Marketing Headhunter

Four Jobs I've Had

Last night, I received the blogger's equivalent of a chain letter.  The Recruiting Animal (whom I like very much) sent me a note saying "Dennis Smith tagged me for his game and now I have to tag you.  You don't have to play.  But here are the rules.  List the following on your blog ..."  Okay.  Since it's Friday.

Four Jobs I've Had:

1. Telemarketer - It was the first time I realized that I could do business over the phone.  My shift supervisor called me The Jewell of the Dial.
2. Rock Drummer - As much fun as you can have without being a telemarketer.  Click here to download an MP3 of my drumming with Mercyland.
3. Frozen Beef Trader - Great job, if you like being only as smart as your dumbest competitor.
4. Marketing Consultant - How to sell abstractions for fun and profit!

Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over:

1. Passion of the Christ - Coming soon to an iPod near you.  I hope.
2. Saving Private Ryan - I'll never understand why Ryan and Co. don't kneecap the German machine gunner before letting him go.  Or at least break his hands with a rifle butt so that he can't come back later to fight!
3. Gladiator - What we do in life echos in eternity.
4. Stripes - "Chicks really dig me, because I rarely wear underwear, and when I do -- it's usually something exciting."

Four TV Shows I Love to Watch:

1. Seinfeld - Especially the Larry David episodes.
2. Curb Your Enthusiasm - Better than Seinfeld.
3. Sopranos - How easy it is to identify with them!
4. The Apprentice - I hate myself for watching ... but I watch it anyway.

Four Places I've Been on Vacation:

1. Manaus, Brazil
2. Dalian, China
3. Asuncion, Paraguay
4. Belfast, Northern Ireland

Four Favorite Dishes:

1. Sushi
2. Cold cereal
3. Ham and Swiss on rye
4. Zone Bars

Four Places I'd Rather Be:

There's no place like home, which is why I work out of my house in a tee shirt.  Basically, I'm Kramer.  Please keep this particular item confidential -- especially when referring your high-powered friends to me.  Thank you.

Four Bloggers I'm Tagging (in alphabetical order):

1. Andy
2. John
3. Hugh
4. Seth
5. SYP

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Using Video to Sell on eBay

For several years, I have been a trader of luxury wristwatches on Timezone, an online community of watch freaks.  I dunno, but there's just something awe-inspiring about the level of craftsmanship in a $3000 mechanical watch.  You can see the love that goes into every piece.  No kidding.  These artisans really care about every watch they make -- even though they'll never see it again after it leaves their shop.

Anyway, tonight -- for the first time ever -- I saw a seller use video to market a watch.  Click here to see his posting.  His basic-but-impactful video link follows:

I am sure it's only a matter of time before this tactic is common on eBay.  Maybe it's already happening.  Can video for recruiting blogs be far behind? ;->

An amazing footnote about the watch trading community:  We buy and sell sight-unseen using PayPal.  How trust-intensive is that?  Last week I bought a pre-owned RGM 151p for $1040 using PayPal.  And once I bought a pre-owned IWC UTC for $1925 from a seller in Australia.  I sold that watch for a profit and paid $2950 to a seller in Alaska for an IWC Portugieser ...

Only once have I been stung by a seller:  A guy in Chicago sold me an Eberhard Traversetolo "like new in box" -- and when it arrived I was crushed to find several scratches on the crystal.

He'll never work in this town again.

Why Financial Literacy?

Often I'm asked "Why do you believe that the most marketable marketing candidates are financially literate?"  Fair question.

The short answer is that the best marketers are realists -- and the most realistic marketers believe that there's nothing as devastating to an opinion as a number.  True, certain marketing disciplines (like direct mail) have always been math-driven -- where products, lists, and offers are scientifically tested to sift out which mailing worked best.

But now that mentality is securing a beach-head in the online space, thanks largely to analytics packages.  CEO's are becoming addicted to analytics reports -- and are they beginning to demand the same level of accountability for their company's mass marketing initiatives.  And why not?  Branding metrics like "recall" are just too abstract when compared to online key performance indicators (KPI's) like

• Unique visits per month
• Homepage bailout rate
• Page views per visit
• Average time spent on site
• Average order value
• Avg # of items p/ purchase, and
• Shopping cart abandonment rate

For sure, marketers from all disciplines are being called to develop a greater agility with numbers in order to account for the success of their campaigns in terms of their impact on their company's financials.  In fact, the measurability of a new marketing initiative can be just as important to senior management as the viability of the initiative in the first place.  No margin, no mission.

Let me give you an example:  Suppose your company wishes to enter a new market niche (this is called expeditionary marketing), and they have asked you -- as the VP of Marketing -- to assess the niche's attractiveness.  Certainly, understanding the mind of the target customer is critical.  But management would also want you to assess:

• What market, competitive, and technology risks does your project face -- and how can you quantify them?
• How will your revenue, expenses, and income develop?  Is there a "continuity" element to your revenue model?
• How will your cash flow develop?  When will you break-even in the new market -- and to what extent will you need to buy market share with discounts?
• How high is your need for financing based on your liquidity planning?  Put another way, how much cash is needed in the worst case scenario?
• What assumptions underlie your financial planning?
• Which sources of capital are available to you to cover your financing needs?
• What deal are you offering to potential investors or outside partners?
• What return can investors expect?
• How will they realize a profit?  What are their exit options?

Increasingly, great marketers are excellent intra-preneurs who can marshal internal and external resources to get the funding they need for their expeditionary marketing projects.  That means being savvy enough to speak the language of the risk-averse finance guys in your company.  Naturally, the better you can communicate with your internal stakeholders, the higher the likelihood your project has of getting a green light.

Click here for the best *FREE* financial training site on the internet.

A final note:  Most companies require that all expeditionary marketing initiatives meet a certain hurdle rate of return.  Usually, this hurdle rate must exceed the company's cost of capital.  If this sounds like Greek to you -- then simply buy a programmable financial calculator, like an HP 17B-II, and load the necessary financial routines into it.  Seriously.

Although I lack agility with numbers, I can understand and apply many financial and cost accounting concepts to my work simply because my HP 17B-II does the algebra for me.  This "crutch-enabled" analytical bias gives me the ability to ...

• Deal with ambiguity
• Manage and measure my marketing initiatives
• Negotiate in a fact-based manner that's hard on the issues and soft on the people
• Prioritize projects, knowing which activities will drive the highest payoff
• ... and more.

My HP 17B-II "keeps my candidates honest" because I have dozens of standard online and direct mail formulae at my finger tips during the phone call.  So for example, if a candidate claims to run a $10 million online business -- but he only reports 25,000 monthly unique visitors and an average order value of $500 on a 2% conversion rate -- I know he's full of baloney.

Furthermore, I can totally rattle such candidates by immediately back-solving for the correct conversion rate for a $10 million business:  6.67%.  This is very fun to do.
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Freelance Email Marketer Available

Alexandra Duemer has seven years of online marketing experience with such companies as PETsMART, Homestore.com, Motorsports Authentics, Honeywell, ColdStone Creamery, and Datek Online.  Her expertise ranges from email campaigns and web content to catalog copy and print campaigns.  Alexandra resides in Phoenix, but she is available via telecommute as a writing resource for $50/hour.  Click here to contact Alexandra directly.

Clever Banner Ad Attracts Top Talent

The Orvis Company is running online banner ads to promote their internet marketing job openings.  But here's a clever twist:  Orvis' ads will appear along side their competitors' job board postings -- such as this one from TJ Maxx.

Although I've never considered using banner ads to siphon off candidates directly from my competitor's job posts, the idea makes perfect sense:  One of the main reasons big companies like TJ Maxx optimise their job postings for search engines is to leverage their brands to attract the best talent.

The Orvis move nullifies TJ Maxx's advantage -- and in some ways, its banner seems to invite clicks more than TJM's actual job posting.  Certainly, the move makes Orvis look like a company that "gets" the internet -- thereby making it a more attractive place of employment for savvy online marketers.  Smart.
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"Before You Apply for Your Next Job..."

Here's a story about what Warren Buffett calls the sins of omission, those business mistakes that don't appear on a P&L but can be of enormous consequence anyway -- like selling 1000 shares of stock for a profit of $5,000 when the same 1000 shares sold three years later would have yielded a profit of $50,000.

When I first became self-employed in 2001, one of the things that took me about nine months to learn was that every day when I woke up and decided what I was going to do for the day -- in a hidden way, I was deciding what I was NOT going to do.  Very important.  Re-read that.

That year almost bankrupted me, as I sadly mistook my new-found freedom as a license to do whatever the hell I pleased.  Blab on the phone all day with my buddies?  Sure.  Hang out at Staples pricing laser printers?  No problem.  Spend an afternoon having lunch with a friend of a friend of a friend who just wants to "pick my brain" about marketing?  I'll buy.

You get the idea.  Drove my wife nuts as our family financials cratered.

What I learned the hard way:  You are the sum of your days.  You've heard it all before:  If you want to have a great day, have 24 great hours.  If you want a great week, have 7 great days.  A great year is 52 great weeks, and a great career is ~40 great years, with each new year building on the success of the previous one.  Sheryl Crow is only half right:  Every day is a winding road -- but it's still important to know one's destination.

Which brings me to the point of this post:  Most candidates who apply for jobs make the same mistake I made just five years ago.  They have no idea what they want to accomplish with their lives and how their current job -- or the job for which they are applying -- is going to enable that ideal.  Their careers are made up of mostly bad decisions and sins of omission, held together by a few of good decisions and lucky breaks.  Like a roof held together with holes.

I'm not just being negative.  I've been there, and I speak with nearly 150 candidates each week.  Less than 10% of these professionals understand exactly what is interfering with their career progress and are taking specific steps to deal with the problem in a proactive, workmanlike fashion.  So before you apply for your next job ...

Answer these 10 questions:

1. Describe the best times of your career or working life.
2. What did you love about your job at the time?
3. What did your work look like?  List the five most important responsibilities in that job.
4. What were the five most important contributions you made to that organization?
5. How have you defined career happiness?  What is currently interfering with your career happiness, and what actions can you take to change this?  (Remember that your career must blend the Three F's: Fun, Future, and Finance.)
6. List three career related problems, however large or small, that you are currently facing.  How are you going to deal with them?
7. What are your three most important career goals currently?
8. What tools, skills, and resources do you feel you need to achieve your career goals?
9. What three skills do you feel that you have mastered?  What three skills have you always wanted to master?
10. What would you say is your greatest asset and why?  What types of jobs will allow you to leverage that asset?  Are there any you have overlooked?

Life is tough in the sense that the basic law of the universe is economy:  You either impact the universe or it impacts you.  If you don't decide what you want from your career, the people around you will make that decision for you.  Not because they want to be in control of your destiny -- but because they want to be in control of theirs.  In that sense, life is very much a contest of wills.

So map out the rest of your career.  If not today, soon.  Only after you have thought through these questions should you start applying for a new job.
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Which Would You Rather Be?

Which would you rather be?
	Lion
	Eagle
	Dolphin
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Simple Trick to Position Your Brand

Tiffany over at Magic Pot of Jobs notes in a recent blog post that 'it's popular nowadays for marketers to use combinations of three words to describe their company.  The three words are appealing concepts that the marketer wants the client to associate with the company, such as "Experience. Reliability. Success."'

Right she is.  Studies of trial juries have shown that average people (ie, those on juries) are best persuaded by case themes using threes, like ...

1. Red, White, and Blue
2. Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner
3. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Additionally, as a marketer you probably know that people buy feelings -- not features:  Volvo sells safety.  Domino's sells convenience.  McDonald's sells consistency.  Home Depot sells empowerment (You can do it -- We can help.)  And every insurance company sells piece of mind.

So check out Humanityquest.com -- an obscure online portal for "the exploration of more than 500 values, attitudes, principles and emotions."  It's not a marketing resource, exactly -- but it sure is useful for brand positioning exercises.

Just for fun:  See if you can match each set of three emotions from the first list with the companies from the second list.  Post your answers below.

Feelings:

1. Beauty.  Balance.  Elegance.
2. Commitment.  Cheerfulness.  Dependability.
3. Adventure.  Freedom.  Growth.
4. Quality.  Sharing.  Fun.

Companies:

• Lexus
• Krispy Kreme
• Southwest Airlines
• Harley-Davidson

How did you do?  Of course, I just made up those lists -- but you get the idea.  Looking at Humanityquest, which three feelings does your brand promise?  What is the locus of your "brand promise" on the perceptual map (just above)?  Where are your competitors?  Is your brand promise positioned favorably against the "holes" of opportunity in the market?  And finally:  Does your company's operating model support its brand promise?  Heady questions.  Often, there's a major disconnect between these issues, which is why I say that the best marketers can think holistically about their business and industry [see trait # 1].

Regardless, what I like best about little marketing tricks like this is what they can do for a business.  For example, the word "sharing" in # 4 implies that the product is best used with a friend.  The only other instance I can recall where a single word doubled the sales of a product was when Prell shampoo added the word REPEAT to their label:  Lather.  Rinse.  Repeat.

Here's a fourth word:  Amazing.
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How to Recognize a Big Idea

I'm reading a book by advertising legend, David Ogilvy, and I'm struck by how many little frameworks and rules of thumb he had to guide his work.

Such bite-sized pieces of wisdom are easy to remember and hard to forget.  When I was a beef trader for my father's company back in the 1990s, he used to tell his traders "Buy the rumor and sell the fact."  And: "When the market softens by more than X%, shorten your position -- Your first loss is your best loss."  Or if a customer got behind on their invoices, he'd remind the trader handling the account to "Never make ultimatums when the other guy's got your money."

Anyway, David Ogilvy used to tell his staff that unless an ad contained a big idea, it would pass like a ship in the night.  Here's how Mr. Ogilvy recognized a big idea:

1. Did it make him gasp when he first saw it?
2. Did he wish he had thought of it himself?
3. Was it unique?
4. Did it fit the client's strategy to perfection?
5. Could it be used for thirty years?

Big ideas that fit this framework include Mr. Ogilvy's own Hathaway man with an eye patch (above), the Marlboro Man, and American Express' "Do you know me?"  And according to Mr. Ogilvy, "If you are lucky enough to write a great advertisement, run it until it stops selling."

So:  What's your big idea? 

My big idea is the new MYSTERY LINK treasure chest -- which will contain a really cool, obscure, useful and free Adobe file that I dug up on the web.  Click it right now!  And look for the Mystery Link treasure chest on future posts.
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Q:  Need the number of a recruiter who "gets it?"
A:  Download Harry's contact info for future reference.

Seven *HUGE* Candidate Turn-Offs

More from my interview with Jay Lipe ...

What are some qualities you find to be turn-offs for marketing candidates you're trying to place?

There are essentially two kinds of mistakes:  Mistakes of the head, and mistakes of the heart.

• Mistakes of the head are silly, unintended blunders like spilling marinara sauce on your shirt at lunch.
• Mistakes of the heart are meant to deceive oneself and others.  Lying on a resume is a very common example.

If a candidate makes a mistake of the head in the interview process, it can be overcome.  In fact, sometimes it humanizes and endears the candidate to the client.  I've seen it happen.  However, if it comes out during the process that the candidate is a prideful, greedy, envious, wrathful, lustful, gluttonous, or slothful person, then forget it.  Moreover, the candidate has bigger problems than my not being able to help him get a job.

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