Seeing the Tree among the Forest

So what are the leading indicators that you're going to be swimming upstream against in your effort to bring behavioral marketing into your company? Initially, I'd consider how much your firm invests in marketing headcount. Typically, the fewer people your company has in marketing (commensurate with the size of the business), the harder your road is going to be.

You can look at the simple ratio of sales people to marketing people. Again, it depends a lot on your business model, but generally I see ratios of about five to eight sellers for every marketer for mature sellers that have a blend of marketing-based demand generation and sales-based closing.

It's also a warning sign if you've got one to two marketing people in total, whereas the sales group has continually grown past 10, 20, or 30 in the last year. That should be a clue your management team is very much focused on revenue growth but aren't truly understanding the geometric progression that happens when sales and marketing are working well together.

Finally, you should be able to take quick stock of your executives' skill level and familiarity with the discipline of marketing. If they believe your success hangs on great writing, pretty pictures, and good product-slick design, then know you're going to be pushing a decent-sized rock up a big hill. Be prepared to inform and educate your direct boss—or potentially your entire executive team—based on already-achieved milestones and simplistic business terms. Said crassly, you're going to have to dumb it down pretty significantly.

Where to Begin When You're Alone

If you're stuck in this unfortunate spot, I recommend a couple things right away. First, go find some local peers who are in similar-sized companies or the same industry. You can normally find them hanging out at local chapters of national groups such as the American Marketing Association or the Interactive Marketing Association; you can also look for groups on LinkedIn or work your own network to find similar people in related roles around town.

This step is critical because sometimes you're going to need a sounding board when building tests or defining campaign rules. In fact, I would be seeking to add this kind of knowledge to your own personal network immediately for two critical reasons: (1) support along your current journey, and (2) as a means for finding your next job at a more progressive company.

Second, I'd spend even more time upfront planning your journey, its milestones, and your own personal off ramp. Know that it's going to be difficult, and plan your exit upfront. This might sound harsh, but your optimism and job satisfaction can be ground down pretty quickly, and life's too short to absolutely hate your job. Pledge to yourself that you'll give it a 125 percent effort for a decent amount of time, and evaluate your progress honestly.

You'll remember that I spoke in Chapter 4 about how young marketers are often promoted by changing jobs; now's the time to experiment, learn, and prepare for your next role. What would you want to tell your next employer you achieved while working so hard to increase marketing performance in this insanely hostile environment?

Plan Less, Experiment More, and Document Everything

Now that you've accepted the challenge and set some personal boundaries, it's time to develop your approach. This might sound diametrically opposed to what I just said about taking more time up front, but I would spend less time actually laying out your plan. No one's going to need or want to see the fully blown plan before you begin executing, so why start down the path of analysis paralysis?

Accept that this is one of the few benefits you'll have with a hands-off executive team, but recognize that it also means you're probably working with a fixed budget and all the resources you're going to have. In other words, you must prove the business case later when you want to increase paid media spend or headcount—but at least you don't have to get everything pre-approved.

And on the subject of approvals, don't worry about gaining many up front. Rather, recognize with utter clarity that you need to execute solidly. Even if you figured out the ideal terms to describe your process and thinking, it's still going to fly 20,000 feet over their head. Your job is to maintain your executives' trust and continue to produce great results. The secret is you're working on a way to drive results 10 times the great ones of the past, but don't be foolish enough to try to convince them up front. Walk the walk; forget the talk.

Even though you're going to spend less time concocting ROI models and business cases up front, that doesn't mean you can attack the tasks with any less rigor. In fact, you should clearly recognize you're fighting a pretty big battle all by yourself, which means you'll need maximum creativity and to be testing far and wide across your tactics. Your appetite to experiment should far exceed what a traditional marketing manager who has weekly meetings with their boss would think about.

You must also prepare for all the harrowing moments when top-line performance dips a bit because you're testing that aggressively or when your budget doesn't grow year over year because sales slowed down based on market factors (not because of you cratering the sales function, which you'd better not ever even get close to!).

You must transfer the effort you would have normally spent upfront into an exacting focus on tracking, reporting, and analysis on the back side of your campaigns. There will come a point when you will need to convince an old-school boss that your new-school approach is better, faster, and creates more sales for the same investment, and you need to have the data to back up your assertion.

The problem is that you don't know exactly when that's going to happen. You may never get called out that aggressively or you might have to defend your entire budget, marketing approach, and core existence next Wednesday in the CEO's office. You must always have that business-proof case ready, so start early and keep that supersmart, concise PowerPoint deck constantly refreshed.

Knowing You've Won or Lost

Because this is such a tenuous effort, you've got to set some time- and sanity-based parameters. Otherwise, you're likely to fall into a dysfunctional rhythm with your dysfunctional company and will, therefore, waste very precious time in your career. Oddly enough, I believe this is more important the earlier you are in your career. You'll never get those formative years back, and you've got to hustle very fast early on to find your place in the work world.

If you manage to successfully integrate behavioral marketing thinking in this scenario and you've dragged an old-school group (somewhat quietly) kicking and screaming into the digital age, then that's an epic accomplishment. You might have just figured out your calling: driving change management and performance lift into old-school marketing teams. Congratulations! You now have a skill you can build on for the rest of your marketing career.

If, on the other hand, you gave it your best shot for a year or through a couple of product launches and your executives are just as clueless as when you began, it's time to throw in the proverbial towel. But keep in mind that the customer focus and behavioral aspects you were able to execute improved the situation and that things are better now than they would have been without your effort.

Get to work on finding a new gig, and keep in mind when attempting to find a more supportive environment that you want to look for the polar opposite of your current fixer-upper of a marketing department. And congratulations! You worked hard, took on a challenge, and truly tried to make things better. You've just injected yourself with a good dose of the grit I also talk about in Chapter 13, which is always a good thing.

Conclusion

Although this was very much geared to the individual practitioner trying to bring behavioral marketing to an old-school marketing group, it probably equally applies to a small group of less than three or four marketers working for a less-than-great marketing team. Maybe the only difference is who you complain to about how backward your company is; the individual likely bores his or her significant other, and the team probably spends lots of happy hours and lunches disparaging the situation.

Either way, changing the course of a marketing department is a tall order. There are often significant forces at play that keep things operating as they always have. For some, change is scary and create some existential questions like “Can I still be good at my job if it's changed this much?” Understanding the reason behind some of the pushback can be an eye-opening realization, and working around it elegantly can be the difference between failure and success.

So whether you're a single practitioner or a small group, I'd suggest you meet this challenge head on with action. Know that your best chance is to understand the existing expectations, and spend every minute of effort above those expectations on blowing them out of the water. Check the boxes on your everyday job while plotting an undeniable future state of marketing that's built around your customers' needs and is dynamic based on your customers' actions. Even if it doesn't work out at today's gig, it's killer training for the future.