Pragmatic Marketing: Effective Product Marketing Rule #2

This is the first in a series of posts on Pragmatic Marketing’s Effective Product Marketing Rules.

Effective Product Marketing Rule #2: Never Confuse Efforts with Results.

Forget product marketing, I can think of few rules that are so applicable across the boards in business, or even in life.

Here’s my life story: Last October, I fractured my arm in several places, right beneath the shoulder. Within one weak of breaking my arm, I started Physical Therapy in the hospital where I had gone to the ER post-fall. This is my neighborhood hospital. The place where my doctors are affiliated. And - lucky me - one of the foremost hospitals in the world. I had also used their PT services quite successfully years before when I developed severe sciatica.

In any case, I started PT in the hospital setting but, after a couple of weeks, I didn’t feel that I was making all that much progress. Yes, I was coming each week. Yes, I was doing all the exercises as instructed. Morning, noon, and night, in fact. Yes, I kept telling the therapist that I wanted to be as aggressive as possible, that I wasn’t afraid of a lot of effort or a little pain. Yet on the final visit of my twelve visit referral - after I’d already decided to take my next referral elsewhere - I sat there while the therapist told me that, in her opinion, I would need surgery if I were to recover any further range of motion, beyond the limited results I’d already received.

All that effort. Such little by way of results.

For the last four weeks, I’ve been seeing a kick-butt sports physical therapist, where I spend two-hours at a time doing things that, for a sedentary couch-potato whose principal exercise is blogging, can only be considered unnatural acts. All this lifting, pushing, pulling, and heaving ends with a stretching session that is so painful I now believe I understand what people went through when being tortured on the rack.

But guess what: all this effort is tied to results, and I can now do things I couldn’t do a few weeks ago. And I’m on my way to pretty near full recovery.

Those first twelve weeks, I was certainly putting in plenty of effort, religiously going to my sessions, relentlessly following their instruction. Part of my brain was questioning all this effort, but part of it was accepting that this must be it.

As a marketer, I’ve also had times when I’ve fallen in the trap of confusion efforts with results.

Hey, look, we went to 3 trade shows, ran a direct mail program, announced a new product. Here are all the leads. Here’s all the coverage. Here are all the web hits. Look at me! All that effort. All those results.

But are leads, site-hits, and coverage really "results"?

Well, yes, they are results of a sort. But they’re not the sort of results you’re really after with your marketing programs. You want qualified leads and you want sales.

Now you can spend altogether too much time obsessing about metrics, trying to connect marketing dots to revenue when the connections are tortuous and thin at best. This can be especially true in complex, long-drawn out enterprise technology sales. But if you don’t want to end up looking back at a lot of effort (blood, sweat, tears, and budget) that seemed to have gone for naught, it’s essential that you be able to point to "real" results. (I.e., the sort of result that a reasonable person might actually consider a result.)

How to get and stay connected to "real" results?

First off, establish up front - with sales - just what constitutes a qualified lead. Get the quibbling over with ahead of time, and you’ll better be able to demonstrate that you’re doing a good job.

Next, stay connected to the sales process. Marketing doesn’t end when the qualified, unqualified, or disqualified lead comes in the door. You need to be able to monitor the progress of that lead, and support sales with the right tools and programs to move the lead along as it proceeds towards a sale.

No, marketing is unlikely to ever be able to claim full credit for that sale. But how much more effective it is to be able to point to the places along the way where marketing made a touch during a successful sales process, than to just wave a sheaf of unqualified leads. The effort, in fact, may have been identical in terms of hours and dollars spent. But which effort do you think will be (justifiably) more rewarded?

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