Cutting back on marketing? Read this first | The Melting Pot Newsletter | Issue #106
HOW TO GROW YOUR BUSINESS WITH POWERFUL MARKETING METRICS
Thinking of cutting back on marketing? You won’t be alone. In July this year, Marketing Week reported a record decline in budgets, dwarfing previous recessions. But before you start slashing your budget, consider this. Is your lack of faith in marketing driven by poor planning? Do you have the right metrics in place to properly track the effectiveness of your expenditure?
It’s pretty frustrating. I sit down with clients who have big, bold aspirations for growth. We start digging into their data. After a while, we discover they’re spending money on marketing but to no end. Because there’s no coherent plan. It’s like they’re shooting in the dark. There’s no idea of what’s working and little comprehension of where to focus. It’s not surprising they’re disillusioned. Quite often, they have no tangible sense of what they want to achieve. Let alone the investment that’s needed to do this.
A while back, I blogged about the sales velocity equation. For me, this neat little formula is all you need to transform your sales operation. Well – here’s another for marketing with similarly magical properties. CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) and LTV (Lifetime Value). Never heard of them? That’s the usual reaction I get. Well, read and learn! Every business should track them. These metrics will transform your understanding of the value of marketing. They may even persuade you to increase your budget.
How To Change Your Company Culture with Siobhán McHale
If your company culture could do with an overhaul, then who better to impart advice on this very topic than the culture transformer guru with a track record of making workplaces better, Siobhán McHale?
“We’ve got to move beyond the framing of culture purely in employee experience terms. It’s about how to create more agile, innovative, and commercial cultures that can be sustainable over time.”
Siobhán has worked across 4 continents helping thousands of leaders create more agile and productive workplaces. One such example of her work in action was the radical 7 year change initiative at Australia and New Zealand Bank Ltd (ANZ).
In her time with ANZ she transformed the bank from being the lowest performing bank in the country into one of the highest performing and most admired banks in the world – a recognised paragon of customer service.
This work forms the backbone of her book The Insider’s Guide To Culture Change which she talks about in this episode. She also discusses her four step approach to driving culture and what needs to happen inside an organisation to make that happen, how to test for EQ when recruiting and how to hire for customer-centricity. One thing that is apparent during this conversation with Siobhán is that she is adamant that culture is in service of strategy and that it follows on from strategy. Culture isn’t about staff engagement. It’s about where your business is trying to go and what culture does your business need to put in place to enable its strategy to be successful?
A truly insightful conversation, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
Recommended Podcasts
Standing Ovation, hosted by keynote speaker and emcee Jay Baer is where the very best public speakers reveal the secrets behind their greatest successes.
Recommended Articles
YOUR ORGANIZATION IS GRIEVING—HERE’S HOW YOU CAN HELP
Look around and you’ll see grief everywhere—that stew of loss, longing, and other emotions we experience when something we value and feel connection to is gone. During the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone has suffered losses—for some, it’s the loss of loved ones; for others, the loss of routines and the familiar, the missed family gatherings or coffee with friends, the cancelled vacations and postponed weddings, even the loss of going into the office every day. The sources of loss, big and small, are radiating across our work and personal lives.
DON’T JUST LEAD YOUR PEOPLE THROUGH TRAUMA. HELP THEM GROW.
The last several months have stacked painful experiences on top of each other: a global pandemic, economic collapse, and new reminders of perennial racial injustice and police violence. This July, rates of depression and anxiety in the U.S. were more than triple those of early 2019. The simple question, “How are you?” has turned into an emotional minefield.
HOW TO SUSTAIN YOUR ORGANIZATION’S CULTURE WHEN EVERYONE IS REMOTE
Within just a few weeks earlier this year, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a massive shift to remote work that may change the office as we know it forever. Many large companies are urging employees to work from home for months to come, and some CFOs are making plans to shed office real estate and permanently move some portion of their workforces to remote working.
Recommended Reads
THE LEADER YOU WANT TO BE BY AMY JEN SU
Do you find yourself wishing you had more hours in the day? Do you want to do more, yet feel you just can’t add another thing to your plate without being overwhelmed by stress or compromising your health, relationships, and integrity? No doubt, as a leader, there are some days when you feel the flow. You’re able to make a difference and achieve big goals. You feel confident and energized. On days like this, you are your best self – the leader you want to be. But on other days, you go down a different, negative path, with pressures and doubts making you feel like a lesser version of yourself. How can you be the leader you want to be, every day? The answer is more than a time-management system or a silver-bullet solution for changing your routines. Leadership expert and coach Amy Jen Su’s powerful new book helps readers discover that the answer lies within. By focusing in specific ways on five key leadership elements – Purpose, Process, People, Presence, and Peace – you can increase your time, capacity, energy, and ultimately your impact, with less stress and more equanimity.
HELPING PEOPLE CHANGE BY RICHARD BOYATZIS, MELVIN SMITH AND ELLEN VAN OOSTEN
Helping others is a good thing. Often, as a leader, manager, doctor, teacher, or coach, it’s central to your job. But even the most well-intentioned efforts to help others can be undermined by a simple truth: We almost always focus on trying to “fix” people, correcting problems or filling the gaps between where they are and where we think they should be. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work well, if at all, to inspire sustained learning or positive change. There’s a better way. In this powerful, practical book, emotional intelligence expert Richard Boyatzis and Weatherhead School of Management colleagues Melvin Smith and Ellen Van Oosten present a clear and hopeful message. The way to help someone learn and change, they say, cannot be focused primarily on fixing problems, but instead must connect to that person’s positive vision of themselves or an inspiring dream or goal they’ve long held. This is what great coaches do – they know that people draw energy from their visions and dreams, and that same energy sustains their efforts to change, even through difficult times. In contrast, problem-centered approaches trigger physiological responses that make a person defensive and less open to new ideas.
MEANINGFUL ACTION FOR MONDAY
WORK ON DIVERSITY
This week, online design tool, Cards for Humanity caught our eye. We’re always on board for anything that promotes inclusive design, and this adds an element of fun we just couldn’t resist. The premise is simple, you get dealt two random cards; a person and a trait. You then need to work out how you can meet their needs. Use this to think about how you can attract a more diverse group of employees to your business. It could challenge the wording of any job advert that you’re running. Thanks to Etch for sharing.
Upcoming Events
Exchange’s Employee Experience Event (virtual) – 1 October 2020
The employee experience revolution is happening; exchange is the gathering of professionals and practitioners at its forefront. Get ahead of the curve with the latest insights, never-heard-before stories, and radical innovations. Featuring speakers from industry leaders such as Facebook, Warner Bros. and Moneypenny, exchange is your chance to think outside the box, meet other experts, and take your organisation’s employee experience to the next level.
Megabuyte Virtual CEOSummit 13-15 & 20-22 October 2020
As well as Keynote speeches and panel sessions this CEOSummit also incorporates Q4 Barometer webinars.
An exclusive annual gathering of high-growth tech CEOs. This powerful three-day summit will transform how you define success and deliver growth in 2020 and beyond.
Scaling Up Business Growth Workshop, Monkhouse & Co, Salisbury – 3 November 2020
When the going gets tough, attitude trumps everything. Don’t let COVID-19 beat you into the ground and take your business. Treat this pandemic as an accelerator. The “one thing” you’ve been looking for to pivot, re-evaluate or simply get shit done. Join us on our farm in Wiltshire to walk through our Scaling Up growth programme.
Acetech Summit, Whistler – April 2021 (re-scheduled)
An exclusive annual gathering of high-growth tech CEOs. This powerful three-day summit will transform how you define success and deliver growth in 2020 and beyond.
Quote of the week
‘Few managers appreciate the range of metrics by which they can evaluate marketing strategies and dynamics. Fewer still understand the pros, cons and nuances of each.’
Paul W Farris, Marketing Metrics: The Definitive Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance