The other day I had a really good idea.  Just one, and it wasn’t a big one.  But it solved a problem
we had been having at work and it came to me in a quiet moment after hours of meetings and conference calls weren’t solving the problem.

It was easy, and kind of obvious.  And after I came up with it I was reminded of George Costanza’s “going out on a high note” bit.  I felt like, “oh good – I had this idea!  I’m done for today.”

How much time things take versus how much value they provide is an interesting calculus. Sometimes you need to take some time to let ideas marinate and it doesn’t feel productive but you can’t speed it up.  Sometimes you come up with a good idea what seems like quickly, forgetting all the marination that occurred in the background.

When I started in marketing at Dell I remember my first task was to put together a set of materials around our pre-validated stacks of servers, storage, and networking.  I took a first swing at it and it was terrible.  I was used to a technical 1:1 sale and here I was instead trying to build a 1:many high-level storyline.

There was one slide in particular – the linchpin of the story – that I just couldn’t get right.  One day I locked myself in a room and didn’t come out until it was done.  It took nearly four hours, and all I had to show for it was one slide.  And yet my manager was complimentary – “You got it,” he said, “that’s the story we’re trying to tell.”  And he shared that he thought that sometimes all you could do in a day was produce one really strategic piece of work, in this case, just one slide.

He is a good manager, and one who values this concept of things taking time.  He taught me about how much time needs to be in people’s work plans to allow for on-boarding and education, and how important those things are as investments in later productivity.  Of course, applying those concepts at a startup is not easy, but it’s a good guide I think back to a lot.

As for George Costanza – would that I could have just one good idea or quip a day, then leave on a high note.  For good or bad, my responsibilities are more complex that that.

Current readers of my blog know that I learn a lot about marketing and sales from my experiences as a consumer.  Last week I was at Barnes and Noble and learned something selling.  Here goes.

For me, books have always been my happy place, in a slightly obsessive way.  Not like, “I like to read for 15 minutes before bed and on the T” but as NPR book critic Maureen Corrigan puts it, “It’s not that I don’t like people. It’s just that when I’m in the company of others – even my nearest and dearest – there always comes a moment when I’d rather be reading a book.”

When mrDiva says, “you’re having a tough week, go do something fun for yourself, I don’t think “spa” or “gym” or “girlfriends”, I think “bookstore.”

So last week after a bout with a nasty flu, when I was supposed to have a relaxing week while babyDiva vacationed with my parents, and instead I had a Love it or List it marathon while I moaned, alone, on the couch, I decided a trip to Barnes and Noble was in order.

I have had beef with Barnes and Noble in the past – the real estate they dedicated to the Nook impinged on my browsing area, and I still resent that.  But this time when I went to the store, I lucked out – there were several books on the first few curated tables (“New fiction” “Must-read non-fiction”) that caught my attention, and I happily struggled to the checkout with my armful of treasures.

Enter the Barnes and Noble Members’ program.

The Members’ program is not a bad deal – for $25 you get extra discounts every time you shop, and if you buy a lot of books, there’s a pretty good ROI on that.  Except I don’t want to be a member.  Because reading and buying books is a treat for me, it’s a luxury.  I want to go to the checkout and hand over a credit card and not think about the cost because I’m enjoying myself. I don’t want to feel guilty every time I order a book from Amazon, like I should instead be buying it from Barnes and Noble (I get it, that’s why the program exists).

But the cashiers are in violent opposition to my point of view – “Are you part of our Members’ program?” “Do you know how the program works?” “Would you like to join?” “You’d already save $9 today!”  That is not a sampling of the kinds of things they say – that’s one set of encouragement I got at one visit.

And it killed my mojo.  It made me feel less excited about my reward of buying myself some books after a tough week.  Suddenly, my book reverie was broken and I was back in the real world.  And I didn’t like it.

I have a friend who used to manage Marketing for a casual dining restaurant chain.  She said one of the trends in the industry was that their servers were being trained to “read the table” and look for signs that they fit the profile of people who (e.g.,) wanted to hear the specials, just wanted to order, were going to have a round of drinks before ordering, were going to order dessert, etc.  The chain had determined that they could increase the revenue per table if the guests were “read” correctly and offered the right things at the right times.

That’s what it felt like Barnes and Noble was missing.  The cashier was not “reading” my disinterest and instead was just following his script.  I’m not convinced that is in the best interest of Barnes and Noble – it makes me dread going to the cashier, which I can’t imagine is good news for a retailer.

Are we doing this for our customers?  Are we reading their cues to understand what they are open to and when to stop offering things?  How do we read those cues in an enterprise sales cycle rather than a retail environment?  Because I’m sure they’re there.  It’s something to aspire to.

With the impending arrival of miniDiva/o, we’re in the market for a new car.  Our 2008 sedan just isn’t going to cut it anymore once we add a 2nd carseat.

I thought it would be most efficient to write a letter to anyone who might be interested in selling me this car to clarify a few things.

(If you’re just interested in the sales and marketing punchline, scroll past this list.  But I think it’s illustrative.)

1. My family lives in the city and we don’t drive a lot.  Let me say that again, my family lives in the city and we don’t drive a lot.  There are several corollaries to this, like (a) we don’t care that much about gas mileage, (b) we need something we can park in awkward and small places, (c) we don’t care about things that make it easy to get kids in and out of the car multiple times a day, because we don’t get kids in and out of the car multiple times a day.  We barely do it multiple times a week.

2. Our 2-year-old doesn’t watch any TV or other screen time yet.  Because I have no faith in humanity I will add that the new baby who arrives in June will likely not watch TV right away either.

In case those two sets of requirements were confusing, I’ll spell something else out.  We don’t want a minivan.  We’re not anti-minivan but we don’t need one because (see 1 and 2). Also, we live IN THE CITY, so car doors that can automatically slide open are not going to be of any use to us and in fact I don’t want my kids running down a CITY street getting in or out of the car.

3. We don’t need 3rd row seating.  Nobody comes in our car with us.  No we don’t anticipate a lot of carpooling because we live in the city and nobody we know drives.

4. We need heated, leather seats, and 4-wheel or all-wheel drive.  Yes, we know the difference.

5. My husband is tall, most of it in his legs.  A toddler who likes to kick or a fully-grown adult needs to be able to sit behind my husband in the car.

6. Safety ratings are not that important to me.  I am pretty comfortable with anything that says Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mazda, Volvo, Audi, Subaru, Volkswagen, or Hyundai without needing to hear about the safety awards you’ve won.

7. I can’t possibly decide whether to pay cash, finance, or lease, until you tell me what the rates are.  I don’t want to tell you what I can afford each month.  I want to negotiate the total price of the car.

8. Cubic cargo space is very helpful for those times when I’m planning to fill the car fully with Rubik’s cubes.  Otherwise, it’s not that useful for me.

For those of you who are not trying to sell me a car, but who read this blog for insights on sales and marketing, here goes.  Our customers are telling us what they want this clearly.  We are just not always listening.

Modern sales is complex.  Customers are more educated than ever, so the strategies for influencing them at the sales level has to change.  Take the car example; when I walk into the dealership, I might already know everything there is to know about the car – the cargo space, the packages, the safety ratings.  But if the dealer wants to sell me something, he or she needs to demonstrate some differentiation, or get me to think about something differently from how I have in the past.

But there is a difference between bulldozing me (“Everyone with kids wants a video screen – you may not think that you do, but wait until your next 7-hour drive,”) and educating me, (“I know you said that safety ratings aren’t important to you, but I’d like to explain which of those are most important to look at.”)  Or “You never know when 3rd row seating will come in handy” vs “I know you said you didn’t want 3rd row seating, but let me explain the relationship between the possibility of seating and total available cargo space.”

I love when my own consumer purchases teach me something about enterprise sales.

I was just a few years into my career, selling a brand new solution with a partner known for wanting to control deals.   This solution (“Widget”) cost the company a lot of money to acquire and develop, and everyone at the company (as well as partners like us) had been through endless training about how to position and sell it.

At the time, I was known as “the smart girl SE” as in, “Can the smart girl SE come onsite with us for this one?”

The smart girl SE came onsite with James* to meet a new customer.  James was a boisterious, friendly salesperson who called everyone “buddy”, punched them in the upper arm, and talked a lot about beahs (beers), the Sox, and his good old days on a college hockey team.  After a lot of chatter, we starting talking through the customer’s environment, their concerns, and needs. A few minutes of discussion and it was obvious that they were a candidate for this new solution.

“You may want to look at this new Widget,” I said.  “It is great for environments like yours that have qualities A, B, and C.”

And then I made an error in judgement.

In an effort to cede the conversation to the partner salesperson, thinking I was being a good partner by doing so, I said, “James, why don’t you tell them some more about Widget.”

I knew immediately it was a mistake.  James got a quintessential “deer in the headlights” look in his eye.  He started sweating.  He looked at his fingernails, at his shoes, and at his watch.  Finally, with everyone’s eyes on him, he stammered,

“It’s just bettah.”  (That’s how we say “better” in Boston.)

And that was the entirety of his sales pitch.

Relationships are important. Nobody wins deals by being the smartest person in the room – people win deals because they understand the customer’s environment, their concerns, and in cases of extremely good salespersonship, even act as an extension of the customer’s team.  But relationships are not everything.

Every person in an organization needs to be able to speak about their product and their value proposition.  Customers are looking for guidance, for honesty, and for advice.  But they are also looking for information about a specific solution, about a specific product.  Sure, they may be 57% of the way through the sales process by the time they approach the vendor directly, but that means the other 43% is still in our hands.

And just saying that the product is “better” isn’t going to cut it.

*name has been changed to protect the….

There is an episode in the West Wing (“Separation of Powers”) where Josh Lyman, top legislative negotiator for the president, is “benched” because of personal problems. In his stead, a woman named Angela Blake is sent in to negotiate.  Josh is deflated, and angry. He feels like this is his role being taken away; he barely holds it together when he hears the news.

Negotiations go poorly.  Josh is frustrated, as is the rest of the staff.  However, when the president asks Josh his opinion of how Blake is doing, Josh says, “You gotta trust the person in the room.”

I think about that moment a lot, because it’s true – you do have to trust the person in the room. You have to trust that the salesperson is doing her best to close the deal, that your boss is doing his best to advocate for you, that product management is doing their best to prioritize features accurately.  And all of this happens when you’re not in the room.

This is where a lot of people get crazy.  Take the salesperson example – sure you might send the salesperson in to close the deal on their own, but if they don’t close it, then suddenly the sales manager is all over them asking if they did this, or did that, and can they get another meeting, and try this other strategy.  Or how many times has someone’s manager committed to trying to get them a raise or promotion, only to come back empty-handed; the employee often feels betrayed, or let down, or feels as if the manager had a lot of things to negotiate and his or her salary fell off the list at some point.

So the key is to find an organization, and a leadership team that you can trust in the room.  And the leadership has to trickle down to everyone – because the product management example above isn’t about a manager of yours going to do something, it’s about a peer organization trying to get things done. To me, that’s probably one of my top few yardsticks for assessing how I feel about an organization – do I trust these people in a room without me?

The key is also to remember that sometimes you are the person in the room.  You are the one negotiating and speaking for someone else.  And as such, you carry a burden of doing your best for them – of being worthy of their letting go of the opportunity to advocate for themselves, as they are not the person in the room.

A few weeks ago I caught up with a former colleague who, like me, finds himself in a leadership role at a startup.  His role is different from mine, but we find ourselves in some similar situations.  For example, we have both had the experience of off-handedly suggesting something and having it executed, almost accidentally. We both marvel at how much decision-making gets done in a startup, and what we get to contribute to.

And then he was explaining to me how there will come a time at his startup when his specific role in the company will need to be formalized and its scope determined.  He took the job with a few conditions, one being that he get to be part of that conversation when it occurred.

“You want to be in the room for those conversations,” I said.

“Exactly.  I get to be in the room.”

When I think about good leadership, often I think about big, bold leadership.  People like Marissa Mayer or Elon Musk – big risk takers who make bold moves.  Sure, they are inspiring and there is value in my business education to following them, but it’s hard to consider them role models. Aspiring to be “like Marissa Mayer” or “like Elan Musk” is not helpful to me on a daily basis.

Yesterday, I watched a very small activity that I’m not sure anyone else noticed, and it hit me hard that *this* is what good, everyday leadership looks like.  Here’s what happened.

Our CTO was giving a technical talk, occurring in Cambridge with our Nashua team joining via Google Hangouts.  We do this kind of broadcast bi-weekly for our engineering iteration meetings, and they are riddled with issues: bad audio, screens that don’t share, wifi problems, and any number of other similar problems.

I watched as our SVP of Engineering – an executive who has arguably one of the most important roles in executing our strategy – log in to the Hangout from Cambridge to see the version of the screen his team in Nashua is seeing. He had the CTO correct his screen sharing and camera a few times.  Then I watched as he ran over to his desk and grabbed his headset to hear the audio as it was being heard in Nashua.  He attended the entire talk this way.

It’s a minor thing, right?  But it’s great leadership – it’s leadership that shows a complete lack of ego, and a desire to be inclusive to team members, and a commitment to getting done what has to get done.

The opportunities for these sorts of things are probably more likely in a startup where there isn’t really administrative support staff, and where everyone pitches in, but I also know of startups where the SVP of Engineering wouldn’t deign to do something so mundane.

My lesson of the day: good leadership isn’t only big, bold leadership.

Last week at Infinio we added a few members to the sales and marketing teams.

I’m not sure I could have predicted it, but it was enough people to suddenly feel like there is critical mass on the sales and marketing floor.  There’s now a constant buzz of noise, someone is always on the phone with a customer, and our Friday afternoon sports/movies/music debates just got a lot more lively.  Another indicator?  There’s more than one destination for lunch each day.

When I was at Dell there was a time when my team grew from 3 people to 7, inorganically. Suddenly one person’s dental appointment or sick kid no longer cancelled the team meeting; my team 1x1s took nearly an entire day.

As a manager, having a team grow like that added immeasurable complexity, but it also added immeasurable value.  When it came to brainstorming, or allocating projects to people, or even sending someone to get something proofread or looked at, there were options.  Delegating became something other than zero-sum.

It’s exciting to see this happen at Infinio.  To have responsibilities that were held by one person grow large enough that they split into a few people’s domains, to have a few people performing the same function rather than just one person in each role, and to feel like when something comes up, there’s a particular person to go to for assistance – these are all exciting signs of growth.

I’ve heard early members of startups talk about the good old days when they were small and agile and knew everyone.  We’re still in that phase, I think.  But, delightfully, a little bigger.

The other day I was in a meeting looking at sales numbers.  We were comparing performance of two different queues of leads, and someone said something like “Clearly, Queue A is giving us a better yield.”

The numbers were pretty small and we only had a week’s worth of data.  “I don’t know,” I said, “is that difference really statistically significant?”

“Of course it is.  It’s twice as big”

In the moment I let it go, but I knew that it wasn’t a true assessment of statistical significance. Let’s say there were only 4 names in each queue.  If Queue A gave us 1 lead and Queue B gave us 2 leads, then “twice as many” wouldn’t feel like a conclusion.  Conversely, if there 1000 names in each queue, and one gave us 400 leads while the other gave us 800 leads, then we could comfortably draw the conclusion.  But what about all the in-betweens?

All of this drove me to do some research on what “statistical significance” really means.  As I’ve been learning, much of marketing is actually pretty numbers-driven, so knowing what numbers “matter” is important to making good decisions.

Here’s the first definition that came up, from Wikihow.  “Statistical significance is the number, called a p-value, that tells you the probability of your result being observed, given that a certain statement (the null hypothesis) is true. If this p-value is sufficiently small, the experimenter can safely assume that the null hypothesis is false.”

Huh?

OK, first I teased out what “null hypothesis” means – it’s the baseline that assumes that there is no impact of the variable, or no difference in two populations.  In my example, the null hypothesis would be that the yield of Queue A is the same as the yield of Queue B.  Any difference in their yields is based purely on randomness.

As I read more, there seem to be three interrelated concepts that feed into whether something is significant:

Sample Size: How many activities are we looking at?

How big are each of the queues?

Confidence Range: How precisely honed in on the conclusion are we?

We’re comfortable saying that if the yields are within 5% of each other then they are, for practical purposes, the same.

Confidence Level: How sure are we about our conclusion?

We’re 90% sure that the yields being different means that in the larger population they will be different (and thus we should/shouldn’t make a decision based on this)

So the way these interact is: If you want a higher confidence level (i.e., to be more sure of your conclusion) then you have to accept a larger confidence interval (i.e., accept a greater range, like 8% rather than 5%).  To make that interval lower, then you need a larger sample size.

Statistical significance means that we are at least 95% that the results are due to the nature of the different populations, not to randomness.

Getting back to our example, then the thing we’d be testing is “Is the yield from Queue A greater than that of Queue B.”  We’d define “greater than” as calculating the interval of both results and checking that they don’t overlap.  And we’d need a big enough sample size to be 95% sure that these results were repeatable.

One thing that helped me understand this more concretely is this calculator provided by KISSMetrics.

Let’s say I have a sample size of 100.

If Queue A yields 90 and Queue B yields 80, then with 98% certainty we can say Queue A is better.

But let’s say Queue A yields 40 and Queue B yields 50.  Then the certainty is only 92%, which is not considered “statistically significant.”  We’re only 92% sure that this is not due to randomness.

This video is a great resource specifically about marketing, as is this page from UT, which is a little more formal mathematically.

My take-home conclusion is that of where I started: it’s not always obvious whether something is “statistically significant” without doing some serious math.

In college, one of the courses I enjoyed the most was Operations Research.  There were two versions of this course, a deterministic one and a probabilistic one.  I always regret only having taken the former.

The deterministic course taught you to solve problems like this, “If it costs $X to make metal widgets over 3 weeks with a profit of $A, and $Y to make wooden widgets over 5 weeks with a profit of $B, what is the optimal mix of metal and wooden widgets to make to maximize profit?”

The probabilistic course taught you to solve problems like this, “If 75% of widgets with a Flaw X fail, and only 2% of those without Flaw X fail, and 15% of widgets have Flaw X, what is the chance of any new widget failing?”

This all came to mind because a few days ago a colleague and I were discussing how marketing is totally probabilistic.  There’s no set of events, materials, and interactions that will guarantee a certain outcome.  Everything we’re doing in marketing is to increase probabilities.

Marketing (I’m talking about demand generation / marketing communications marketing, not product marketing) is all about reaching a large audience and successively focusing in on the people in that audience who are most open to learning more, then have the specific pain we’re solving, then are making a decision about how to solve the problem in the near-term.

(If you need a crash course on this, Atlassian did a series of blog posts on it a few years back.)

Optimizing marketing is about (a) increasing the size of the total audience, and (b) increasing the conversion rate for each phase of the funnel.  That is, how can we go to the right events/write the write whitepapers/invite people to the right webinars so that more of the people looking for a solution know about us, and more of the ones who know about us see us as a solution for their shortlist.

But that’s what’s kind of crazy about marketing: It’s always “how can we find more” but there’s no concept of “how can we find all.”  Sure, there are industry benchmarks (things like X% of visitors to your website should visit at least Y pages, and Y% of people who attend a webinar are likely to buy in Z months), but those are merely goals, not guarantees.

In short, there’s no formula that says “Go to VMworld, send these two whitepapers, have these three conversations, and then invite the customer to this private event, then they will buy your product.”

Marketing gets a bad rap – but it shouldn’t.  It’s a key function in a company, and is a lot harder than just writing some press releases and choosing booth graphics for an event.  But thinking through this leads me to wonder if its lack of respect is rooted in its probabilistic – rather than deterministic – nature.

In the past 16 hours, I’ve checked into not one, but (due to a wee snowstorm in Boston) two hotels.  One was mid-range, and one slightly higher-end.  Neither one had toothpaste in the bathroom.

In fact, I can’t remember checking into any hotels ever – anywhere – that had toothpaste in the bathroom.  Mouthwash, very, very occasionally.  But not toothpaste.

Lest you think this is a Seinfeld-esque meditation on “What’s the deal with hotels and toothpaste”, read on. There’s a marketing lesson here.

A few years ago, Slate had a comprehensive article on why there isn’t toothpaste in hotel rooms.  The author interviews several people in the industry, then offers several theories, none of which he really seems to like: toiletries are refilled from a big vat, and toothpaste can’t be refilled; it’s too expensive; it’s not an aspirational cosmetic; it’s a conspiracy to tip bellman who have to bring it up.

Whether it’s a conspiracy, an economic decision, or something else, what I see is an interesting marketing opportunity – at least an opportunity for analysis.

One of the things marketers do is create “awareness” around a brand.  This isn’t the kind of marketing that helps someone who is down to deciding between Toyota and Honda, this is the kind of marketing that Mercury did a few years ago with “You’ve got to put Mercury on your list.”  It’s making sure that people are aware that the brand exists, so that when it’s time to make the “shortlist” (in this case, cruise through the CVS toothpaste aisle and choose one) the brand is top of mind.

I don’t know a lot about how consumers choose to purchase products, (although I can tell you a whole lot about how IT buyers do it) but I’ve got to believe that there is a value to someone’s using a toothpaste they haven’t used before, in their likelihood to buy it in the future.  Right now I think that toiletries in hotels are funded by the hotels as an amenity.  Some of the higher-end hotels have higher-end brands like Bliss or L’Occitane.

But what if Colgate (or Crest or Aquafresh or AIM) paid for their toothpaste to go into hotels? Couldn’t that help the toothpaste companies?  Let’s say I always just buy what’s on sale; or perhaps I always buy Colgate because that is what I grew up brushing with.  Wouldn’t this be one of the only chances to have me try something different?  And couldn’t it be at least as effective per marketing $ as telling me that 9 out of 10 dentists recommend something?

It seems like that would be something worth piloting, although measuring the efficacy could be difficult.  If you picked just one city, you’d have no way to track the impact on everyone’s buying habits when they went home and bought Brand X at their local pharmacy.  Unless you gave them a coupon, which tracked their purchase.  Or chose a destination where you know where the guests are from (e.g. Disney during NJ’s school vacation time).

In any case – I can’t tell you how often I’ve forgotten toothpaste and yearned for it in my hotel room at 11pm.  I’d be a fan of the first brand to help me out.