The weight of politics… If one person can rock the boat, what happens when everyone stands up at the same time? How do you keep a successful marketing process on an even keel when internal struggles threaten to shut it down altogether?
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Thanks again, SWOT Team members, for sharing your perspectives and reactions to this marketing dilemma: How do you sift through politics to get the job done? While politics can be a sticky wicket, your suggestions are quite valuable and provide a clear guideline for simplifying the newsletter publishing process. Read below for your peers’ best advice.
Frustrated with your own marketing problem? Ask our SWOT Team for help. Join us. We promise you won’t be disappointed. When we tap into our collective experience, strength and hope—everyone benefits. And you could win a copy of our book, A Marketer’s Guide to e-Newsletter Publishing.
Can you help with this issue’s marketing dilemma? It begs the question, Which is more important: branding or sales?
This Issue’s Dilemma
Branding or sales: which comes first?
We are a profitable B2B product and services company with a strong cash reserve and would like to invest a portion of it in our future growth. Building an exceptional team of 88 professionals who work well together and provide value to our customers has brought us a great deal of joy. We now face one of the most important decisions we will make since I started our company nine years ago. I am apprehensive about a dilemma, which may be our undoing, if we are not careful. My VP of Sales and Marketing and our Marketing Consultant, who has been an integral part of our team for 5 years, are squared off in a debate about how to invest our sales and marketing budget for next year. My Sales VP wants to create new position and hire a Director of Sales and 5 additional sales people. We currently have 2 sales managers and 11 salespeople. My Marketing consultant wants us to invest in a marketing and advertising campaign to make our B2B brand stronger. Our budget will allow us to do one or the other, but not both. I am not sure of the right decision to make. I feel like I am in a “chicken or egg” scenario: which comes first—sales or branding? This whole dilemma is new to me. I’m not even sure where to start.
Would you ask your readers how I can make the right decision? What questions should I ask?
—Jeffrey C., CEO
Previous Dilemma
Swot Category: External Opportunity and Internal Weakness
How do you sift through politics enough to get the job done?
We have published our e-newsletter for 14 months, and by all accounts it is successful. Our sales team is happy with the leads it generates, product development stays informed with the “electronic focus group” capabilities, and MARCOM likes to embed surveys to take our customers’ pulse (external opportunity).
We also have a companion print newsletter, which has been part of our branding strategies for years. It is sent out every quarter and includes longer versions of stories and additional articles.
So what’s the problem? It’s getting harder and harder to get each issue out the door. We try to coordinate the information from the e-version with the print version, but the more successful our newsletters become, the more they become political hot beds.
Somehow, everyone has his or her own agenda for the newsletters. It’s getting ugly as one VP wrestles with the production manager and our copywriters are given inconsistent directions for content (internal weakness).
Would you ask your readers if they have any tips on how to smooth out some of these politics?
— Sharon T., VP of Marketing
Summary of Advice Received
Sharon, the answers we received to your dilemma leaned toward logic: organizing a clear newsletter creative process, with a good dose of relationship do’s and don’ts thrown in. While individual personalities have individual ways of dealing with political breeding grounds, three main themes emerged. You will probably find the most valuable advice in a combination of the responses we received, which fell into these three categories:
Establish a clear process with authority and set goals.
Set themes and use reader preferences to do so.
Clearly define print versus e-newsletter purposes.
1. Establish a clear process with authority and set goals
The majority of the SWOT team members who responded recommended determining a set approach with a designated leader and then standing by it, no matter what. This leader needs to set boundaries and communicate them to everyone involved. One reader told the story of how her company established review teams and deadlines for each reviewer of specific articles (in order of review). Because of this approach, her story ended happily, “No one could deviate from the team’s process by adding members or requesting additional time or iterations, and if deadlines were not met they were forfeited. No exceptions were made. It caused some grumbling, but eventually people seemed to respect the endeavor more, and more thought went into articles and marketing.”
Having clear guidelines and a strong leader at the helm was also recommended by Garith Hosking, Strategist at King’s Trust Marketing:
Lobby with the CEO to have the newsletter remain within your scope. Then make the ultimate decisions about what is in and what is out. Have a brainstorming session with the politicians involved. Let them know you value their input, but they should not take it personally if all of their input is not used; there is only so much space available. Set parameters in one of these sessions. Copywriters should not have the responsibility of discussing content; instead, their responsibilities are to collect information and write copy according to a predetermined schedule of content. Ensure content suggestions or chan