I've spent most of my career around enterprise IT sales. I have learned a lot from my colleagues on the sales side, which makes me much more effective in supporting them. After all, let's not forget - whatever your business card or your email sig say your particular role is, ultimately we're all in sales, or we're all out of a job.

One of the things I have learned, however, is that there is a very common misunderstanding of the role of marketing and advertising in enterprise IT sales.

The first thing to bear in mind is the difference between direct marketing and brand marketing. To quote Wikipedia,

Direct marketing is attractive to many marketers because its positive results can be measured directly. For example, if a marketer sends out 1,000 solicitations by mail and 100 respond to the promotion, the marketer can say with confidence that campaign led directly to 10% direct responses. This metric is known as the 'response rate,' and it is one of many clearly quantifiable success metrics employed by direct marketers. In contrast, general advertising uses indirect measurements, such as awareness or engagement, since there is no direct response from a consumer.

Measurement of results is a fundamental element in successful direct marketing. The Internet has made it easier for marketing managers to measure the results of a campaign. This is often achieved by using a specific website landing page directly relating to the promotional material. A call to action will ask the customer to visit the landing page, and the effectiveness of the campaign can be measured by taking the number of promotional messages distributed and dividing it into the number of responses. Another way to measure the results is to compare the projected sales or generated leads for a given term with the actual sales or leads after a direct advertising campaign.

Sales people tend to assume that all marketing should be direct marketing - that is, marketing that should trigger a measurable action. Each campaign must generate a certain number of leads, a certain percentage of which will turn into actual qualified opportunities, and with any luck some of those opportunities will eventually close.

Coffee is for closers only

Of course this situation generates all sorts of fun conversations where sales people question the quality of those leads, while marketing answers back with barbed retorts about the number of opportunities that the sales team actually convert. Lost in the Sturm und Drang of the resulting blamestorm is the question of whether this model can even work at all.

On the other hand, straightforward brand advertising is ridiculed as a waste of money. Since it is hard to measure almost by definition, it doesn't fit into the usual opportunity conversion spreadsheets, and is therefore the first expense to be cut when Sales is driving the bus. In fact, the only way of measuring the impact of brand advertising is by looking at what happens when you stop doing it.

I would argue that for the sort of long-duration, big-ticket sales cycles that we have in enterprise IT, the expectations of direct marketing in the traditional sense are overinflated. On the other hand, the potential of brand advertising is vastly underestimated - including by marketing departments.

Brand advertising - what is it good for?

Very few people in this space will make or even consider a purchase based on a single campaign or targeted VITO letter, no matter how good. This idea plays into the heroic self-image of sales, but it is rarely true. In actual fact, before receiving that first formal sales approach, our prospect already has an opinion of what our company and products are like. This opinion is formed from various different sources, but the most important ones are personal experience and received opinion. If you can get personal experience right the first time you have generally bought yourself a customer for life, but that's a whole other topic. The way you can influence the frame of mind of your VITO is to work on that other axis: the received opinion that they already have of your product and/or company.

In turn, that received opinion is also determined by two main sources: word of mouth, and - yes - brand advertising. Brand advertising helps position your company as the sort of company that your VITO would want to do business with: innovative, customer-focused, stable & reliable, or whatever your particular values might be.

A prospect reading a VITO letter

So far, so much like direct marketing, except without the all-important metrics. Where brand advertising pays off is in what happens next. What you want to happen after VITO reads their customised¹ letter is that they run down the hallway, burst into their colleague's office or their team's open space, and announce excitedly that they have just read about a very cool-sounding product from your company.

Their willingness to do this - to expose themselves in this way - is going to be predicated on your company's credibility in the space where you operate. In 2015, anyone getting excited about a new offering from Blackberry would have to do a fair amount of explaining (sorry, Blackberry). Vice versa, nobody has to explain why they are planning to buy cloud services from Amazon, storage from EMC, networking gear from Cisco, or insert your own favoured example.

While no amount of brand advertising could save Blackberry at this point, Amazon, EMC, Cisco, et al got to where they are in no small part by working on their perception in the market. In other words, their brand advertising ensures that VITO will be excited, rather than embarrassed, to involve their colleagues in an evaluation and advocate for a new offering.

What advertising can and cannot do

None of this is to say that brand advertising alone is sufficient if the products themselves don't meet expectations around price, performance, support, or any other axis that is important to customers. However, brand advertising can help get to the point where those variables can come into play.

Ironically, this distrust of advertising is one of the very few things that sales people and engineers both agree on. Both are making a category error which is nicely explained in this episode of the excellent Exponent podcast, with Ben Thompson and James Allworth.

Bottom line, I think overlooking brand advertising is a false economy. If you’re a startup, of course, you can’t blanket airports and fill out business magazines like the big guys², so figure out what you can do in that space. And if you are big company that doesn’t do brand advertising, know that prospects are asking themselves why that is - and this definitely feeds into the perception they have of your company.

Another instance of air rage over a reclined seat. This one is a bit more severe than most, though:

The pilot doubled back after a man began choking the woman sitting in front of him, who had reclined her seat.

The bit that leaped out at me was this:

NBC News reports the pilot declared an in-air emergency, but airport police said the plane never took off.

So it sounds like the woman reclined her seat even before takeoff? Of course this does not justify the passenger behind choking her - but it does go some way towards explaining why he would do that.

I have long legs, and I very much wish people would not recline their seats back into my knees - but I realise that is their prerogative and part of the service they paid for with their ticket. There are rules about when the seat can and cannot be reclined, though, not to mention courtesy and common sense. As cabin crew always tell us, "seat backs should be fully upright for takeoff and landing".

I would also add that they should be upright during meal service and until the tray is cleared away, and that reclining on a sub-one-hour flight (like the LAX to SFO flight in the linked story) is a jerk move.

In fact, what could solve this recurring problem would be to repurpose the now-redundant "no smoking" sign as a "no reclining" sign. When the sign is lit, no reclining. When the sign goes out, that’s fair warning to get your wine glass / laptop / knees / whatever out of the way of the way of the descending seat back in front.

This won’t help with those configurations that Spanish airlines in particular are so fond of where there is legitimately no room for the person in front of me to recline, because my knees are already jammed up against the seat back even in the fully upright position, but at least it should cut down on altercations. Then again, I did once find myself on a transatlantic flight behind a woman who spent the entire flight fully reclined. I struggled to get comfortable and squirmed about a bit, and she eventually enquired nastily whether I was going to stop poking her in the back. My suggestion that she could avoid any "poking" by raising her seat was not taken well by her…

Another guest post from my wife. However, unlike her previous post here, this one is not a commentary on anything I said - or at least, I hope not.

Ladies and gentlemen, my wife.

When I woke up a couple of days ago I never would have imagined that an essay penned by a 25 y-o actress would make me re-evaluate my working life so much. Inspiration really comes from the unlikeliest places.

Anyway, Jennifer Lawrence guest posted on Lena Dunham's The Lenny Letter, and since it was the first time she addressed the Sony Hack the whole internet was abuzz. (For those of you who lived under a rock for the past year or so, among what emerged from the Sony Hack was that Lawrence, despite being billed at the same level as her male co-stars, and despite being the only one with an Oscar under her belt, went to get paid a fraction of what her male co-stars did for her role on American Hustle, and probably had no knowledge of the disparity until it was uncovered by the leaked emails.)

J-Law went on to explain that she was over trying to tip-toe around men and trying to be adorable and funny and not appear a brat for asking what she wants. (if you want more, go subscribe to the Lenny Letter, I had to!).

Next thing I know, I follow a link that takes me to this article.

While being a very, VERY, lighthearted take on corporate and gender politics, this piece really resonated with me. You see, I am known to be a no-nonsense, straight to the point kind of girl in my work environment, definitely NOT what you would consider a shrinking violet. And yet. I realized some of the things described in that article had indeed happened to me, and, worse still, I had not understood they were happening.

Let me give you an example. A couple of years ago I was called into a meeting with two new guys to discuss a situation. Now, the situation had absolutely nothing to do with any of us, I was called since I had been the closest to observe it, and could probably explain some of the ins and outs to them, give them a little history, if you will. A male co-worker was with me, since he had helped me with some of the issues concerning this thing. This whole long preface is just to make you understand that I had no reason whatsoever to be 1. defensive, 2. angry, 3. aggressive since - once again - this had nothing to do with my performance, my objectives, my targets, my people. We had the meeting, I thought nothing more of it, and we went on with our own jobs. A year later, one of the two guys - whom I had got to know a little better in the meantime - let it slip that he thought I had been a terrible bitch during that meeting, and he was surprised I was so angry and aggressive towards them. This threw me for a loop. I had no intention of being aggressive and curt, I was surprised I had come off that way. I even went back to my male co-worker to ask him whether he thought I had gone over the line. (he said "you were fine", but then again, he's used to me, so who knows). This minor incident with a guy led me to re-evaluate how I deal with people everyday.

In the interest of full disclosure, this guy, the one who basically called me a terrifying bitch to my face, is also the one who always compliments me on my physical appearance, and is derogatory as f&%$ whenever in a professional context, despite not knowing or understanding anything about my job. I am so upset with myself, because, despite knowing all this I let it dictate my behaviour, and I let it get under my skin. A man would have never done that, never in a million years. It took Jennifer bloody Lawrence to open my eyes, go figure.

Are IT People uniquely judgy or is that common to all specialists?

I know I get insanely wound up when I see someone Using A Computer Wrong. Some of the things that will set me off:

• Unused icons in the dock

• Unused toolbars on screen

• Manually dismissing notification after notification, when each one has a "don’t show me this again" checkbox

• Navigating to a website by Googling its name, then clicking the first result

It’s not just computers (or those other computers that for some reason we persist in calling "phones"), either. If I see someone driving a car which I am pretty sure comes with Bluetooth, but they have their phone in their hand? HATE RAYS FROM MY EYES.

I know lots of IT people are like this, but is it exclusive to our tribe? Do fashion people look at people’s shoes and feel physical pain? Do professional writers just write off¹ Facebook and in fact most of the web? Do car people have to restrain themselves from carjacking people in order to do some way overdue maintenance on their vehicles? Those are just a few examples which I can sort-of relate to, but I’m sure there are more.

I talked over the previous post with my wife at lunch, and she had a good perspective. Since I don’t do comments on my blog, she wrote them down and sent them to me by email.

Take it away:

While I understand your point and I think it comes from a good place, I cannot agree with your conclusions.

Yes, sponsoring a message with any kind of mistaken data (be it a logo, a price, or any kind of valuable consumer info) is a big "faux pas", especially coming from a big company, one that should have a working structure, and enough work force to enable that structure to talk through its various organisational changes.

Yes, not talking to each other is bad.

Yes, brand messages, and "content" at large, should be shaped by the people who know about it, and live and breathe it every day.

This is all very true, except that you seem to forget that packaging that message, and distributing it in the right way is just as important.

What is worse? getting a message that is not quite correct, or getting no message at all? I would argue they are both bad. So here's the deal: in my experience there are two sides to communication - one side is about the vision, and the other is about the execution. One side cannot thrive, or even function, without the other. In social media that means knowing your audience, targeting your readers, breaking down the message to suit different platforms, and also dealing with a lot of conceited people who think they can judge your work by the number of likes it gathers. Sounds familiar?

We have all been guilty of trivialising social media managers’ jobs, because the very concept of spending all your day on Facebook as a job is worth a laugh, while grumbling about our own jobs in communication being trivialised by others. Like those others were, we also happened to be mostly wrong. The message is a company's most valuable asset, but it needs to be packaged and delivered so that people can hear it and receive it and make it theirs, otherwise it is just as worthless as the wrong logo on a sponsored post.

If you have thoughts, you can find her on Twitter as @mrscwellington.

For my part, I agree with her qualification: I lumped content and delivery together, and criticised a situation where the delivery had actually worked pretty well, but the content had fallen down. As my wife cruelly and correctly noted, my own delivery is not that hot¹ - Google Analytics says I got 105 unique visitors in the last month, which is about typical for this blog but not exactly setting the internet on fire.

I do think my main point stands: that the disconnect between the two aspects of social media is a problem, and can be taken as a symptom of a more general issue of barriers between different parts of an organisation that should be working much more closely together.

Since I still don’t have comments, if anyone else has thoughts, please hit us up on Twitter.

This morning I found an interesting promoted tweet in my timeline. I added some magnification around the bit that caught my attention:

This isn’t interesting so much because of the subject matter - I no longer work for BMC, and even when I did, I had very little to do with Remedy. It’s the logo there, in the magnified area.

Notice how it’s different from the logo at the top of the tweet? The orange one is the new BMC logo, while the blue one is the old logo. The rebranding happened more than a year ago, and though it takes time for a change like that to make its way through all the products, Remedyforce has indeed been rebranded. However, even the product page is confused, with an outdated screenshot (looks like the same one as in the tweet) at the top of the page, but a link to a demo in the sidebar that uses a rebranded screenshot.

This sort of thing happens all too often in large companies, as generalists simply cannot keep up with everything and delegate to specialists. The results, however, can be ugly, as in this case. The web and social media teams are now far removed from people who actually know and understand the products that they are pushing, so they end up using screenshots that may be a year old without even realising it. Worse, maybe they do realise it - web design people may well pick up on the different logos - but don’t have any channel to request updated screenshots in a timely manner.

Startups are different.

At startups people care deeply about what they are doing. I’m sure there are exceptions, people who are just in it for the gamble and the hope of a big payoff on IPO day, but by and large people join startups because they care about solving a particular problem. I just read a fantastic piece by Steve Albini on this very topic:

"Like a bakery opens because a guy wants to make bread. A tavern opens because a guy wants to serve beer to people. That’s why people start businesses."

In this environment, everyone is close enough to everyone else, and is emotionally invested enough, that things like this should not happen.

So what? It’s just a screenshot!

It’s never "just" anything. It’s a symptom of a way of doing things. In a big enough organisation, this sort of disconnect happens all over. R&D gets out of touch with what customers are actually using the products, or what they expect from the next version. Finance has no view into how customers like and expect to pay for the products they use. This is how disruption happens and keeps on happening, even though by this point everyone knows at least the Twitter version of the theory.

Why do you hate BMC???

I’m not picking on BMC in particular¹, it just happened to be the example that caught my eye today. I know the web and social teams there, and I know they will be mortified when someone brings this to their attention, and work hard to fix it. The problem is not with the people or their professionalism; the problem is with the structure they are placed into.

This gives me the opportunity to trot out one of my favourite quotes:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

-- R. A. Heinlein

History has shown over and over that massive centralised command and control looks good in theory, but tends to get messy in practice. The way things work best is not with massive, monolithic structures that attempt to do everything. Instead, look for small teams of people who own and care deeply about every aspect of something, and make it easy for them to work well together.

Today this sort of focus is easier than ever, as the technical underpinnings are there to enable good integration between different services. The technical term is "composable services". Take an example: I work for a startup, but we still need to do expenses. However, we didn’t build or buy some creeping Orrible thing; we contract with a third-party vendor who takes care of that. They give us a fantastic app that we can use to take pictures of receipts; then the app OCRs them, we tag them, and we get reimbursed. It’s fantastic.

Same thing with travel: we have a service that takes care of all of that, giving users a pleasant experience while delivering low prices (I checked) and compliance with company policies.

Wait, didn’t you just undermine your own argument?

It might look like I just contradicted myself. I started out railing against the separate web and social media teams that are too far away from the product teams, but still within the same company. Then I started praising actual external companies, that aren’t even under the same company umbrella! So which is it: is specialisation good, or bad?

The key difference is in the Steve Albini quote above. People who care deeply about something focus on that one thing. The people at our travel service care deeply about that, and when I had some questions during the early days of adoption, they were answered rapidly and in a way that made it clear to me that I was dealing with someone who really cared and knew what they were talking about, not someone who was just going through the motions or delivering against a number they had been given.

Conclusion (finally!)

Social media represent the public face of an organisation. Handing that over to professionals may seem like a good idea, but ultimately it’s a self-defeating move. Most social media pros are good at social media. If you go looking for advice about how to get more reach for your blog posts or whatever, you quickly find that it’s all inside baseball: people using social media to promote their blogs about social media, so they can attend events about social media and discuss the nuts & bolts of social media.

If you want to use social media to have a conversation about something else, all of this is of relatively limited utility. And if you’re a company, remember that people come to social media to have conversations, not to be sent press releases. Whatever you are selling - bread, beer, or software - your social media "guru" won’t be able to answer questions or jump into conversations if they don’t understand and care about that specific thing.

If you want your social media efforts to be effective, everyone in the company should be doing it, not a small nominated group of pros. This is the only way you can get real engagement and true conversations going.

Reaction to this post - from my own wife, no less - in a follow-up here.

Something I wrote on Facebook which I thought was worthy of a wider outing:

Enormous amounts of hot air are produced over what people have in their pants and whose pants they themselves want to get into - a topic which is fascinating to the individuals concerned and should be of no interest to anyone else outside their immediate circle of friends & relations.

The topic was a new iteration of the endless argument over gender in language. I don’t think we solved it, but I am happy with my comment!

Dear web programmers, input validation is important. We can all agree on this.

Lazy input validation, however, just leads to user frustration.

My "favourite" examples are phone numbers and IBAN codes. In both cases, spaces are irrelevant to the result, so kindly take the extra thirty seconds to rule out spaces from your character count. Otherwise, when I copy & paste - or simply type - the code in human-legible format, broken down with spaces, and your validation fails or the code simply truncates the input to the maximum allowable length, I will wish you all sorts of ill.

The same goes for non-numeric characters in phone numbers. How do you want me to enter an international phone number? Should I assume that your international code is 00? I know that is not valid everywhere. Meanwhile, any human or dialling software understands + as "replace this with the appropriate international dialling code".

I occasionally enter * or # in a telephone number field to go directly to a particular extension or to preselect options in a phone tree. I also do the same with email, adding "+foldername" to direct email straight to a particular folder in my inbox. It’s a sad commentary on the general quality of software that I am pleasantly surprised when something actually accepts these.

Image via DevOps Reactions

From The Oatmeal.

So true.

Last week brought iOS 9, and with it the long-awaited support for ad blockers in Safari.

I am not really comfortable with the idea of blocking ads; while it was more or less a requirement to block the worst excesses a decade or so ago if you wanted any sort of usable web experience, on the desktop at least that is no longer the case. It's an open question how much of this is due to adtech providers giving up on their most obnoxious tricks, how much to features like popup-blocking being built in to all major browsers, and how much to ad blocking on the wetware - simply ignoring most of the ads that are served to me.

It's another story on mobile.

. @BenedictEvans My compromise w/ my conscience: installed on iPhone but not on iPad (or Mac). My take: http://t.co/gTNOBkDwkD

— Dominic 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@dwellington) September 18, 2015

Part of the problem is the ad networks themselves. Print publications generally carry significant amounts of advertising, but because it's controlled by the publisher, the ads that make it into the magazines are typically relevant to readers and in line with the rest of the content. For an example of a magazine that gets this right, pick up a copy of Monocle. The ads are for the same sorts of brands that also come up in the editorial content, they are tasteful and well presented, and generally in line with the high production values of the rest of the magazine. The same goes for their advertorials - sorry, branded content: relevant, unforced, clearly signalled, and often actually interesting in their own right - at least if you're a Monocle reader.

Now name the last time you had an experience like that on the web.

You can't - because hardly any web sites choose their own ads. They all sign up with one or several of the big ad networks, and they will serve you whatever they feel is relevant - to their customers, regardless of what you are reading or watching at the time. This disconnect can lead to idiotic consequences, with the same products stalking you around the web even once you've already bought them, or even been prevented from buying them!

What if an #ad network wrote a code of conduct (no audio, movement, fake UI elements…) & then implemented #adblock for ads that violate it?

— Dominic 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@dwellington) September 20, 2015

So how do we get out of this situation? Micropayments for content do not look like a practical solution, so what can be done to avoid either beggaring online outlets or giving up on protecting our eyeballs and cellphone bills from the worst excesses of advertisers?

If ad networks are the villains - can they also be our saviours? What if they started policing their own ads better, enforcing "polite" ads? At a minimum:

• No auto playing audio or video

• No movement or resizing

• No pop ups

• No redirects (I see this on mobile, presumably as a side effect of evading pop up blockers on desktop)

• No faking UI elements (pretending to be an OS message)

• No excessive size, measured as a percentage of the actual content

I would have no problem whitelisting that network. In fact, if they made a blocker that only allowed through ads that respected such a code of conduct? I'd install that blocker!

Pity it'll never happen. Instead, we will get some sort of buggy-whip-maker protection rule, and we'll just keep muddling along.

Image by Pablo GarciaSaldaña via Unsplash