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.

It’s been about two years since I last hired someone, but I can feel the muscle memory kicking in.  That delicate balance of both buying and selling at the same time; the drive past where the candidate starts towards what I need to know about what they’ve done and how they’ve done it; the explanations of what the role, team, product, and company are like.

The first time I was involved in hiring people it was at a small reseller and I interviewed all our potential college hires.  I learned how to disarm people to get to the meat of their accomplishments.  My favorite example was of someone who leaned back in his chair and proudly told me that he didn’t buy any of his textbooks in college.  I also learned how accurate first impressions usually are in the long term.  It wasn’t solely up to me whether someone got the job or not, but I often was the gate through which candidates had to pass.

When I hired at Dell, it was for my own team that I was building, somewhat from scratch.  I learned that people usually forgot to ask about what the role entailed day-to-day, and that was a major source of issues down the road.  “Solutions Marketing Manager”, as it turned out, could mean a lot of things, and not all of them had to do with what I was hiring for.  I learned that finding things people were proud of was the best way to learn who they really were and what they really wanted.

Maybe most importantly, I learned that a former manager of mine was right in valuing a diversity of skills on a team over any one top contributor, although I probably didn’t appreciate that until far after the interviewing part was over.  Hiring a team from scratch really forced me to think through what I saw the team as growing into.  Handling people’s questions about culture and career path and priorities forced me into forming opinions about those things in a way no other exercise would have.

Now I’m hiring again for my own team, from scratch.  What I’m learning is not really about the process or the hiring per se, but about how to describe the job to someone.  Startup jobs by their nature are less well-defined than jobs at larger, more established companies, and yet someone has to decide to take a job doing something.  I’ve been breaking it down for candidates as I mentioned earlier: role, team, product, company, which seems to work for most people.

What’s also been really interesting this time around is that I am working on our company and product messaging at the same time as I’m recruiting people.  So each interview or phone screen is also an opportunity to hone our messaging, to practice explaining what we do to someone who is smart but not familiar with us, and see if it works.  I’m not hiring IT professionals (our target audience) but people who professionally market and sell to IT professionals are a good proxy.

Hiring: it’s one of the most important things I will do in the first half of this year.

When I was growing up (in the ’80’s) phones were definitely associated with girls. I can remember spending hours on the phone with my girlfriends, talking about who-knows-what because usually I had spent the entire day with them.  We called boys – sometimes – but those were quick, awkward conversations. Girls were on the phone with girls.

In fact, we all talked on the phone so much that many of our parents set limits to how much we could be on the phone – 30 minutes or an hour on a school night, for example.

Fast forward to today, and everyone I know is on their phone – constantly.  In bed, while watching TV, on the train, in the bathroom, at work, at dinner, at social events. Constant compulsive checking phones and texting and opening up Facebook and Twitter because you.can’t.stop.

At my house, we’ve tried to set some limits on phone use for us adults, but with little success – we’re tethered.

There have been only three situations in the past year where I found myself in environments without compulsive phone checking, and both have been all-women’s events.  Coincidence?

Once was at the Massachusetts Women’s Conference.  With 10,000 women in the general sessions, of course there were people checking phones in the audience, but nowhere near as much as you see at a typical conference.  In the smaller sessions, I hardly saw any phones come out.

The second places was at an alumni mentoring event that was half recent college grads and half those of us in our 30’s and 40’s.  I am pretty sure that I was the only person who took out her phone at all during the 2-hour event, and I did it with a degree of shame!  (In my defense, my husband was traveling and I wanted to make sure the babysitter didn’t have any questions.)

The third is at my monthly professional lunch meeting.  8-10 women around the table, and phones usually don’t come out for 90 minutes until we need to talk scheduling.

So the interesting question here is “why”.  Why are women’s-only events places where we check our phones less?   Here are some hypotheses:

1. Some number of women, for whatever reason, are less inclined to compulsively check their phones.  As such, the phenomenon of contagious phone checking is less impactful.  (Maybe. Not sure how to figure this one out.)

2. Women care less about their jobs, so they’re less invested in checking email when they’re out of the office.  (Just kidding, want to make sure you’re still reading.)

3. Women consider these networking events crucial to their success and don’t want anything interrupting them.  (A good hypothesis.  Especially in male-dominated fields like mine, I’m not running into people in the men’s room or the golf course – so these events are my chance to forge those bonds.)

I think that last hypothesis is the most likely – and I’ll take it even a step further.  I consider the time I spend doing these things “my” time in a way that almost nothing else I do belongs to me.  I’m not saying I have no downtime – I do.  But I might spend it watching TV (with my husband) or shopping (usually for babyDiva) or cooking (which I love, but it’s for the family). And going to professional development events is something that is really, truly, just for me.

Maybe this is how other people feel about the gym.  But that’s another post for another time.

After watching too much NFL this weekend, I skipped watching the Golden Globes. But I like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, so I watched their opening monologue (dualogue?) on Monday morning.  You can watch it here.

I found parts of it funny, but a few parts of nagged at me as not funny – not only not funny, but offensive.  Then I read this commentary on how they made this the first feminist film awards ceremony.

And I thought, “wow – that’s exactly NOT how I felt about it.”

The two items I was most uncomfortable about were mentioned in this article: one was the “game” they played of which of two actors they preferred physically, and one was their set of jokes about Bill Cosby.

If we look at their “game” my immediate thought was – wow – if two guys were hosting the Globes, and started comparing which of two actresses they found more attractive, we’d probably be disgusted.  Where is our disgust for the converse?

And regarding Bill Cosby, I was deeply offended that women would make jokes around someone accused of a lifetime of sexual assault and abuse.  Is there any way that his alleged victims would have found that funny?

This all reminded me of a discussion that my professional networking group had last week. We were talking about the things we do as women to fit into men’s cultural dominance in our industries.  I gave the example of becoming an NFL fan because if I didn’t follow football I couldn’t talk to my sales guys or customers for 7 months a year.

We didn’t come to a great conclusion.  I mean, we all kind of agreed that if it didn’t offend your “self” (watching football vs going to a strip club) that it was probably good and maybe even necessary.  But I’m not sure any of us walked away satisfied or comfortable with that answer.

In this excellent post about women in Silicon Valley, Nancy Householder Hauge takes Sheryl’s Sandberg’s style of assimilating into the Temple of Male Behavior to task directly.  She writes, “Until people who have created their success by worshipping at the temple of male behavior, like Sheryl Sandberg, learn to value alternate behaviors, the working world will remain a foreign and hostile culture to women.”

As will, likely, Hollywood.  Brava to Charlize Theron for going after the $10M Sony should have offered her, but she had to go get it.

Anyway, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have done a lot for women in entertainment.  Along with other leaders in women’s comedy like Julia Louise-Dreyfus, Rosanne Barr, Ellen Degeneres, and Rhea Perlman, they have demonstrated that women can be funny on the big screen and the small, as actors and producers, and succeed at the highest levels.

So isn’t it time Tina and Amy do it on terms that are comfortable for women?

I’m hiring for a few roles on my team, and have had several discussions with recruiters this week.  One of them commented that last year Product Marketing was the role in the highest demand – that it was very competitive because everyone seemed to be hiring for it.

I should mention that she mostly works with high-growth startups in the Boston area.

I’ve been thinking about why this might be for the past few days.  Here’s what i’ve come up with.

1. She’s lying in an effort to inflate her value and increase my salary range.

Verdict: unlikely.  She’s came highly recommended from a trusted source.

2. There’s some weird perfect storm in Boston that is causing a surge in demand for this role.

Verdict: unlikely.  Most of the tech startups in Boston sell to a national or international audience.

3. All the interest in “content marketing” (driven by buyer’s access to information outside of relationships with vendors and VARs) is actually interest in what we used to call “product marketing.”

Verdict: Now we’re getting somewhere.

This idea is really interesting to me because it’s happening in my field right now.  Here’s the basics: Corporate Executive Board (and many others) suggest that buyers are 60% of the way through the buying cycle by the time they reach out directly to the vendor.

The natural takeaway to that is that if vendors want to influence these buyers, we have to get in front of them where they are looking – and that might be third-party sites, organic and paid web searches, conferences, and communities.  They aren’t simply reading an article about us, then typing our URL into their browser to learn more.

So there is a new industry of people who know how to find these buyers, and who run these communities, and conferences, and who will syndicate your content to channels where these buyers are looking, sometimes in what seems like a vendor-neutral perspective.

And it’s not to trivialize or minimize these people’s jobs, because I’ve met many of them and this is a real thing, but at the heart of it, it’s the people who understand both the technology and the buyer, and who know how to communicate it, who have to create the content.  And that’s product marketing.

Put another way, the industry is shifting from a model where buyers turn to vendor sales teams to usher them through the process to a model where buyers do more of their own research and only contact vendors later in the process.  This means vendors need to shift the makeup of sales and marketing to have fewer people in traditional sales roles.  Then there is more pressure to hire people who can create and deliver the content buyers are looking for early in the process, and participate in technical communities.

Enter product marketing.

(Psst, if you live in Boston, work in tech, and find either of these roles interesting, let me know!)

As a welcome to 2015, Boston has been gifted … winter.  It is cold out there!  So this morning on my way in I stopped at Starbucks for a grande non-fat extra-hot decaf caramel latte. You know, just a cup of coffee.

I had to say my order three times – once to a barista who was filling in at a cash register, once to a manager who shooed her back to the bar and rang me up, and then again to another cashier who finally charged for my order because the first cash register was out of service.

And that is a mouthful – grande non-fat extra-hot decaf caramel latte.  (Nevermind the stress of saying it in the right order and the shame of accidentally calling it a “medium”)  So by the time I got to the guy who was ringing me up, I just said “grande caramel latte” because those were the items that impacted what they were going to charge me.

I got to thinking – who at Starbucks actually need to know what parts of that order?  How much value is there in their business systems knowing that particular combination is important to me?

I’ve had the same thought at the supermarket, when I’ve bought, say, two pints of ice cream (don’t judge!) and they are different flavors, but the cashier rings them up as two of the same flavor.  I mean, with all the computing power and analytics behind Big Data, don’t Ben and Jerry or at least Stop & Shop care that the same person who buys Chunky Monkey also buys Chubby Hubby, rather than two pints of Chunky Monkey?

And it seems like there are two issues – one is knowing the customer (she buys those flavors together) and the other is inventory (we have two fewer shots of decaf than we had before this transaction).

Maybe there is enough volume at supermarkets and Starbucks that it just doesn’t matter. Maybe Starbucks knows that decaf is under-reported by 15% and rung up as high-test, so they compensate for that.  Or maybe they track stock based on other indicators, not based on transactions.  Maybe two Chunky Monkeys get rung up as often as two Chubby Hubbys.  

That leaves the customer side of it – knowing what customers want what things. And here’s where I really wonder what’s going on.  Something like “extra hot” probably isn’t rung up on the cash register.  (Even if I’m a more fairly compensated Starbucks barista, when it gets busy at the store, I’m going to focus on getting the drinks out, not ringing up all the adjectives).

But wouldn’t Starbucks want to know if everyone who orders decaf also orders extra-hot?  Even selfishly? (Maybe there’s something chemical that’s causing the coffee to come out colder. Or maybe the people who order decaf want it to warm their hands.)  What about a sudden increase in extra-hot requests without a change in weather?  (Maybe there’s something wrong with the machines at that store.)

And milk preference – what if people who order caramel lattes almost always order them with whole milk?  Maybe that means that skim caramel lattes don’t taste as good, so if someone orders that (~$.50 upsell on the caramel) they should be offered whole milk to try to gain them as a syrup-adding customer.  Or maybe it means that people who order whole milk lattes are prone to being open to syrup combinations, so they should be offered a “hazelnut caramel” whatever-a-ccino with an extra syrup upsell.

The truth is, Starbucks is doing pretty well without my crack team analysis.  I just spend so much time reading and learning about Big Data from the technology side that the mechanics of implementing it in retail are a fascinating thought experiment for me.

Spoiler alert: “Yet”

It’s been a crazy few weeks as we get ready for 2015 at work.  Lots of meetings, lots of planning, and lots of change.  Some days I’m in a complete panic, but mostly I am optimistic that this work will pay off with a smooth plan for how we execute in 2015.

I’ve noticed that as I am working on progressively bigger projects with broader scope, I’m not comfortable saying “I don’t know.”  Several times each day, I’m in fast-paced meetings where we’re making big decisions, and not knowing just doesn’t cut it.

So I’ve started to answer questions differently. Subtly, I’ve made the shift from:

“I don’t know”
to
“I don’t know yet”

It’s a sign to whoever’s asking that I’m engaged, and I want them to ask me that kind of thing again in the future.  It’s a reminder to myself that this topic or type of question is something I need to be better prepared to address if I want to work at this level.

“I don’t know” means more than “I don’t know”; it means “I don’t know and also I don’t know how to form an opinion for next time you ask.”

“I don’t know yet” means “I don’t know because I don’t have all the information I need or the framework to have an opinion, but I’m going to figure that stuff out so keep me in the game.”

Sheryl, do you think your hiring plan is appropriate for our growth?
Sheryl, do you think we can achieve those goals on the screen?
Sheryl, should those be internal or external resources?

I don’t know…yet.

Last week, I attended the Massachusetts Conference for Women. I had gone last year, and was

The women from Infinio enjoying the conference lunch keynote.

very excited to attend again.  It’s a huge event – upwards of 10,000 women attend.

My Uber driver was an immigrant from Ethiopia whose daughter recently finished her degree in Ethiopia in….Gender Inequality!  So he was really interested to hear about both the conference and whether I thought his daughter had any job prospects here.

The conference itself was amazing.  Riding down the huge escalators in the morning, I saw the expo floor already teeming with women, eager and excited.  There was palpable energy in the air, and it was immediately apparent upon arriving in the ballroom.  The highlight of the morning keynotes were definitely Tory Burch (fashion designer) and John Jacobs (co-founder of Life is Good.)  Tory’s story was very understated of how she’s become a top lifestyle brand, and John was just full of life and enthusiasm.

The morning sessions I went to were pretty good.  In particular, I enjoyed the panel discussion on work/life balance.  That seems to be code these days for “tips to get your kids picked up from daycare” but that was fine with me.  It was a very practical discussion of what models work for several women in different industries.  For the first time, I felt like I was equivalent to one of the women on the panel, not just learning from an expert.

Lunch had several impressive keynotes, most notably Lupita Nyong’o and Hillary Clinton. Nyong’o talked about how she got from Kenya to the Academy Awards; her talk was really one about following your dreams because nothing else will feel right.  Secretary Clinton was, of course, in a class of her own.  She began by speaking about the deaths in Ferguson and New York, then spoke more generally about leadership and her experiences.  We all got a chuckle out of the moderator asking her what would the right qualities be for a “First Gentleman.”

In the afternoon, I attended a session on feedback that was okay – the thesis was that we practice and get a lot of training on how to give feedback, but don’t focus enough on receiving it.  I liked that idea but found the actual content a little basic.  I’ve thought about reading the speaker’s book, because maybe it is more in-depth and more relevant to me.

On my way to the coatroom, I was stopped by someone running the coaching area, and offered a free 10-minute coaching session that I couldn’t turn down.  I had a really interesting and helpful talk with Laurie McAnaugh, who was masterful at getting to the crux of the issue I had brought up.

My takeaways this year were vastly different than those of last year.  Perhaps a little less star-struck and a little more interested in practical advice, I ended the day feeling and thinking the following:

1. The theme of needing to bring one’s personal “self” into work and align values was louder than I had heard it in the past.  I don’t know if it’s the next iteration of work/life balance, or if I was just listening for something different this year.

2. There was practically no content for non-traditional families – speakers used “husband” pretty liberally, only sometimes remembering to also offer “partner” and nearly never recognizing that there were likely many single women and single moms in the audience.  While I’m married to a man, I think talking to a more diverse audience helps everyone better understand options, challenges, and sensitivity.  Would have liked to see more of that.

3. The feedback session stayed in my head; not because I learned a lot from it, but more because I thought a lot of its content was rooted in having a lack of confidence.  In fact, a lot of the content throughout the day was about building confidence, and not suffering from impostor syndrome, and I struggled with that – because I don’t relate to it.  The issues and challenges I have with getting to the next level aren’t ones of confidence.   Good news/bad news I guess.

What most surprised me was that I felt different coming out of this year’s conference than I had last year’s.  Less elation, more introspection.  But another good year nonetheless.