My first reaction when reading Andy's post on Klimpton Hotels today was "wow, that's great marketing at work."  Second reaction was, " I'm not sure many marketers would recognize this as marketing to begin with."

How many marketers think marketing is about the Web site, the collateral, the signage, the newsletter, and activities strictly focused on marketing communications?  Marketing is far more than that.  It's the entire experience you give your customers.

Klimpton has done a lot to create great experiences for their customers, with lots of buzz-worthy features.  And as Andy points out, even when they screw up, their response is genuine, transparent and fast.

That's all good marketing.  The unfortunate truth is that not only do many marketers not see this as part of their job, most organizations don't realize the impact on revenue these "operational" experiences have.  The experience and operations is the marketing for service-oriented businesses like Klimpton.

Too many sales & marketing messages, unfortunately, talk about “what” and “how”.  And at the front of the sales process, that’s a shame.

You’re proud of what you’ve built, which is great.  You have six new features in the latest version, awesome.  But if you lead your pitch with a description of what you’re selling, or how it works, you’re skipping the most important part of the conversation.

Why the customer cares.

When you write about why, you’re addressing your customer’s world.  You’re speaking their language, feeling their pain, building credibility by associating with the challenges they face.  Those challenges, that pain, is what drives demand for your product or service.  It’s why people buy.

If your prospect doesn’t have that need, or you haven’t established or created that need, selling the prospect on what you have and how it works isn’t going to help.  You’ve done nothing to build value, and given the prospect no context for which to understand why they need to talk to you in the first place.

In the end, it all comes down to why.  Yes, you may eventually get to a product demo and operational training of how to get started.

But the top of the funnel is all about why.

Braden Kelley was kind enough to let me guest-post on his excellent Blogging Innovation blog today.  He (as well as his contributors) cover a wide variety of innovation-related topics specific to the workplace, but I wanted to explore how those same concepts apply to several other facets of our lives.  Check it out here.

If you work for or with a marketing team that drives leads for a sales team, it's likely a mistake to measure your success based on lead volume.

Lead volume doesn't matter.

What matters, of course, is revenue. Your job as a marketer is to give your sales team the best opportunities possible to close business, increase sales, and grow the value of the overall business. To that effect, there are far better ways to measure marketing success instead of pure leads. Here are four I like in particular:

• Lead Quality: Leads are only good if they represent individuals or companies who can buy. Sit down with your sales team and agree on a common definition for a qualified lead. This can include things like company size, title, industry, purchase timeline - whatever you agree on. Leads you generate that aren't quite "in profile" aren't necessarily bad - some will still have revenue in them - but your primary job is to focus on optimizing volume and cost of the in-profile leads first.
• Pipeline Contribution: Simply put, how many of those leads generated become active sales opportunities? Sure, this step requires work by your sales team, but it's another good indicator of lead quality. This step also requires marketing to work collaboratively with sales to get the job done. No more passing leads over the wall and walking away. Marketing's job includes helping the sales team continue working with new prospects until they're ready to buy.
• Deal Size: If you look deep into your lead generation metrics, I guarantee you'll find trends that help you increase deal size at the lead level. Do particular industries buy more? Do certain titles tend to buy more products? Certain company sizes, geographies? Find the trends that lead to bigger deals, and find ways to generate more leads like that moving forward.
• % and # of Deals from Nurture Database: If a lead isn't ready to buy, but hasn't said no, it's marketing's job to nurture that prospect until it's ready to be passed back to sales. How well does your marketing team drive interest and urgency with your nurture database? How well does marketing identify when nurtured prospects are ready to buy? This is a great way to ensure your marketing team is innovating ways to drive urgency among your prospect database, and many of those urgency drivers will work in primary lead generation channels & campaigns as well.

Last but not least, there's of course cost per lead all the way through to the sale. Too many B2B marketers measure cost per lead (and sometimes even cost per in-profile lead), but fail to look at relative marketing cost of the opportunity and sale. A certain lead source can look great based on cost per lead, but if the conversion to opportunity and sale (not to mention lifetime value) is too low, leads that cost more can actually be better for the business after sale price and renewals are factored in.

What success measures work for your marketing team to drive focus on revenue?

I had a great meeting with Nic Wildeman of Lionfish Creative this morning. Check out their Web site and you'll see that they're very good at creative and design - their work is fresh and engaging, it "makes you look."

But what I particularly liked about Nic and Lionfish is their perspective on design, summed neatly by Nic's comment below:

"The best creative work in marketing must serve a client's business purpose, else it is art for art's sake, and that is not our business."

These are exactly the words you want coming from your brand's creative shop. Every facet of your execution - including strategy, copy, offer and design - needs to align with your purpose and objectives. Too many creative resources - both in-house and via agencies - focus on creative that wins industry awards, which is nice for the agency walls but not as helpful for the client's sales goals and bottom line.

But the blame here isn't always with the creative shop, but too often also with the client. When you fill out the creative brief, do you describe how you want the ad to look? Sure. Do you also describe the brand's revenue or market share objectives, and how the creative needs to align to and deliver those results? Not always.

Your execution is as good as its weakest component. Don't let it be the creative (and don't always blame the agency or designers when it is).

I’m a big believer in supporting local businesses.  In these economic times especially, it just feels right to do so.

The Kirkland Reporter recently published a short piece I wrote highlighting seven specific reasons why shopping local can save you time and money.  Check it out here.