Barbara Walters Price

Data, we need more data

In a recent post, I commented on Suzanne Lowe's seventh post in her series on "Marketing Experts."  I've gone back and read parts 1 - 6 and have found them to be interesting.  She focuses on quantitative skills as both vital and personally differentiating for PSF marketers and I agree with her. 

Suzanne even gave me the "honesty award" in part 5 when I stated in an earlier post on this blog:

"We all give lip service to positioning and differentiating but precious few of us know how to make it happen."

She agrees with me and then asks "why?".  She has a few ideas, one of them being:

"There are precious few sources of cogent work on differentiation and positioning for service businesses."

That's true.  It's also true that many of us are focused on the tactical rather than the strategic.  In addition, many PSF marketers are more creative than quantitative by personality (for an example of why it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool rather than to speak and remove all doubt, see here).  Much of this comes from not focusing on the quantitative.

HOWEVER, what I haven't seen in her series is the acknowledgment that many small and mid-size firms don't have the internal systems to easily extract the needed data for analysis. 

If you're one of the big boys, you should have these systems and the skill-set to take advantage of the data.  There is no disputing that.  But for smaller firms whose systems have grown as the firm has grown, access to helpful data is not always easy to get.

I'm one of those "more creative" than "quantitative" folks but I understand the importance of the numbers (I work in a financial services business, for heavens sake).    Yet, our systems are not adequate to extract the data we need.  So, that means it's a herculean task every time we pull data for analysis.  That also means that we don't pull it as often as we need to.  Also, we never get exactly what we need.

I know, I know.  You're saying: If you don't have the systems, get the systems. 

I agree with that too but it is easier to say it than to do it.   It's on our to-do list but won't be implemented tomorrow because of the investment and time involved. 

So, in the meantime, we continue to rely upon what I call our "band-aid approach" - which is to squeeze all the info we can out of our existing systems, and to rely upon individual experience, initiative, and memory (scary, I realize) to keep us in the game.  It's a benefit to Mercer Capital that I've been here for over twenty years so I understand much more about what we do, why we do it, who we do it for, than most marketers in our industry.  Yet, let me say it before Suzanne says it, I know it's not remotely sufficient.

So, how about a little help from the peanut gallery ... what type of systems does your firm use to track clients, prospects, engagements, industries, etc.?  Any help would be much appreciated. 

Then maybe I can become a real marketing expert.  In the meantime, I'm going to go back and re-read Suzanne's book so we'll be ready to go when we're ready to go.

Someone really answered the question this way...

This just makes me laugh.  I wonder if the teacher found it as amusing?

Hat Tip: Binza.  Visit there to see other hilarious (and creative) "answers" to math test questions.

Want comments? Don't just wish for them ...

My internet friend, Thom Singer, over at Some Assembly Required, has an interesting and proactive idea to solicit comments:  leave a comment, win a prize! 

Check out his blog (which is a fun and educational read by the way). Thom, how do you have the time and energy to post as often as you do? You're my hero.  You can also check out his book, Some Assembly Required: How to Make, Grow, and Keep Your Business Relationships which I reviewed a while back here and here.

And, a very belated thanks to Thom for featuring my blog way back in December 2006 during his great "Praise Others Project."  What a great idea.  Check out his 2006 archive for the entries and bookmark his blog.

Now I'm off to comment on his blog before the end of February in order to be eligible to win!

Suzanne Lowe's Take on Marketing Experts

I've been away from the marketing blogosphere for a while now because I've been, well, marketing.  We just got our second book (in two months) to the printer and are pushing really hard to bring up our new web site along with several other tactical and strategic initiatives.  So, I've been remiss not just in taking part in the conversation but in even paying attention to the conversation.  However, I decided to rejoin the internet world and take a peek at what some of the folks I admire are talking about.

Suzanne Lowe has had SEVEN posts on the subject of "what should be expected of 'marketing experts'".  (Parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven)

I haven't read them all but the seventh post caught my eye and I have to say "way to go, Suzanne!"  It deals with thought leadership and piqued my interest because this has been a differentiation strategy for Mercer Capital for some time.  While we have certainly embarked upon "a puffed up writing activity" from time to time, most of our content is leading-edge for our industry.

I also love the last three points of the post which I reproduce here with a few comments from yours truly in brackets which are based solely upon my own experience:

"For a firm that wants to tap "the thought leadership white space," it will take

• a marketer who is extremely well grounded in that firm's service portfolio, and who knows where those services fit in the panoply of intellectual capital and services that the clients can access [BWP comment: YES!  However, a firm's management should realize that, depending upon a firm's service lines, it can take a long time (years) to really understand those services and how they both interrelate to the firm's other service lines and their market potential.  Experienced marketers from your industry are a must here.] 
• the firm's management to support the marketer's deep interaction with the firm's practitioners, to both mine the knowledge that resides in the practitioner's heads and to prod and push where it appears that intellectual capital is dated [BWP comment: Activities like this can certainly seem like "one more thing to do" for a fee-earner, yet they are vital.  A marketer has to lead the charge with firm management.]  
• a firm's management to support that marketer's contact with clients to gain new perspectives about what's really new and simultaneously beneficial [Again, a hearty YES!  I don't see the downside of this if the marketer is knowledgeable about the client and/or industry.  I make it a point to do this as much as possible.  Again, I believe the marketer has to take the first step here.  Without the initiative, the fee-earners just won't think about it].

These marketers are what I would call 'experts.' "  

Great job Suzanne.  Now, I'm going to go back and read Parts I-VI.

Where did I put my keys to this thing?

I'm back.  Hopefully somebody missed me.  I missed you, dear readers.  I was away not because I'm a slacker (although I felt like slacking many times) or because I had run out of things to say (this is a blog which, unfortunately, by it's very nature tends toward vapid discourse so why should that stop me?). 

I was away because I was too busy to be here which I know is a mortal sin in the blogosphere, however, please forgive me because I was working on the printed word in another form - I was bringing a printed book to life (that's it over there to your left designed in-house by our very talented Matt Washburn).

Now that sounds more interesting (and a bit more dramatic) than it was/is.  And, no, I didn't write the book. Our CEO, Chris Mercer, wrote the book and did it quite well - using his blog (www.merceronvalue.com), by the way, as a drafting tool.

The title of the book is Buy-Sell Agreements: Ticking Time Bombs or Reasonable Resolutions?. 

While that may not sound like a page-turner to some of you, it's a very readable and useful book (350+ pages) and of interest to many more people than an average reader of this blog might think. 

This is a self-published book that we have been working on for over a year.  Several folks here provided review and editing.  When I picked up the manuscript in November thinking that we were almost done, I discovered that it still needed quite a bit of editing.  We had to get it to market by the end of 2006 and if I didn't stop everything I was doing right before Thanksgiving and work almost exclusively on the book, it wouldn't have happened.  I won't go into all the details here.  I will share those with you in a future post.

I will say, however, that this book was our first experience with print-on-demand.  I'll share the advantages and disadvantages of this technology in a day or so.

In the meantime, if you want to purchase the book, it's only $79 - a steal!