually use the phrase one off. Brand a new product with one client project, so you’ve got one data point and now you’re going to brand a whole new product around it. A one-time ad and then I lumped in there producing a brochure. So let’s talk about those for a few minutes. Let’s talk about why those one off activities are just bad ideas. And we can probably pick any one of them as an example and dig into it. What drives you nuts about those, those one off things? Why are they ridiculous?

Jeff McKay: There’s so much noise in the market and doing one offs make partners feel good that they’re doing something, but they simply have no ROI.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah.

Jeff McKay: And they suck off people resources, financial resources, time resources. Oftentimes I think they confuse the market more than educate it. So I just never allow one off anything. And if a partner is really, really fired up about doing something, we’ll turn it from a one off into a multidimensional campaign of some kind. But I always try to take it another step to give it more legs. And that’s to tie it back to firm-wide themes and positioning. And you have to begin with the end in mind to some degree around those. You have to have a vision that allows you to tie it back up easily. You can’t make this stuff up as it’s going.

But if you have a framework for the broader positioning, it’s a lot easier to fit this stuff in. But you have to be thinking that way instead of just saying, yeah we’ll do that for you like an order taker would.

Jason Mlicki: For clarity, when we say a one off program, are we saying that it’s a single channel tactic? Maybe they want to do a … You could lump email blast in here as well. You have send an email blast.

Jeff McKay: Yeah.

Jason Mlicki: Are you saying it’s tactically speaking they’re only trying to go through one channel? Or are you saying they’re trying to do maybe in a little more … Maybe they’ve got an idea for a piece of thought leadership they want to produce that just doesn’t really roll up to the broader firm positioning and so it’s sort of an outlier. What do we mean by a one off? Which of those two scenarios?

Jeff McKay: Yeah, it could be either of those. But I think what you normally see in firms is hey, let’s have an event. Let’s do a seminar, let’s do a webinar on this event because I need some quick leads because my pipeline’s dried up.

Jason Mlicki: Okay.

Jeff McKay: So let’s just do this event and we’ll see what happens.

Jason Mlicki: Okay.

Jeff McKay: Well I can tell you what’s going to happen. We’re not going to get any leads. We’re going to waste a lot of resources. I think the one offs in partner’s mind think that they think that one offs break through the noise and actually produce results. And they just don’t. It’s the exception that does. In order to be effective at driving leads and building pipeline, you just have to keep pounding and pounding and pounding and pounding. And one offs just do not do that.

Jason Mlicki: It’s a great point in the sense that we all have this belief that we’ve got this big idea, or we’ve got this big research study. Or we’ve got this big thing that we want to release to the market place and it’s going to be this just watershed moment where we hit the market and it just explodes. And usually it’s a big missed opportunity because you’ve got to keep putting more different activities around that idea, around that research or whatever it is and let the marketplace over time, the clients you want to reach I like to say form a fuzzy perception of what it is that you’re trying to say and be known for. And when they actually do raise their hand and start the conversation, usually you’re shocked at how little they’ve really internalized of whatever it is you want them to understand.

What’s that statistic they say? I think CEO’s need to repeat themselves 15 times, seven times, some statistic like that internally to get their teams to understand what they’re trying to say. So the marketplace is worse than that, right?

Jeff McKay: Yes.

Jason Mlicki: All right, so I have a third bucket that actually only has one thing in it. So I guess it’s not really a bucket. But I just sort of call it activities you should own. And what is in it is just you have this notion of posting to your social media accounts. Your personal social media account. Let’s talk about that because that’s an interesting one. Why is that a flawed thing for a partner to ask of the marketing team?

Jeff McKay: I would group a couple of things into this category that partners should own. Social media, I would refer to it as social selling, is about engagement, interaction, being attune to what’s going on there. Not just posting to either a company profile or a personal profile. So to me it just shows a complete misunderstanding of the channel and what it takes to be successful. And it falls into that one off again because it’s going to take a lot of resources, but it’s not going to produce much ROI. If you were going to do social, then you have to jump in social on your own and educate yourself and make a commitment to doing it.

Jason Mlicki: So really, they should be looking to the marketing function for guidance on how to do that, not to do the activities for them.

Jeff McKay: Yeah. And the same I would hold for the update or clean up your CRM data. If you’re managing relationships, then your CRM data should be impeccable. You should have the sales discipline to manage contact information and where people are in their careers and what they’re doing and what their roles and responsibilities are. A lot of information, company records and stuff like that can be automated. But the contact information that really adds value is the personal notes, the tasks, the followups, things associated with it. And having emails in there for example, it’s just absolutely critical for your own personal communication. And if a partner’s so inept that they can’t manage email contacts, and they have to delegate that to marketing who has no or a very limited relationship, again, it’s a waste of time and it’s an abdication of real relationship building responsibility.

I would throw make your presentation pretty into that. And something you should own as a partner. Sure, marketing can clean it up, maintain brands and bring graphics that tell complex stories quickly and easily to life. But if you’re just dumping your speaker notes into a presentation and hoping marketing is going to make that better, it’s just a ridiculous waste of time. Partners should be investing the time and being incredibly effective at delivering presentations. Whether that’s an introductory meetings or proposals or client update meetings. And they probably shouldn’t even be using PowerPoint hardly at all anyway. But those are things that they should just own as part of relationship and effective selling in my mind.

Jason Mlicki: Well it’s interesting to me in what you just said is that the … Man, I think about all the conversations I’ve had with partners and business development managers and anybody that has any selling responsibility in most firms, and it is the extreme minority that apply process and rigor to their CRM data. I carried that flag for a little while. I tried to convince the marketplace and alliance that this was an important thing. And most of them just ignored me. And even pretty successful sales consultants I know ignored me. And I finally just decided well, that’s not my battle to fight. So I’m going to move on. But it shocks me because as someone that sits at the apex of marketing and business development in our business, I don’t know how you function successfully without that type of discipline.

Jeff McKay: I don’t think you do. Your ability to command and manage … No, those are not the right words.

Jason Mlicki: Guide, I think it’s about guiding.

Jeff McKay: Yeah. Facilitating, guiding a productive conversation that uncovers issues and needs and makes people self-disclose and feel good and build relationship with you while speaking with authority, but humbly. That takes a lot of practice. And it doesn’t come through when you’re just sliding through 80 slides that all are formatted with the same fonts and colors. It just doesn’t work that way.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah.

Jeff McKay: So I would say 90% of partners tend to send the presentation to marketing. Make it pretty, and that’s where their thought is instead of how they’re going to facilitate and guide people in a dialogue, not get through each of these slides in the amount of time allotted.

Jason Mlicki: Thinking back, this is a long time ago. I hired a researcher to help us do some brand research actually kind of funny. In your list of things not to do. To do a brand study for one of our clients. This was boy, 15 years ago. And I remember she brings back this deck, it’s like 68 slides long. And I looked at it, I was like, this is just not going to fly. Going to a CEO of this company and you’re going to present him 56 slides of data? He’s going to tune out and lose all interest. And she’s like, oh I do this all the time, don’t worry about it. I will move through it quickly.

Jeff McKay: I do it all the time.

Jason Mlicki: I’m like, okay. I kind of let her fail because I knew this was going to fail. She was a seasoned researcher, came from a highly respected firm. And she goes in, delivers all these, her 74 slides or whatever the number was. Gets to end and the CEO looks her square in the face, he’s like, well that was a lot of data, but where’s the insight? And just laid it out there. And of course I was fully prepared. I had my notes. I said, here’s what I think the four insights are Phil. And he looked at me and he said, thank you. And so then we left and of course I never hired her again. I’m like, this is the biggest waste of resources I’ve ever seen.

I could’ve done a better brand study by walking around to their offices and just talking to people. But anyway, I digress. I also think your presentation comment is interesting in the sense just of I also remember an instance where I had a client speak at an event. And I went to the event and afterwards I politely said, hey you did a really nice job. I said, did you rehearse this? And he said, well no, I’m just a natural speaker. I just go up and deliver. And of course I was really just sort of being kind because he really didn’t do a very good job.

But I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. And to me, the biggest complement … At our event this last fall, I gave my talk and a guy came up to me and said, Jason that was an unbelievable talk. And he’s like, and it was your pacing that was incredible. He’s like, the amount of information you put into this talk and brought to light for us, yet you moved at a pace that was perfect. It was never too fast, it was never too slow. It’s like you had this thing so well paced for people to internalize what you were saying, it was unbelievable. And that to me is the biggest complement I could get as a speaker because I’m not emotional. So I’m not going to be the guy to get you all gung ho and fired up or whatever.

But for someone to say that you get the pacing right, and to me that just comes with practice. You have to really work at it. You have to really think through what you want to say. And you can’t like you said, take your speaker notes on an outline and hand them over to some marketing guy to ram into a PowerPoint. And ideally like you said, you’re speaking without a deck at all.

All right let’s get to the last group before we run out of time. And the last group is stuff that I kind of argue could be worth doing, but just needs a little bit of a change of focus. And I’ll pick out a few in here that you put in here that you sort of personally you specifically set up for this reason. Let’s just pick out one that I particularly like.

Actually I like, there’s two I like the most and I’ll pick these out. There’s one where you said build your personal brand. And one that says pursuing growth for your firm or practice without a coherent, realistic business strategy. I like both of those as examples of what I’m saying only in the sense that I would argue both of those things are just really interesting things that clearly marketing should be helping you do. But the lens in which they’re presented here is wrong. And I would totally agree with you. So yes, to me let’s dive on the personal brand side because I actually think that that is absolutely something that you should be turning to marketing for assistance on in the right way. But tell me what’s wrong with it. I guess maybe tell me what’s flawed with that ask?

Jeff McKay: How about if you explain your vent on it first? And then I’ll explain because how we define personal brands may be different.

Jason Mlicki: May be different. Yeah, no that’s a good point.

Jeff McKay: So go ahead and jump in.

Jason Mlicki: Okay, so how many times have you been told in your life that a professional services firm is a highly personal business? Meaning that people hire from people they like and all that kind of person to person interactions that are the foundation of buying and selling. So and yet, and how frequently do you find firms where the people, the people that actually are the experts or the subject matter experts are almost pushed behind the scenes a little bit? They’re not really enabled to really step up and have a voice in a compelling way. So my frame of reference on this is that yes, I understand the risks associated with elevating a subject matter expert into a place of visibility for the firm. But I still think it’s a critical thing and it’s something that firms should do.

If they’re looking for marketing to help raise their visibility, be it through giving them advice on how to build their reputation inside of LinkedIn or raise their visibility through identifying speaking opportunities, those types of things, because they’ve got a compelling point of view and they’re looking for marketing to help shape and define that point of view, that is all positive stuff and stuff that marketing should selectively be doing. They can’t do that for every person I’m sure. But they should absolutely be doing that in my experience.

Jeff McKay: Can’t disagree with any of that. So let me nuance it as I often do.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah.

Jeff McKay: I wrote a piece a while ago on mismanaging personal brands and the basis of the piece was that there are two types of firms. There’s team firms and group firms. And this builds on some of Patrick Lencioni’s thinking about dysfunctional teams. Oftentimes I find people that are obsessed with personal brands and we went through this phrase where people talked about my personal brand.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah.

Jeff McKay: I find are often narcissistic, self-serving in managing a fiefdom for their own gain. And they’re not concerned about the broader firm. Team firms are primarily concerned about the overarching brand of their firm, and their personal brand is a contribution to building up the firm’s brand. And they don’t actively manage a personal brand. Instead, they live with integrity. They act as leaders. They build trust. They are developing and sharing expertise with everyone around them, whether that is technical expertise, business expertise or just personal, spiritual experience and expertise. It’s not something that has to be thought about and managed as a brand. It’s who they are. And it’s contribution is to something bigger than themselves. So when I have somebody come to me and say, I want to build my personal brand, it’s a red flag for me.

It could be a good thing, it could not be a good thing. If somebody comes in and says to me the way you just described that, I want to elevate the visibility of my thinking around such and such a subject, and the reason they want to do that is to drive growth and serve clients and contribute to the firm. And that visibility around that expertise reinforces the firm, I have no trouble doing that. And it goes back to the earlier conversation about what’s one off and what’s really integrated into smarter, strategic investments in growing the firm? So to me, personal brand is just a red flag term for something can have really negative repercussions and suck life away from the firm’s brand if it’s not managed properly.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah, I love the nuance you brought to that because that’s the essence of these seven or eight remaining things on the list to me. Where if you have the right lens on it, it’s a perfectly good thing for marketing to be doing. But the way you’re framed, I agree 100%. Is it’s bad. If someone comes to you like you said, you should be sort of delicately pushing them away because your job as the marketer, marketing lead for the firm is not to build up the reputation of an individual, it’s to build up the elective expertise of the firm and its point of view and its reputation in the marketplace.

Now of course that consists of people. And so at times you’re raising their visibility as well and that to me is perfectly fine.

Jeff McKay: Yeah, and that brings us full circle I think to number 19, send out holiday cards.

Jason Mlicki: Okay.

Jeff McKay: And the way it is represented. There’s nothing wrong with sending out holiday cards.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah.

Jeff McKay: But how do you do it? Do you just create this holiday card and put the firm name on it and then run off a bunch of mailing labels at a mailing house and just zip it out? Or do you just set it up so people can come into a room and sign it as a team member? To me those are wastes of time, but if a consultant wants to send out Christmas cards to his 20 top clients, then sit down, hand write a note in the Christmas card or holiday card, whatever you’re going to call it and say, hey, I really enjoyed last year. I hope your wife’s name and your kid’s name and your dog and your annual trip to the Bahamas goes well and you have a great Christmas. And you actually connect with them personally and demonstrate that you understand who they are as a human being in a hand written note, do that.

That is phenomenal because nobody’s doing that. That would be a good way to send out holiday cards. And to me that reinforces all of that other stuff about you should own that because it’s relationship-driven and it’s building your reputation and trust with a client or a potential client. So your point about yes, everything on this list could be good to do, but it has to be done in the right way with the right ROI and desired outcomes measures.

Jason Mlicki: I honestly can’t imagine a better place to stop this podcast having you brought it full circle. I will say this, to any clients I have that are listening, I’m going to now give you a personal apology for not sending any holiday cards because now you made me feel like the biggest heel in the world for the things I should be doing that I will be doing. So I promise, this is a promise I will make to people that I do business with that I really value and appreciate. And I will do my best to send a personal note to them for the holiday season next year. Because you’re right, that’s exactly what should be happening.

Jeff McKay: I look forward to getting my card, Jason.

Jason Mlicki: Oh I wouldn’t send one to you, but … I’m just teasing. But no….

Jeff McKay: All right, see you buddy.

Jason Mlicki: All right man, thanks for your time.

Jeff McKay: Bye.