The Forgotten Sales Team

Often, as companies try to pump up their sales volume, they forget to turn toward one of the most valuable and cost effective sales tools they have, their employees. By making sure your staff is engaged and interested in the company's operations and goals, you activate a powerful tool in your sales tool belt. There are a couple of reasons that this helps your sales efforts.

First, an engaged and motivated workforce tends to do a better job. They care more about the job they are doing because they better understand their role in the overall success of the organization. This always translates into fewer mistakes and more delighted customers. That translates into positive word of mouth, the holy grail of marketing.

Second, a staff that knows and understands the companies goals, can articulate those when they engage with others. When a customer or a prospect hears about the benefits of a product or services line from everyone she interacts with, and not just the sales manager, she is much more likely to accept the message and act on it.

So engage your entire workforce to get the most out of your sales efforts!

Devil's Night

I spent some time as a child living in the suburbs of Detroit.  I have many great memories of the Detroit area, including the Tiger's winning the World Series, Hudson's Department Store, the Henry Ford Museum, and Lake St. Clair.

But one of the most enduring memories that stuck in my pre-teen mind was the tradition of Devil's Night.

Devil's Night took place every year on October 30th, the day before Halloween.  It was a night in which you were supposed to egg people's houses, TP their trees, and commit other acts of minor vandalism.  At least that's what it was limited to in my neighborhood in the late 60s and early 70s when I lived there.

Devil's Night took on a more sinister and destructive nature in the late 70s and 80s and the closer you got to the city of Detroit.  Halloween day was typically filled with conversations about whose house got TPd or egged, not about costumes and candy.

I bring up Devil's Night not to revel in adolescent memories (I never did much TPing) but to make a comment about unofficial lines of communication.

Devil's Night is not an official holiday.  There were no posters or ads announcing specials on toilet paper just in time for your Devil's Night party.  In fact, as you would expect, Devil's Night was actively discouraged by just about anyone and everyone: police, schools, municipalities, merchants, and parents.  Yet I still learned about it and quickly knew what "the rules" were for our neighborhood.  There were certain houses you didn't hit because the owners were too nice or too mean or some one's grandma.  It was OK to TP some one's tree or throw eggs against their garage but only the delinquents egged cars (because it could permanently discolor the paint).

Toilet Paper TP - Tee Pee a House IMG_7642 (Photo credit: stevendepolo)

My point is that the informal communications network provided me with the information I needed to participate in this Detroit ritual, if I chose.  In your organization, do not assume that there aren't unofficial lines of communications that are probably more efficient at disseminating information than your formal methods.

Also, like the authorities in the Detroit area learned, you really can't control informal lines of communications.  The best you can realistically hope to do is to tap into them and to add to the conversation.  To pursuade.

My dad took that approach with Devil's Night.  Knowing that there was likely huge peer pressure to participate.  He understood that as a 10 or 11 year-old boy, I was dying to participate in this neighborhood ritual.  While he didn't condone it, he didn't forbid it either.  He had one simple rule.  You cleaned up the mess that you made.  If I was going to TP a neighbor's house on the 30th, I would be cleaning it up on the 31st.  The thought of this humilation was enough to dissuade me from being too active on Devil's Night.

Acknowledge and work with the informal lines of communications in your organization and perhaps you can avoid a mess.

Related articles

• 'Step Brothers' Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly to Reteam on Comedy 'Devil's Night'
• Angels Patrolling Detroit

Working Alone?

"It is far better to be alone than to be in bad company."
 George Washington

"Solitude is certainly a fine thing; but there is pleasure in having someone who can answer, from time to time, that it is a fine thing."                                                     Balzac

Whether because of personal preference, economics or other circumstances, more and more of us find ourselves working in one-person marketing and PR offices.  While there are aspects of this that are positive (no one messes with the messes on your desk, you don't have to play departmental politics and you know EVERYTHING that's going on in the department...becasue you ARE the department) there is one decided disadvantage.  You have to do all the work.

There are many keys to surviving work in a one person marketing office.  These include

• Setting and sticking with goals and plans
• Learn to say "no" to additional work
• Take care of your physical work space and the physical YOU
• Give yourself breaks, especially from anything with a screen!
• If you are working from home, establish an "office" space and "office" hours

The most import tip for surviving working alone is to not do it.  Most of the successful people I know in one person marketing/PR offices are really one person in name only.  These people successfully co-opt others into their marketing/communications/PR world.  They recruit interns, find and nurture quality vendor relationships, and involve others in the organization in communications and public relations and outreach.

By making public relations and communications an organization-wide priority, a saavy marketer in a one person office can essentially have the entire organization working for him.  By making sure that marketing and communications principals and values are part of the management principals and values, an on-her-toes communicator can involve the entire management team with her "to do" list.

Ultimately, since marketing and public relations involve communicating with others, you need to involve others.  Done well, the communciations is a conversation, one in which the marketer from the one-person office doesn't have to do all the talking!  

I Recognize the Value of Recognition

Yesterday, I wrote a blog titled The Fallacy of Awards. In it I questioned the value of awards like the ADDYs or the Academy Awards.  I questioned the value of awards that (often) stray from the primary mission of the activity (increasing sales or selling movie tickets.)  My comments should NOT, however, be taken as casting of aspersions on the value of recognition.

Recognition can be a powerful tool.  Most lists of top things employees are looking for from a good workplace will include "appreciation," "respect" and "recognition" near or at the top, well ahead of good pay.  Customers respond to recognition the same way.  I went to a certain dry cleaner for years because the woman who worked the counter always remembered my name and phone number and, if she was with me, that my daughter liked Tootsie Rolls.  After she retired, I became a number.  I had to give them all of my information every week.  Shortly after that, I found a new, cheaper dry cleaner.

But recognition only works when it is genuine and sincere and when it provides true value to the targeted person.  My kids could not have cared less about the participation trophies they got in Pee Wee soccer because the didn't do anything extraordinary to earn it.  On the other hand, I have stayed with Netflix, despite being upset by their pricing and listing fiascoes, because their recommendation tool already has thousands of my movie reviews loaded into it and does often make inspired recommendations.  They recognize my tastes in movies and create value out of that recognition.

Awards are great, if they recognize and encourage actions and behaviors that support the mission and purpose of the organization.  Often, however, the recognition of a simple "thank you" and "good job" delivered honestly, directly and in a timely manner can be just as effective or more so.

An Inside Job: The Importance of Internal Marketing

A friend of mine recently spent a lot of time and money developing a very good marketing campaign. He was very excited about the project and had seemingly done everything by the numbers.  He even tested the campaign before launching it, scoring very well with the test audience.

A few weeks after the launch he was dismayed.  The beautiful (and expensive) campaign had not yielded the results he had hoped.  Sales hadn't really increased.  Testing showed that even his reputation and similar scores weren't changing.

It wasn't until a customer cornered him and told him about the negative things that she had heard an employee saying about the company that my friend realized that he HAD NOT done everything by the numbers.  He had forgotten to market to his internal customers.  While he was sending out positive, marketing-focused messages out the front door, his staff (or at least some of them) were sending out negative complaint-focused messages out the back.  Any marketing who has been working in this field for 30 minutes can tell you that negative word-of-mouth trumps positive word-of-mouth almost every time.

My friend tinkered with his campaign to make it appropriate for his internal audience and shared it with his staff.  Slowly but surely, as his staff understood and bought into his campaign, sales started to improve.

In my blog It's All About Relationships, I talk about the value of developing good relationships with your customers.  The same holds true with your employees.  You not only have to treat them well as a "boss," but you need to keep them informed and up-to-date as potential spokespeople.  An informed employee is an extension of your marketing efforts.  A misinformed or uninformed employee is the worst enemy to your marketing efforts, often unintentionally.

Readers, please share any stories or tips you have on marketing to the internal audience!  Thanks!