Most people think of January as the time of change and the time of new beginnings, but for B2B organizations, the New Year begins much earlier. Why? Because Q3 and Q4 opportunities not only make the numbers for that year but by landing them, companies avoid having to cut cost or headcount, painful changes that would impact growth in the following year.

Many B2B companies are getting into the thick of planning for the next year in Q4 and are also still closing the current year. The dreaded fourth quarter is the time when it all has to come together so companies can deliver the results they promised to the board. This is when most firms try to pull out all stops and execute their way to success for this year and lay the groundwork for continued growth next year.

Here are three initiatives for CEOs to launch and complete in Q3 already to ensure a successful fourth quarter that helps both, this year and next:

Analyze marketing and sales pipeline

Many organizations simply use their sales automation software to track deals, and their marketing automation software to send out email blasts. Best practice, however, is to set aside time now to extract the treasure troves of data hidden in those tools. Use that data to objectively diagnose the sales and marketing processes and get meaningful insights into why opportunity pipelines are growing in some places and not growing fast enough in others.

The third quarter usually already contains the signs of things to come, and now is the time to interpret those signs. For example, the sales pipeline might not be growing fast enough or the close rates not arcing up as business model projections demand. Or it’s important to understand which marketing campaigns and events worked, which sales pitches and sales reps performed better than others, and why. Where are the segments where prospects have a higher likelihood of buying, and why?

Typically, there will be board meetings in September and in January where the above questions about this year’s performance and what’s needed to continue or recover growth next year will be discussed. Pulling together a data-driven strategy of where the company did well and where it needs to do better, and what the root causes were for both require time and keen analyses.

The strategic CEOs start now to diagnose what worked and what didn’t and develop the plans for Q4 and the new year that can be credibly presented at the next board meetings. For that, crawling through both the marketing funnels as well as the sales opportunity pipelines and extracting meaningful insights are key to having a success-prone growth strategy.

Reach out to customers

The fourth quarter often is the time for some last-minute changes in prospects’ or customers’ environments as residual budgets for the fiscal year must be spent. Especially if their current year is leaving certain tasks undone or issues need to be corrected, they are often willing to try a few different things to make their fourth-quarter a success or have their ducks in a row for hitting the ground running on January 2.

Striking those irons while hot can help close last-minute deals or launch new relationships that can be harnessed later. Active CEOs willing to pick up the phone or even travel during these last weeks of the year can help open or land those types of deals. And staying in close touch with both, the sales force but also their own newsfeeds of what’s going on in their marketplaces is crucial to have a sense of the market.

Prospective customers love that kind of attention, and especially if they’re uncertain about the viability or reliability of a new vendor, seeing that type of initiative and interest can often sway the votes in favor of a deal. And, of course, the fourth quarter is also the time of last-minute deals, and having the CEO in the room to approve price concessions or special contractual terms on the spot is a sales rep’s dream.

Roll out needed process or organizational changes

When CEOs take the time to do both, deeply analyze the data underlying their marketing and sales pipelines, as well as go into the field to meet with prospects and customers, they will get a very detailed view of what’s working and what not in their sales and marketing organizations. Nothing beats collecting your own data and impressions and hearing from the market firsthand how your company and your team stack up.

Sometimes this leads to painful realizations. From a top-down perspective, there is the need to make sure sales and marketing cost structures are matched to the incoming revenues, and if those are soft, the inevitable cuts need to occur. Unfortunately, most organizations in that situation decide to cut marketing first, and sales later under that theory that if I’m on a deserted island, I’ll cut out the food first, then water, and last the oxygen.

The problem with that approach is that it simply borrows from the future, and when the lead generation activities stop because those teams are gone, then sales might still close some opportunities in the upcoming quarter, but the following quarter is now lead starved, and in a few months those chickens will come home to roost in terms of more missed revenue targets.

Conversely, we have also seen when marketing leads started growing, but sales hiring did not keep pace. When marketing started overproducing leads relative to the sales organization’s capacity to absorb and land those deals, there was an opportunity cost of revenue that could have been generated had the staff been available to close available opportunities.

So, smart CEOs don’t do department-wide, blanket cuts, or grow sales over marketing or vice versa, producing capacity imbalances that hamper growth (the organization will only grow at the rate of the smaller of those two departments). Instead, they add or delete headcount and programs as their proven results and impact warrant it.

Knowing your market and your pipelines intimately will make decisions much clearer, and the likelihood of your team producing positive results become much higher when compared to blanket hiring or layoff decisions.

Summary

These are all tough things to do, especially when just closing the fourth quarter absorbs everyone’s full-time attention. If that’s the case, then that’s when external help can work to produce faster, unbiased insights or provide data-driven insights into where customers are buying and why and where not.

Whether external help is involved or it’s all done in-house, pulling together well-thought-out analyses of what’s working this year and what needs to improve next year requires the willingness to have honest and productive conversations between sales and marketing, so everyone can work together to get to the bottom of issues that might be plaguing your go-to-market machinery.

Both, revenue performance this and next year will benefit when that happens, and the inevitable board meetings in Q4 and Q1 will go much more smoothly.

The post Practical Tips for CEOs to Make the Most of Q4 appeared first on Premonio.

Regardless of what we might tell ourselves, our businesses, jobs and teams are not immune to self-induced fear. Our fears and anxieties affect both our individual well-being as well as the businesses we are a part of, often resulting in poor decisions and strategies.

In leadership, figuring out how to drive growth isn’t only about MBA-school topics such as go-to-market strategies or pipeline management. It’s about managing fear too—fear and anxieties in your own mind and the minds of your friends and colleagues.

Strategic Thinking Derailed by Fear

Many organizations continue to treat marketing as if it’s a tactical, short-term solution to generating immediate leads for their sales teams. A study performed by Accenture found that 37% of the 535 global-company CEOs who responded to the survey said that their CMOs would be the first fired if corporate growth targets weren’t met.

This type of short-term thinking kills the creativity required for marketing to deliver results.

“I blame it more on a business culture,” says Peter Field, author of an IPA report that analyzes marketing campaign effectiveness. “Marketers often [understand the need for long-term thinking] but their problem is they cannot convince the CFO, who is saying ‘I don’t give a damn about the long term, I just want a good quarter’. It is unreasonable to expect marketers to address the long term when their jobs and livelihoods are on the line.”

Instead, business leaders need to understand that marketing is more a marathon than a sprint. It takes strategic thinking and long-term planning. It doesn’t always produce overnight success, especially for startups who do not have brand recognition or more than a handful of customers. Getting people to hear your message and talk about your brand takes time.

Understanding Fear as an Inhibitor to Growth

Nurturing a culture where long term strategic thinking is encouraged and employees feel empowered, are essential traits of a healthy organization. But leaders can’t do that if they haven’t mastered their own negative, fear-driven thoughts.

In our age of rationality, many of us believe that reason is the only viable method of making decisions. Antonio Damasio, neuroscientist and author of Descartes’ Error, disagrees. Through a series of tests, Damasio has shown that using reason alone is inadequate. He works with patients who had damaged the part of their brain where emotions are generated. It made them unable to make simple decisions—should I have turkey or chicken for dinner?

Emotions play a huge role in our everyday lives. One day we might get into an argument with a colleague and tomorrow feel ashamed for the way we spoke. Psychologists have found that much of our thinking happens outside the realm of conscious reason and it’s beyond its control.

“Sometimes when we’re afraid of something,” Christopher Bader, a Chapman sociology professor told the New York Times, “even if our fears are irrational, that can lead us to make choices that will actually cause the thing that we are avoiding.” The concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy—how your perception of reality can make the very thing you dread become true—isn’t new. Emotions such as fear trigger negative thoughts that affect our brains.

Anxiety can become a habit—your comfort zone. If that’s where you are, you can’t lead effectively.

Self-Awareness is Key to Confident Leadership

Psychologists, Dan Joseph and Daniel Newman, recently did a comprehensive study that examined the link between emotional intelligence and job performance. They discovered that in jobs that required extensive attention to emotions, higher emotional intelligence translated into better performance. Marketing and sales fall into these categories.

Emotional Intelligence (EQ or EI) is a term popularized by Dan Goleman in his book, which was on The New York Times bestseller list for a year-and-a-half. Goleman shares that although the qualities commonly associated with leadership are intelligence, decisiveness, determination and vision, they are not enough. The most effective leaders have a solid degree of emotional intelligence. In fact, he reveals direct links between a leader’s emotional intelligence and measurable business results.

Self-awareness, a key aspect of Emotional Intelligence, is a subtle force that is easily missed by those who lack it, but it is an essential quality of great leaders.

Being self-aware means that you are in touch with your own truth. When you lack self-awareness, you are more likely to take an authoritative and fear-driven approach to management. You often don’t have an accurate read on a situation, might behave in ways that demoralizes your employees and you might lack empathy. Your behavior could cause employees to operate from a position of fear—they won’t speak up, take risks, be creative or cooperate.

With a high degree of self-awareness and emotional intelligence, leaders can disarm anxieties that ultimately reduce productivity and create conflict.

One way to start this process of changing your own thinking is to keep repeating positive thoughts often. Whenever an anxious thought enters your mind, don’t give it the focus it’s craving, observe it without judging it, and then either focus on something else (such as your breath) or replace it with a positive thought. Doing so reshapes your brain over time to make pathways to new ideas and habits. It’s a concept called neuroplasticity, based on neuroscience.

With time, you will experience changes in the way you think and how you interact with others, improving your own life and the life of others.

The post What Does Managing Fear Have to do with Marketing Effectiveness? appeared first on Premonio.

However, over time, it became clear that the finance and efficiency-dominated mental frameworks that still seem to guide managerial instincts and decision making in Manhattan, have slowed down its pace of innovation. This was especially true when compared to the growth and innovative leadership styles that have, in the meantime, emerged in Silicon Valley.

There were tangible differences from the start. First of all, it was difficult finding employees with the right skillset to use modern, cloud-based business management tools. Secondly, there was a lack of familiarity with new lead generation methods including nurture marketing or account based marketing across the organization. There were other differences too—more subtle perhaps, but still very important. In Silicon Valley, there is emphasis on independence of employees and their empowerment to be problem solvers, whereas in New York, I realized that there seems to be a structured top-down approach with employees following tightly defined management directives.

I’m not trying to position this blog into a mouthpiece for political ideologies. But these trends are worth pointing out because emerging marketing technologies are outpacing outdated management models. This is analogous to what happened with the manufacturing quality revolution that returned to the USA from Japan in the 1980s. It resulted in a necessary overhaul of motivational management styles to encourage employees to not just perform tasks but do them well.

Modern marketing methods like account based marketing rely on employees entering data accurately, reporting outcomes transparently and truthfully, and constantly tuning marketing campaigns to optimize their performance. However, in a top down approach where employees are worried about getting laid off or not receiving approval from their managers, they will often not provide the data necessary to make the right decisions. In these environments, employees are often hesitant to share ideas that could help optimize marketing campaigns and associated analytics, which contribute to a high velocity, rapidly growing opportunity pipeline.

If you see employees as sources of innovation and the providers of new solutions to problems, you will give them access to all data and tools needed and tap into their technical expertise and instincts for what marketing techniques work in the market place.

If your management style is more top down, then you’ll run the risk that they won’t tell you what you need to hear because they’re concerned that you might not want to hear the truth or that they could get in trouble. In the latter mindset, the company is more likely to view employees as cost centers that need to be managed and kept in check, because their sole contribution is to execute tasks, but not be consulted for their intellectual contribution and innovative thoughts.

Whether employees are seen as cost centers or as sources of growth has massive implications:

Empower autonomous decision making vs. enforcing directive management

• More brain power: In the empowered model, all the employees’ are thinking and coming up with solutions vs. just the executive staff. What’s the impact? More Bottom-up ideation and faster resolution of problems. With technologies like cloud based management systems or social media networks, the younger, more junior employees will be the ones knowing how to leverage them. If they keep silent, the organization loses out.
• Upside down pyramid: In the empowered model, management sets the overall goals and budgets, then asks the employees to put the plans together to achieve those goals. Management’s role then shifts to deliver needed resources and remove obstacles, and counsels as needed to accommodate budgetary or political realities.
• CEO commitment: If the CEO does not value analytics and transparency then modern, analytical marketing techniques are doomed to fail. The CEO needs to step up to this responsibility to leverage all the dashboards, analytics and real-time data the new marketing systems provide.

Drive needed cultural changes

• Celebrate corrective action: In a a complex lead generation environment that depends on leads coming through a multitude of channels like social, email, events, web traffic, or advertising, and that hinges on timely and accurate analytics, failure must be tolerated. At the onset of a new marketing initiative, no one will know what messaging, formats or channels will work, and thus everyone should be willing to shut down non-performing campaigns in favor of the ones that do perform. To that effect, management needs to define and fund the tools with which the employees can measure and improve their own department’s performance.
• Encourage risk taking: The entire system depends on trying new ideas. We used to rent latte machines for our events to drive traffic to our booth; even though the expense was significant, we tripled our lead volume through the booth from one year to the next. The same is true for new content pieces, messaging, or campaigns. Employees worried about getting tainted by failure will not initiate this needed experimentation.
• High ego vs. low ego: In a data-driven, fact-based organization there is no room for “because I said so” behaviors. The entire system depends on collecting data and accurately reporting on the conclusions that data drives. If politics or egos get in the way of accurate reporting, management will operate blind to the facts of what goes on at the frontline because data is withheld from them.

New kinds of employees:

• Hire self-motivated, self-starters: The entire philosophy of giving employees the tools to monitor their own work and their department’s performance only works if they can report bad news, as we described above, but they also need to be motivated to proactively find their own problems and improvement opportunities. Management needs to provide the tools and the culture for that to happen, but the employees need to seize the moment and truthfully drive the needed actions and analyses.
• Non-political problem solvers: We have written about the challenges of getting sales and marketing to work together, and especially during the ramp-up phases when marketing spends lots of money and no leads are flowing, the same can apply to marketing and finance. In a data-driven, transparent culture, management needs to constantly strive to eliminate political or manipulative behaviors because they are anathema to truth in reporting.
• Need to be detoxed from earlier experiences: I have always been amazed at how long it takes to get employees to trust that they will not be punished for reporting their mistakes, or for identifying improvement opportunities. Or for not supporting their management’s ideas, even if those ideas are outdated or bad. If someone has had past, bad management experiences, they may well be reluctant to contribute proactively and openly to the kinds of transparent analytics machine we have been talking about. If that’s the case, their trust needs to be earned so they begin to share the facts needed to optimize the lead machine.

Modern marketing machines with the associated real-time analytics are works of art. The upsides are motivated employees, high productivity, and faster and better innovation in the pursuit of rapidly growing pipelines.

There are no alternatives to efficiently and effectively leveraging these modern marketing and analytics approaches. We believe that the above dynamic is a contributor to the relative lack of innovation in certain sectors of the US economy: Distrust between management / investors and employees result in modern analytics tools and marketing methods to remain underutilized. As with the quality revolution of the 1980s, today’s innovation requires empowered employees who can be sources of growth. Autocratic or non-empowering management styles fail to leverage those technologies.

For some more reading, here are two relevant blogs on a related phenomenon, “Digital Taylorism”:

• New Taylorism: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21664190-modern-version-scientific-management-threatens-dehumanise-workplace-digital
• Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Taylorism

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