Author: Jeff Shearer

  • Smartphone etiquette

    At some point in the last decade it’s become commonplace, even accepted, to whip out our smartphones at the slightest lull in conversation to catch up on our digital lives instead of the social scene in front of us.

    It’s why you see people on dinner dates independently scrolling Instagram feeds. Checking in on something more interesting, apparently, than what and who is at their table.

    But we didn’t always have smartphones to distract us. Perhaps we used to pass the time with a book. Wouldn’t it look odd to whip out a book at dinner with friends to fill an awkward silence? So why have we normalized this behavior with smartphones?

    I’m much more aware of this while I’ve been relatively shut off from anything interesting on my phone these past few weeks. I certainly feel more present in the moment, but it’s a double edged sword, because I also notice how absorbed most people are with their devices.

    It can be frustrating to be the only person in the room with a “dumb” phone.

  • The one thing

    Marketing is full of advice of the “one thing” you need to do to achieve success. The right channel. The right kind of content. The right audience.

    Yet the truth is, it’s never just one thing. If it was, we’d all have marketing pretty well solved by now.

    We’re all operating in different environments (both internally and externally). What works for me may not work for you. The audiences are different. The use cases vary. It’s impossible to copy an idea or hack and expect it to perform the same in a completely new setting.

    Yet we act as if this isn’t the case. As if we just need to assemble the right collection of point solutions to solve all our problems. And we act surprised every time our plans don’t fall into place.

    If there is “one thing” to do, it’s to take nothing for granted, to make no assumptions. What was a smashing success today may be a flop tomorrow. But this constant reinvention and improvisation is the whole appeal of marketing. If it were easy, everyone would do it the same way. And sometimes it feels as if everyone IS doing it the same way. But the real success is found at the edges, for those willing to embrace uncertainty and to try sometime new.

  • A leads-less Salesforce

    One of the age old defaults of Salesforce is the leads object, and once you use it, it’s hard to move away to any other process. But the leads and lead conversion system system feels antiquated with the way most companies use SFDC today. And a new idea is starting to catch on, one using a leads-less CRM, and living entirely in the contacts object.

    This is interesting on paper, but poses all sorts of challenges. For instance, how do you deal with accounts that potentially house hundreds of contacts. What about accounts for no-name businesses?

    Are you simply moving the mess from one place to another?

    I won’t claim to have one true solution here, but were you to consider a shift to a contacts-only model, there’s a few steps needed first.

    Before you even think of tackling a move away from the lead object, you’ve got to get your filtering dialed in for what justifies an account to be created. The junk just can’t make it over to the contacts object in the first place. Ideally, it shouldn’t be created in the system at all.

    You also still likely need some sort of lead-to-account (L2A) matching system in place, as figuring out where to place a lead initially is still required, especially for most marketing automation systems. You can’t just shut off that object and functionality. Plus, whatever you use for matching must be dialed in precisely to the way your account hierarchies work. If you have global and regional accounts in a parent-child relationship, or subsidiaries housed in the same account, you must account for these nuances in any L2A system.

    The most likely scenario is a world where you have the lead object solely housed for the junk that couldn’t get matched, and any truly net new accounts that have no home yet on the accounts table. Plus any records matched to existing accounts are auto-converted to live on the account where they belong.

    Perhaps this solves the data organization challenge, but the next issue, arguably the most tricky, is properly prioritizing contacts for sales teams. Unlike with a lead queue where a team can just work through a big list of new names, contacts must be sorted from inactive to those showing buying behavior.

    The irony to this is that such prioritization of contacts has always been necessary, but removing leads from the equation tends to shine a light on these systemic issues.

    The shift to a contacts-only model can be worth all this trouble – but it takes a serious investment and partnership between sales, sales and marketing operations, and business systems teams to pull it off successfully.

  • Teachers

    In school it’s easy to tell the distinguish a great course from a bad one. And it always revolves around the quality of the teacher. It had nothing to do with the necessity of the course, or even the quality of the subject matter. It was all about the delivery.

    Teacher quality is the difference between being present and attentive in class and deciding to skip and read up later.

    Most of us aren’t teachers in title, but chances are the opportunities to teach, especially in a presentation setting, are endless. So consider: why you’re delivering the content in this format versus an email? What will you bring to the table to make this an unmissable presentation. What are the costs for not delivering on that plan? Consider the great teachers in your life – what made them special? How can you fold those lessons into your own style?

  • Counting down the blocks

    When I go for a run in my neighborhood, I have a ritual of counting down the blocks on the way back. The way back is uphill—the harder part of the run. I’m already tired from the first half. And counting down the blocks is how I mentally chunk up the remaining work to make it feel more doable.

    If I were to say to myself “only two more miles to go”, that’s going to cause me to lose some steam pretty quickly. But if I treat each block as a chip away at the greater whole, I can keep myself going.

    It’s worth considering this approach in work too. It’s easy to end up with these huge ideas or projects that feel like a massive undertaking. But the trick to getting them done is of course to break them up into smaller chunks. How small? Small enough that you can knock them out regularly, say every few days, and not feel a loss of momentum.

    The hard part, I’ve found, is to regularly assemble all the pieces back together again to observe how far you’ve come. The big picture is what gets us started. The small picture is what keeps us going.

  • Default reports

    A quick way to get into trouble in a company that uses Salesforce is to try and use the default reports to draw your conclusions.

    Default reports are easy to access. They’re familiar. But they’re almost always not the true story. And looking to them for answers is likely to only lead you astray. The reason is simple: most companies are a lot more complicated than a default report can account for.

    There’s data from different teams that are measured differently. There’s legacy processes. There’s filtering to consider. Bottom line, a default report is an easy way to see some numbers, but rarely is it showing the right ones.

    Which is why I’m so surprised most companies don’t just disable the default reports entirely. Maybe Salesforce doesn’t allow it. Or maybe it’s because doing so means that someone is now on the hook to provide the “right” data.

    Maybe it’s a bit of column A and column B. But it’s worth the effort to try and restrict these reports (or at least discourage their use), because the time saved by ignoring the issue is increasingly outweighed by the harm caused by arming people with bad or misleading data.

    The more time I spend in these tools, the more I recognize the need for dedicated analysis & data functions across departments. We just can’t hope to continue using data effectively with only the bare minimum provided by the default tools. The story has gotten too complex, and we’re doing it a disservice by trying to take a shortcut.

  • Busy vs meaningful work

    You can easily burn through a work day just by checking email, slack, and going to meetings. It’s easy to spend your day doing that, because it requires little thoughtful effort, at least compared to pursuing what actually needs to get done. That’s not to say these tasks are unimportant. But all too often we build our days around the busy work rather than the meaningful work.

    We stick to the easy tasks because they often give the impression that they’re work that matters. These activities give the feeling of progress and work, even though they’re mostly empty calories in the work world. I don’t mean to say they are never worthwhile— simply that we shouldn’t build our days around them.

    The only trick I’ve found to making the meaningful work happen consistently over the busy work is to schedule it. For me, that’s the literal act of blocking time in the calendar for the tasks that matter each week.

    It’s a little onerous to maintain at first, but it comes more naturally as you do it regularly. And the benefit is that because it’s on your calendar, the mere act of scheduling means other tasks, namely meetings, cannot sneak in as easily.

    Give it a try if you’re struggling to get the right work done.

  • Reach vs Relevancy

    When we think about reach vs relevance to our audience as marketers, the solution is often to go more targeted, more specific, with smaller, more homogeneous audiences, rather than the mass marketing days of before.

    And I think most marketers recognize now that relevancy, rather than reach, is the new goalpost.

    Yet most of us are still marketing for reach like before. And I think it’s because we’re afraid.

    Once we submit to the idea that we’ve got to focus on targeted, meaningful messages to specific groups, the quality and execution of our campaigns are much more on the line than ever before. There’s nowhere for bad copy, bad design, or bad strategy to hide. And I suspect a lot of marketing teams just aren’t equipped to live up to these new standards yet.

    In a mass marketing environment, we can send out a mediocre campaign and still get mediocre results. But in a hyper-targeted world, anything short of excellent isn’t likely to yield much at all.

    I talk a lot about the shortage of technical skillsets in marketers, but true creative talent—the kind that can make an okay campaign a great one—is as rare or rarer to find. For marketers to live up to the promise of personalization and relevancy, we’ve got to start investing more in the talent that makes that happen. Otherwise we’ll build the technology to do it all, but have nothing meaningful to say with it.

  • Advice for students

    I talk to a lot of marketing students eager to get into the workforce. Most have a very specific plan for what they want to do. I admire that, because I was the same as a student.

    But as I look back on the winding path of my career so far, I’m reminded that rarely are our long term plans a straight shot destination. And a lot of the detours I ended up taking in my career made me better for it. Some, like my shift over to marketing automation, totally changed my career trajectory.

    So my advice to students with a specific plan for what they want to achieve in their career – keep that plan in mind for the long term. But keep things flexible in the short term. Explore and say yes to the detours early on – it may seem frustrating to depart from the course you set ahead of time, but most of the time, you can find your way back to the original path later. The value of staying flexible to early opportunities is you get to explore scenarios you may never have considered. You get to build additional skills, which, while they may not be apparently valuable to the career dream you originally had, will help give you a unique mix of skills that if anything, makes you more valuable in future roles.

    As a hiring manager, some of the most interesting and valuable candidates I’ve hired have been those who’ve had an unconventional path, and possess skills unlike the average applicant who checks all the boxes, and nothing more.

  • Digital Declutter – 1 Week

    Last week I started a month-long digital declutter experiment. No distracting apps or social media. No meaningless time sinks. This isn’t a complete disconnection – it’s purely an elimination diet of the tech in my life that (I suspect) don’t provide a positive return on the time investment required to maintain them.

    I’m already a fairly low media-usage guy. I haven’t used Facebook in years, I’m more of a lurker on Twitter & Instagram than an avid poster. But I still found myself on most of these and other sites far too often, mindlessly scrolling as a default time-killing action.

    As I started this project, I completely closed off a whole list of sites and apps from access.

    And what I noticed first was how disorienting it all was. When you are used to a certain cue-habit-reward loop and you completely interrupt it, it can be jarring. For instance, I found myself still attempting to check Twitter multiple times in a few minutes, despite each time being reminded that the app was blocked. It was, if nothing else, a quick way of seeing how deep these habits had formed.

    But like any good advice on habits will tell you, you can’t simply stop a bad habit – you must replace it with an equally satisfying alternative that works on the same cues, and provides a similarly appealing reward. You’re just substituting the habit for a more productive one.

    For me, those substitutions revolve around reading, exercise and productive hobbies. So when that urge to check Youtube arises, instead refocusing your attention on reading a few pages from a great book (Right now I’m reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring). It’s not a perfect substitution yet – but the fact that I physically cannot access a distracting site, even if I want to, makes the transition a little easier.

    The other observation I’ve had so far is how boring a smartphone becomes when strip it down to pure utility. It no longer is a screen to pour my idle moments into. There’s really no reason to check it more than a few times a day.