In the Scott Vaughn episode of the Martech podcast, they mention two metaphors describing the interplay between brand and demand in a marketing strategy.:

1. Demand is like eating sugar while brand is like eating your vegetables.
2. Demand gen is like taking painkillers, while brand is like taking your vitamins

This isn’t a knock against the discussion, which I enjoyed, but I’m not sure either metaphor really works. A better one might be:

“Demand is your daily diet, while brand is your long term exercise habits.”

The effort and results of demand, like diet are much more visible every day. They’re also much more measurable. You can see exactly what you put in your body every day. And you can make the choice to put junk in for a short term boost, or quality food that builds long term health.

Brand is like your long term workout routine. You don’t necessarily see the change immediately, but it compounds over time. It’s harder to quantify the benefit of a two mile run in the same way as that pack of potato chips you just ate. Similarly, the stakes of failure in brand have more immediate long term consequences. Twisting your ankle at the gym is going to take a lot longer to recover from than cheating that one day on your low carb diet.

This metaphor also speaks better to the synergy between demand and brand. The two support each other for the health of the business, just like exercise and a balanced diet are both needed for a healthy lifestyle.

When I describe my career, I tend to focus on the tangible stuff. The systems I build, the insights I derive, the efficiencies I create. But I tend to overlook the softer aspects of my work that are often what matter most. Most of all, socialization of projects and education of others in the organization outside my own team.

The assumption is that we toil away on some complex idea, and produce a brilliant solution that (we assume) everyone should appreciate as much as us. Certainly others can see it’s value as clearly as we do, we tell ourselves. The famous sales and marketing misalignment I think is mostly caused by this disconnect. One team believes they’ve got the obvious solution to a problem, but fail to put that solution in terms other teams can relate to or even understand.

If the first problem is not tailoring the message to the audience, then the second mistake is not enough repetition. I used to treat training on a new process as a one-and-done deal, and then would get frustrated by questions whose answers I thought should be obvious to others by now. If feels odd to hear yourself constantly repeating yourself, but to the outside world, it comes off less as repetitive and more as consistent.

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listing, everything must be said again.” – Andre Gide

I’m in hiring mode right now, so I’ve been reviewing a ton of applications lately. A few observations:

1. Any online job posting is likely to have hundreds, even thousands of people applying “cold”. It is very easy to miss good candidates in this situation. Leverage any connection you have at the company to solicit a referral or introduction to hiring manager or recruiter. Without it, your odds of even getting a “thanks but no thanks” emailw are extremely slim.
2. On resumes specifically:
3. Actually tailor your cover letter and resume to the job at hand. Prioritize relevant experience, and leave out anything that isn’t at least tangentially related to the job at hand. Hiring managers and recruiters are scanning hundreds of these applications quickly, looking for key terms and statements. These systems are also usually flooded with completely irrelevant applications. If you do not highlight your relevance to the job immediately, you’ll get missed.
4. If you can’t fit all your relevant accomplishments on one page, it’s a sign you’ve got way too much in your resume.
5. Similarly – If you’re listing Microsoft office as your skills, it’s a sign you have more trimming to do.
6. Actually describe what you accomplished at each role. A list of just titles and dates is useless.
7. For email marketers specifically – No one is impressed by vanity metrics like how many emails you sent monthly. Tell me about long term improvement to conversion rate or revenue driven, and I might care a bit more. Just be prepared to back up any numbers with explanation.

Think about when you’re asked by someone to build an exception. To move their request to the top of the stack. To bend the rules. It’s totally up to you what you say “yes” to, but for most of us, it’s a default reaction. It’s human nature to want to please others, and saying yes to others’ requests is an easy way to satisfy that need.

Just remember when you say yes to one project, you’re saying no to others. Even if you don’t recognize that transaction now, it’s still taking place.

The easy solution to this is to delay the answer a bit. Not long, maybe only a few hours, or a day or two. Enough to look at the request alone, without the social pressure, and separate the desire to please someone with the hard facts of the request at hand.

I’m working on a lot of data projects right now, and building out basic reporting chief among them. It’s logical, straightforward work to me, but I’m always amazed at the reactions I get from non-ops people that such reporting is even possible.

It’s easy to take for granted your own contributions – since they’re what you know, they tend to seem easier and less significant than the work of others – work you’re less familiar with.

Recognize if what you’re doing feels trivial or basic, it’s always helpful to get an outside perspective on it. You may often surprise yourself at the value you provide with seemingly “simple” solutions.

But remember this can cut both ways. You can build something you think anyone should be able to understand, and the rest of your team might look at you like you’re speaking another language.

“Simple” is subjective.

It’s easy to let your day devolve into a rotating series of distractions. Procrastination has never had an easier time taking over from the work we probably should be doing.

Yet it seems to have trouble with already busy people. Distractions just don’t have the same appeal for people who have no time for them.

So if you’re stuck in an unproductive cycle – try making yourself busy. Sign up for that highly visible project. Take on that extra client. Soon you’ll have little time for time wasting.

Hyper personalization and targeting get a lot of attention these days, and for highly competitive markets, they’re probably what’s needed to stand out.

But for the rest of us, just showing up with the basics is often enough.

There’s a brewery near me that hosts events for its members, and they usually send emails in advance of the events they organize. But when they send out reminders to register for an event, they never segment out the registrants. It’s a small, seemingly basic step for most of us, but the fact that they don’t is glaringly obvious. I’m not looking for email marketing brilliance from my local brewery. Just basic competence.

Yet the same lesson is often needed for bigger organizations and marketing teams. They get so hung up on the fancy bells and whistles of their technology that they neglect doing basic segmentation, and end up doing more harm than good.

You won’t win any awards by filtering out customers who aren’t relevant to that upcoming event announcement. And that’s the point.

Seth Godin just wrote a post that I think should be required reading for anyone in marketing, particularly marketing ops. It boils down to three principles of data:

“First, don’t collect data unless it has a non-zero chance of changing your actions.”

It’s easy to think we should track a metric or action just because it’s easy to do so. Even if we may not use the data for anything meaningful. Most of the tools we use are set up to collect more than we need. But all this extraneous data is just noise in the system. And data shouldn’t be something we collect just to save for a rainy day. This of course has consequences with users, when they learn about your reckless data collection practices. Think of all the apps that inexplicably ask for access to your phone’s contacts, photos, location, and more, without any validation for why.

“Second, before you seek to collect data, consider the costs of processing that data.”

These costs are both in terms of hard financial and time costs in processing the data, but also in the risk you assume by having the data at all. Do you really need all that PII about your contacts? What’s the cost if that data were to leak out?

“Third, acknowledge that data collected isn’t always accurate, and consider the costs of acting on data that’s incorrect.”

This is perhaps the nearest to those in marketing ops dealing with messy CRM data, and unreliable data providers. Demands for better segmentation and personalization have never been higher, yet the quality of most CRM data is arguably no better than before.

I often say marketing ops best friend ought to be their counterpart in sales ops. And that’s true for a lot of reasons. But one practical example: sales ops can save your hide when it comes to navigating the nuance of reporting data.

Suppose you’re trying to run reports off pipeline, and using some standard opp fields to do it. It’s easy to assume fields like record type, stage, etc are all straightforward, no-nonsense filters to use. Why wouldn’t a “New Logo” opportunity type mean just that?

All too often, there’s more to the story than that. Maybe there’s edge cases to consider. Or a hidden, custom workaround. And sales ops are typically the group best equipped to help you avoid these land mines.

When you have a young puppy, like I do right now, you learn a lot about habit forming. Puppies learn from positive reinforcement and play. But most of all, they from repetition.

It takes a puppy weeks to learn commands and house training. Weeks of scheduled repetition. Incentives and rewards. Day after day. We know how to exploit this with dogs, yet our own habit forming systems aren’t all that different.

I think it’s because we try and shortcut this process. We assume the new habit will just “stick”. Instead, we should learn from the puppies for once, and embrace the fact that learning anything worthwhile takes repetition and time.