Plagued by the Disease | Your Marketing Isn't for You

Marketers, I’m going to offend you today. But hang with me, because the end result will be worth it.

Today I’m discussing how we’ve forgotten about our customer and started making content just to satisfy ourselves and the approval chain.

How did you get here? Where did that idealistic creative marketer go? Why are we so worried about office politics and approval chains...instead of creating amazing content?

Is there a way to recover?

Plagued by the Disease | Your Marketing Isn’t for You

We are all suffering from The Disease.

The Disease is the inability to see your organization from the outside. You can’t see your organization from your customer's point of view. 

Every organization eventually succumbs to the power of The Disease. We lose track of our purpose. We forget who we’re serving. We just start thinking about ourselves and our own internal interests. 

We keep using terms like “customer centricity”...but we’re really just serving ourselves. Instead of providing value to our customer, the organization exists simply to serve itself.

What does that mean for marketing departments?

You start creating content to please internal team members...not your customers.

Slaves of Sales | Marketing Can’t Serve Both Sales and Customers

Just as an example, I worked in an organization where the marketing department turned into the “product development team for sales.” We pulled all-nighters just to deliver the products to them.

Is this normal? Is this part of corporate life?

Now, don’t get me wrong here. Do you need a robust reservoir of sales enablement tools?  Absolutely. 

Should you have the basic sales enablement tools that your sales team needs?  Well, obviously.

But make that platform quickly and then let marketing do its job. 

Now answer this question: Why does sales have it’s thumb on marketing? Why can’t marketing break out of this?

Here’s what I think:  Marketing forgets it’s a revenue driver for business. 

When all you’re doing is serving the sales team, your attention has completely fallen off your customer. You’re insulated. Instead of thinking “will this resonate with our customer?” you’re thinking “I hope the VP of sales approves this.”

Am I right?

So what do most people do? Entrench themselves politically within the organization and figure out how to get things through the approval process quickly. Your survival depends on how well you navigate the political ladder, not how well you know the customer.

Quick aside here: Don’t get me wrong. I believe sales and marketing should work together. Salespeople posses valuable knowledge about customers that marketing needs. But marketing’s ultimate goal isn’t to serve every need of the sales team and make them happy. It’s to drive revenue by always thinking of the customer and how to delight them.

Designed for the Approval Chain | We Forget Customers and Serve Ourselves

Let’s dig a little deeper. What’s the real problem with becoming product development for sales?

Anything sales asks for is a messaging tool. It’s designed to transmit a message from us to the customer. How can marketing create effective content...if they don’t know the customer? How will it resonate if all you rely on is what the sales team tells you? Now you’re risking all your creative decisions based on what sales tell you - not what you’ve figured out yourself.

I love salespeople. Energetic. Friendly.  Keeping the revenue flowing. But what they aren’t great at is “being creative.” That’s not their job. 

You chose marketing because you’re creative.  But your creativity isn't valuable unless it's designed to achieve specific goals. And one of those goals is ensuring your content resonates with your customer.

What value is your brand story if its sole purpose is to make the VP of sales happy?

What value is your sales enablement content if its sole purpose is to make your CEO happy?

The whole reason you needed this content in the first place was to get a response from the customer. 

Oftentimes, people ask for content to drive more revenue. Which means you need to inspire your customer to purchase. Suppose you create a video to drive interest in a product. As you’re making that content, you gradually forget about the customer and start making something that satisfies the highest people on the chain. You need their approval, right?  And you’re hoping they’re thinking about the customer’s perspective. 

But are they?

Everyone’s goal becomes this: Make the next person on the hierarchy approval chain happy. Get the project through the approval process. So you design the project to suit the tastes of that person...instead of the customer. 

If this sounds like you...then you have The Disease. You’re just creating content for your organization. Your videos become videos for the organization. Your copy becomes copy for the organization. Your website becomes a website for the organization. It never becomes what you intended it to become, which is a message designed specifically for your customer.

Story is the Remedy | Walk a Mile in Your Customer’s Shoes

That’s tough to listen to, right? As challenging as that was, I certainly wouldn’t go there unless I had a remedy for The Disease. Storytelling is the treatment. 

Because the problem to solve is this: How do you start to see your business from your customer’s perspective again?

Stories are a tool for empathy. Stories are how we experience life. It's how we walk within someone else’s shoes.

Stories are how we live and experience life through another person's perspective. 

Stories are how we relate to one another. 

If you're having a conversation with someone and you ask them how their week was, they’ll tell you the emotional result of their week - either it was great or bad. Then you ask them why. What you get in return is a story to help shape your understanding of why. And that story takes you through their journey. It allows you to empathize with them and understand why they feel that way.

As they tell their story, you’re transported into their narrative. You experience their point of view. From narrative transportation, you're actually able to experience the emotions that they experience. 

That’s why when we watch films, we all cry or get angry at the same time. That emotional engineering is intentional. It’s a result of storytelling.

I’m sure storytelling for business isn’t new to you, but what good is our customer’s story if we’re still keeping ourselves at the center? How do we remove ourselves from that position? How do we becomes students of our customer?

Copywriters talk about this all the time. You have to study their language. 

We have to become an anthropologist of our customer and challenge ourselves to be truly customer-centric. We have to actually make them the hero of the story -- not this lowly character who needs our help. 

Bringing it Home | Treating the Disease Through Character and Story

A story is a communication tool.  Great communicators understand the message has to be designed specifically for the audience. How can you do that? You must understand your audience.

That requires using business and marketing as a daily humility practice to shape our own character. Without intervention, we will naturally be self-focused and want to serve ourselves. We’ll succumb to The Disease. We’ll become focused on self-preservation, political alliances, and basically act like a contestant on Survivor. 

We’ll keep using our phrases like “customer-centric” and “authenticity” but we know we’re lying. We’re just spreading the cancer in our organization. 

And although no one challenges the lie...the customer feels it.

Inauthenticity always reveals itself. 

How can you win them back?

Become a student of your customer. Sell your C-suite on this understanding and bring everyone back to the core of business: Service. 

You will feel great about serving your customer from a place of true authenticity and they’ll be happy to do business with an organization that understands and respects them. 

Understand their story and how you fit into it. Walk a mile in their shoes. What are their problems? How can you help? Echo back with their story with the language they need to hear.