“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; I don’t know which half.” – John Wanamaker

Three things that get 100% working for you!

Considered by some to be the first strategic advocate of Advertising and Marketing, John Wanamaker was a successful United States merchant, who became part of Macy’s empire.  This quote has lived 100 years because everyone wanted to avoid accountability for what didn’t work, whatever the percent.

Over that 100 years Advertising and Marketing’s 50% rule has been the way (still is for a lot of firms) CEOs and CMOs shield themselves from the lack of promised success.  The 50% rule allowed CYA statements like:

• We just had the wrong person on the bus
• Our ad agency just was not creative enough
• The agency did reach 50% but they realized too late it was the wrong 50%
• They just use the wrong media and channels for this great product
• Our Website designers just let us down
• Our social media agency just didn’t produce

Today we know these are comments from people who have no idea that there is a science of “Revenue Generation,” there is NO 50% rule and that these comments reflect bad thinking and a bad process.

Today there is NO 50% rule (but still a 50% Myth).  We don’t have the time or the money to get everything wrong 50% of the time.  We certainly don’t have the budget to spend twice what is required to get a minimum outcome.  With marketing and advertising, if 50% of what we got wrong is the message, expectations or statement of the problem we solve for the buyers, we have poisoned 100% with a 50% true message (social media does not like half-truths) and now we must spend a lot more to go back and say, “half of what we told you was wrong and here is what is true.”

Without much research, we can see the 50% rule is fatal today and may have always been if it was not a buyer frenzied bubble or great economy.

What three things would John Wanamaker learn today from his Revenue Science™ certified CRO?

1. Advertising and marketing are no more independent functions to a business than lungs are to a human body.

Today Google, social media and the global nature of the web has put the buyer in charge.  Buyers are investigating how to solve their problems or satisfy their needs, long before the seller has any clue they exist.

Advertising and marketing need to be an intentional part of every conversation with every buyer, even before the seller knows the buyer is there.  This conversation is not fancy, slick, or lavish hoping to lead the buyer into a pleasing ploy.  With today’s digital world everything is transparent and a pleasing ploy today is someone’s sour grapes tomorrow.  The sour grapes will live on the web forever.

Today’s advertising and marketing helps the buyer buy in the way that best fits the buyer.  Sometimes the advertising/marketing programs combine with the sales process and appear to be the same experience making the buyer’s life easy and fast (think Amazon).

2. Hold advertising and marketing accountable for what a business needs from them to survive.

The marketing function includes advertising as well as market research, branding and about forty other knowledge/skill areas have but one metric (behavioral outcome).  That one metric addresses the total marketing effort (lots of activities to get one final outcome) which is to produce the right number of the right type of lead (person or persons) who raise their hand to have a sales conversation at the right time.

The activities in the marketing function are important since they produce the required outcomes or don’t.  If the combination of activities in marketing meet the required outcome that is the starting place for continuously improving outcomes for additional scale or to address changes in the buyer’s world.

If the activities in the marketing function don’t meet the minimum level of required outcomes, the continuous improvement starts with meeting the minimum by controlled activity changes.

In both cases, what matters is meeting the required behavioral outcomes.  These outcomes are required by the sales function – period.  Advertising and the rest of the marketing function are responsible for 100% of the required outcomes (defined by the level of budget available) to feed selling success.

3. Since they are NOT independent and they ARE accountable they need to play as team members deploying the same game plan in a continuous improvement culture to survive the short-term and thrive for the long-term.

Step 2 above makes it clear the customer for advertising and marketing is the sales function (maybe salespeople or a selling process or both).  Buyer success requires both marketing and sales as well as the delivery function to align to deliver to the buyer exactly what they previewed during the selling process to launch a long-term value give and receive relationship with the buyer.

To make this an end-to-end continuous improvement engagement model all three functions start with the same Revenue Strategy and deployment plan complete with those “required” behavioral outcomes that when aligned achieve the Revenue Strategy goals.

All three functions with the leadership create the Revenue Strategy and deployment model.  Once deployed they are all accountable for the three functions outcomes and goal achievement.  No one can finger point or claim victory until the strategic goals are achieved.

Help John Wanamaker rest because Revenue Science™ brings 100% rule to everyone.

Revenue Science™™ is an organized systematic and repeatable way to determine revenue cycles, and decrease the cost of chaos with such precision that you can see rapid decreases in your cost of sales and increases in profit within weeks and months.