Crucial 12

Steve Wolgemuth

Description

Get Marketing Traction with Twelve Questions. Why do some organizations get brilliant results from their marketing and others don't? Is it the people or agencies they engage or some secret marketing techniques they use? This book provides an unexpected answer to those universal questions: Better leaders get better marketing results. Are you that leader, and will your organization grow from great marketing under your direction? It can! Your success is just a few chapters away. This book will give you a unique, structured approach that even leaders without marketing savvy can employ, one couched in a powerful communication style by asking 12 crucial questions. Transform your leadership impact, identify your organization's weaknesses, uncover game-changing marketing opportunities and insights, and bring accountability and growth to your organization year-over-year.

Sujets

• Marketing et communication
• Advertising

Informations

• Publié par: Bookpress Publishing
• Date de parution: 16 mars 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781947305052
• Langue: English

Extrait

STEVE WOLGEMUTH
   www.BookpressPublishing.com
Copyright © 2020 by Steven R. Wolgemuth. All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without prior written permission of the publisher. Requests to the publisher for permission or information should be submitted via email at [e-mail] .
Any requests or questions for the author should be submitted to him directly at [e-mail] .
Published in Des Moines, Iowa, by:
Bookpress Publishing P.O. Box 71532 Des Moines, IA 50325 www.BookpressPublishing.com
First Edition
Before this dedication is dismissed by the reader as just another sappy tribute, I’d like to point out the hundreds of days my team has covered for me at work while I was out of the office, writing this book. I’d like to mention the countless days, over this two-year journey, my beautiful wife patiently entertained herself for days at a time, as I sat alone and wrote this during what normal couples would have called, “vacations.” There’s also that extra help I required of my incredibly helpful writing coach, Anthony Paustian, who had no idea what he was taking on when he offered to work with me. These selfless supporting acts flowed naturally from the admirable characters of these people, and I’m blessed beyond measure to have them in my life .
CONTENTS
Why?
The epidemic of bad leadership
QUESTION 1 What’s our high-level strategy?
QUESTION 2 How are we different?
QUESTION 3 What do our customers experience?
QUESTION 4 What’s our marketing problem?
QUESTION 5 What’s the thing that sells the thing?
QUESTION 6 How will people hear about us?
QUESTION 7 How do we assemble the right team?
QUESTION 8 How can we bring out the best in our marketing teams?
QUESTION 9 How much should we spend?
QUESTION 10 How will we track progress?
QUESTION 11 What are we learning?
QUESTION 12 Where do we start?
Final thoughts Marketing leadership matters
Why?
Why does marketing succeed under some leaders but not others? Most would assume it has to do with how much money is spent or the talent level of the marketing professionals involved. Certainly, these may be factors, but after running an agency for more than a decade and consulting with hundreds of leaders, I came to another conclusion. A leader’s behavior affects marketing outcomes . This nugget of insight is part of what compelled me to write this book.
There is no shortage of books on leadership, but if I search for books specifically about how to lead marketing, the results are disappointing. Instead, I find books that attempt to teach leaders to be marketing experts. I’ve read many of these books, and while most are brilliant, they’re written for scrappy entrepreneur types, marketers, and leaders who are keenly interested in marketing.
The problem is most business leaders don’t share that interest, and they don’t have the time, education, or core competency to become marketing experts. To make matters worse, marketing has never been more complicated. Competitive forces and fast-changing technology platforms have made marketing success a daunting responsibility. It’s no wonder business leaders, especially small business leaders managing many different concerns, don’t have the needed clarity about how to invest their marketing resources effectively. Frankly, most would prefer not to have the responsibility because it’s simply not their thing. Expecting them to become marketing experts is not the solution.
Most leaders don’t want to become marketers. And they shouldn’t. Nor should they feel guilty about their lack of passion in this crucial aspect of business management. But in the end, they may have to live with the outcomes of poor marketing: lost opportunities, competitors moving ahead, and wasted marketing dollars. Ignoring marketing isn’t the answer.
Then what is the solution for leaders today? I’m convinced they must learn to lead marketing efforts from a high level. Marketing leadership is the art and science of directing, managing, and even inspiring great work from marketing employees, subcontractors, and agencies . Leaders must learn how to play that role.
I wrote The Crucial 12 as a guide for business leaders who want to develop their marketing leadership skills. In it, readers will discover and unpack the essential questions they must ask, questions that will create focus around key areas, inform decisions, and direct marketing strategies.
I make no apologies in saying The Crucial 12 is not a marketing book, and marketing experts who read it might be disappointed. It is a leadership book that outlines a vital thought paradigm that even non-marketers can use to direct their marketing stakeholders and inspire them to do their best work.
Years ago, I was asked to serve on the board of directors for a private college. I felt the other members were of higher social or financial standing than I was, so I felt humbled by this appointment and somewhat inadequate. When I asked the college president how I could bring the most value to the school, his answer was immediate and brilliant. “Ask good questions,” he advised. He knew I had that capability, and that would make me the most valuable to his leadership team.
You will bring more value to your team of marketers as you improve your ability to ask good questions. If you ask the right questions, you’ll draw focus to the right issues. This book is organized to help you do just that.
By the time you finish this book, you will have a framework for how to think about marketing at a higher strategic level and tools for identifying priorities, holding everyone accountable, and developing a culture rooted in marketing improvement. Armed with these questions, you will recognize the significant role you must play to facilitate positive marketing outcomes and how to draw out the best from the talented marketers on your team.
The Epidemic of Bad Leadership
Peter’s Story
Peter was the CEO of a pool and spa company with five locations and 45 full-time employees. He was naturally energetic, a competent leader, and loved coming to work every day, until recently.
Sales were down. They had been on a downward trend for the last two years. Up to this point, he could ignore the sales slump, dismissing it as “a slow season that will rebound.” But lately, his inner voice was telling him, “This isn’t going to turn around on its own.” Peter’s company was losing market share to competitors, and he knew he could no longer ignore it.
Frankly, Peter didn’t know what to do. Nothing he had tried had worked. He had done an exemplary job at identifying all the outside factors that had led to this: more competitors offering cheaper products, and the economic downturn he believed might have been hurting pool sales in general. But he felt powerless to fix it.
Peter was waking up at night, thinking about how he might have to lay off some employees in the coming months. How would he be able to face their families? If he didn’t turn this around, it could have unthinkable long-term effects for the employees who had worked for the company their entire lives. The stakes were high. Peter needed to get to the bottom of why his marketing wasn’t working.
He had hired, and subsequently fired, three marketing companies in three years. Each of them had used up significant marketing budgets, but none of them had helped increase sales. Over that same time period, Peter had gone through two different marketing directors internally. Even after 18 months, neither one of them had been able to increase sales numbers or even keep pace with the growth of their competition. To this point, Peter had done a good enough job comforting his employees, family, and colleagues as to why sales were down. He had convinced everyone but himself that this was a normal and temporary decline in sales. But Peter knew his competitors were gaining market share, and he couldn’t figure out why. It was wearing on him.
Peter was finding it increasingly difficult to be excited about going to work, a new emotion to him. It was disorienting, and it was starting to affect his confidence and his ability to concentrate.
Why was this happening? Peter ran a tight ship. Their financials were in order, and he knew how every dollar moved through his organization. Operations were stellar. Peter loved the pool and spa business and knew it better than anyone.
And Peter loved challenges—a difficult customer, a negotiation with a manufacturer, deciding which hot tubs to stock the coming year, hiring and firing—he was a master with those issues. It gave him the energy to tackle challenges that would cripple most leaders.
The fact was, he felt much more comfortable solving more exacting issues, like cash and inventory management, than tackling the complicated issues of marketing and business development. Like many leaders today, Peter felt insecure when working on marketing-related tasks for his businesses, and the internet made his insecurity even worse. He wasn’t as tech-savvy as he wanted to be. Peter blamed the business down-turn on his “bad hiring decisions,” but inside, Peter felt responsible. When it came to marketing in today’s world, Peter felt inadequate.
Adding to the stress, he knew the success or failure of his business’s marketing would have a huge impact on his family, not to mention the families of his 45 team members. If he didn’t get this business going again, how could he ever look at himself in the mirror?
Most Leaders Prefer Operations Over Marketing
Like Peter, many business leaders sometimes feel they have the weight of the world on their shoulders. That’s especially true when things aren’t going well. And since marketing is not an exact science, many operations-minded leaders find it frustrating. Lik