(Note: In Spring 2006 I worked closely with two companies preparing for Initial Public Offerings. This transcript is from a curated series of late-night sessions I recorded to train the corporate marketing and sales teams. In these private trainings I answered their specific questions about the strategies and tactics (and art) of establishing your branding and positioning as unique and special, to give you the edge in a crowded marketplace. These have never been shared publicly before now, and even though the recording quality is poor there are some golden nuggets of information in each that will expand your understanding of these key topics and give your business the edge as well.)
You know, when we’re working at trying to determine a campaign and we’re looking at outcomes, quite often, a big problem is that we don’t real clearly identify what everybody thinks of as success. And that doesn’t mean that IS success, we need to figure out what we think success is, and minimal success, and determine how we come up with those figures.
I’m going to use an example for you. I did work for a very large nonprofit at one point. And 80% of their online sales had come from a dotcom that busted in 2001.
Now, that’s important. Because when they brought me in, what they wanted me to do was to DOUBLE their online sales! Now, I did not know that THEIR online sales were 20%, that their online presence was next to nothing, and they did not have a website that really was set up to do e-commerce at all!
I just looked at the sales figures and said, “Okay, well, if you’re doing that, then certainly doubling that is doable, and we can work out a campaign to do it. And that’s what I began doing.
Secondly, I did not understand that they only considered their online sales the sales that were from people who clicked through and put in their credit card ON their website, NOT any sales that were generated THROUGH the website.
Now, you know and I know a lot of people still are uncomfortable, and some for good reasons. with putting their credit card information online. I don’t know how many times you have, but I’ll often pick up and call on the phone, call the 800 number and talk with a representative.
So in the course of doing business for them, I did much more than DOUBLE the size of their actual web sales on their site. But more importantly than that, I DOUBLED the volume of their catalog sales directly from the website. I mean, We knew that was where it was coming from, it was trackable, and everything.
They considered that a failure.
They considered it a failure because the catalog sales weren’t part of work considered a part of their “Mental Metric” for what I was doing, and also because they wanted to double NOT what their site had done, but what a third party site had been doing, and do that from the tiny place they were at. Do I need to say as a large nonprofit, we weren’t talking to huge budget here, either!
So defining success up front is very, very, very, very important.
Because that will become the gauge for moving a program forward. Now reading this or listening to this, you’re probably thinking, “My gosh, if somebody could do that, for me, it’d be terrific!”
Well, it IS terrific… If you THINK it’s terrific! But Perception Is Reality and their perception was that that had NOT been successful. So instead of being able to take that program and continue to move it higher and higher to new levels, we basically mutually agreed: I left it.
And the company was not independently in business within about a year.
So, measure your success carefully, know what it is that you’re trying to accomplish, and then Do It. But BE HONEST About It In The Process!
