The Jamie Oliver approach to marketing
I recently attended the B2B Marketing Lead Nurturing event (30 Sept 2009). I have a bar by which I measure the success of any speaker event I go to, which is that if there’s one thing I take away and implement in some way, it’s been a good event. For this one, the key thing I take away is an analogy used by Pete Jakob of IBM when talking about the relationship that often exists between marketing and sales.
In setting the scene he outlined how marketing generally want to feed sales with beautiful, nutritious organic vegetables, when sales want to eat fast food. It’s a great analogy that put me in mind of Jamie Oliver’s school dinners’ crusade.
It’s an analogy that works on many levels:
- Marketers will cite the potential lifetime value of a lead – when sales are often rewarded on revenue that month. Eating your greens is better for you, but a bag of starchy chips will fill you up quickly.
- Marketers often want to create ‘perfect’ materials and campaigns, when sales are often in need of a quick fix. Cooking a meal from fresh raw ingredients just isn’t as easy as grabbing a take away.
- Sales do know that ‘easy’ sales often result in churn and aren’t 100% healthy for the company, but need to meet their targets and maintain cash flow. I can’t be the only one to have tucked into a burger promising to go for a run later!
- Moves to convert a sales organisation to a new diet of inbound, marketing-generated, leads often makes them feel ill and change is often resisted. Reminiscent of parent passing chips through the school railings.
For a business, you need to work out what a healthy balanced diet means. Often this is about having two speeds – the long-term profitability track (greens, etc.) and the essential cash flow now (junk food). Then, I’d suggest that you take a careful look at the business you generate, assessing the source of the customers that provide these two things for you. I’m betting that in most cases, a marketing-generated lead, that has been nurtured through a thoughtful process, is likely to be more profitable in the long term, and that sales that closed on the day as the result of something like cold-calling often buy less and churn more. Most businesses will need a healthy mix of both – but it is essential to know, and manage, the difference. Making a shift in dietary habits is hard – adopting a closed-loop marketing>sales approach is really hard. But, the results of both are definitely worth it.
Now don’t get me wrong – I like chips. I even think there’s a place for fast food in a healthy diet – as I think there’s a place for tactical sales that get cash in the door quickly. What I’m saying is that if your business is surviving on junk food alone – think carefully about the long-term impact this could be having on your bottom line.
Pete Jakob’s blog on lead nurturing can be found here: http://b2bnurture.blogspot.com/
By Bryony Thomas | Chief Clear Thinker | Clear Thought Consulting Ltd | @bryonythomas | www.clear-thought.co.uk
Clear Thought Consulting works with small businesses, equipping them with the marketing strategies, suppliers, skills and set-up that they need to become bigger businesses. We do this by planning and delivering 12-month marketing transformation programmes – supporting a small business through a step-by-step process to making marketing pay. We firmly believe that when you can’t out-spend your competition, you have to out-think them.
Published on 2 October 2009
