Steve Blank

If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?

At the same time we were educating the press, we began to educate our own marketing department about what exactly we were supposed to be doing inside the company. During the first few weeks I asked each of my department heads what they did for marketing and the company. When I asked our trade show manager she looked at me like I was the house idiot and said, “Steve, don’t you know that my job is to set up our trade show booth?” The other departments in marketing gave the same answers; the product-marketing department said their job was to write data sheets. But my favorite was when the public relations manager said, “we’re here to write press releases and answer the phone in case the press calls.”

If these sound like reasonable answers to you, and you are in a startup/small company, update your resume.

Titles are not your job
When I pressed my staff to explain why marketing did trade shows, or wrote press releases or penned data sheets, the best I could get was “why that’s our job.” It dawned on me that we had a department full of people who were confusing their titles with what contribution they were supposed to be making to the company. While their titles might be what their business cards said, titles were not their job – at least in any marketing department I was running.

Titles are not the same as what your job is. This is a big idea.

Department Mission Statements – What am I Supposed to Do Today
It wasn’t that we somehow had inherited dumb employees. What I was actually hearing was a failure of management. No one had sat the marketing department down and defined what our department Mission (with a capital “M”) was.

Most startups put together a corporate mission statement because the CEO remembered seeing one at their last job, or the investors said they needed one. Most companies spend an inordinate amount of time crafting a finely honed corporate mission statement for external consumption and then do nothing internally to actually make it happen. (And to this day I can’t remember if we even had a corporate mission statement.) What I’m about to describe here is quite different.

What was missing in SuperMac marketing was anything in writing that gave the marketing staff daily guidance on what they should be doing. The first reaction from my CEO was, “that’s why you’re running the department.” And yes, we could have built a top-down, command-and-control hierarchy. But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction.

So what we needed to do was to craft a Departmental Mission statement that told everyone why they come to work, what they need to do, and how they will know they have succeeded. And it was going to mention the two words that SuperMac marketing needed to live and breathe: revenue and profit.

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission
After a few months of talking to customers, talking to our channel and working with sales we defined the marketing Mission (our job) was to:
Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires. We will accomplish this through demand-creation activities (advertising, PR, tradeshows, seminars, web sites, etc.), competitive analyses, channel and customer collateral (white papers, data sheets, product reviews), customer surveys, and market requirements documents.

This year, marketing need to provide sales with 40,000 active and accepted leads, company and product name recognition over 65% in our target market, and five positive product reviews per quarter. We will reach 35% market share in year one of sales with a headcount of twenty people, spending less than $4,000,000.

• Generate end user demand (to match our revenue goals)
• Drive that demand into our sales channels
• Value price our products to achieve our revenue and margin goals (create high-value)
• Educate our sales channel(s)
• Help engineering understand customer needs

That was it. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more.

Working to the Mission
Having the mission in place meant that our marketing team could see that what mattered was not what their business card said, but how much closer did their work move our department to completing the mission. Period.

It wasn’t an easy concept for everyone to understand.

Building the Team
My new Director of Marketing Communications turned the Marcom departments into a mission-focused organization. Her new tradeshow manager quickly came to understand that their job was not to set up booths. We hired union laborers to do that. A trade show was where our company went to create awareness and/or leads. And if you ran the tradeshow department you owned the responsibility of awareness and leads. The booth was incidental. I couldn’t care less if we had a booth or not if we could generate the same amount of leads and awareness by skydiving naked into a coffee cup.

The same was true for PR. My new head of Public Relations quickly learned that my admin could answer calls from the press. The job of Public Relations at SuperMac wasn’t a passive “write a press release and wait for something to happen activity.” It wasn’t measured by how busy you were, it was measured by results. And the results weren’t the traditional PR metrics of number of articles or inches of ink. I couldn’t care less about those. I wanted our PR department to get close and personal with the press and use it to generate end user demand and then drive that demand into our sales channel. (The Potrero benchmark strategy was one component of this creating end user demand through PR.) We were constantly creating metrics to see the effects of different PR messages, channels and audiences on end-user purchases.

The same was true for the Product Marketing group. I hired a Director of Product Marketing who in his last company had ran its marketing and then went out into the field and became its national sales director. He got the job when I asked him how much of his own marketing material his sales team actually used in the field. When he said, “about ten percent,” I knew by the embarrassed look on his face I had found the right guy. And our Director of Technical Marketing was superb at understanding customer needs and communicating them to engineering.

Teaching Mission Intent – What’s Really Important
With a great team in place, the next step was recognizing that our Mission statement might change on the fly. “Hey, we just all bought into this Mission idea and now you’re telling us it can change?!”

We introduced the notion of Mission intent. What is the company goal behind the mission. In our case it was to sell $25 million in graphics boards with 45% gross margin. The idea of intention is that if employees understand the thinking behind the mission, they can work collaboratively to achieve it.

But we recognized that there would be time marketing would screw up, making the mission obsolete (i.e. we might fail to deliver 40,000 leads.) Think of intention as the answer to the adage, “When you are up to your neck in alligators it’s hard to remember you were supposed to drain the swamp.” For example; our mission said that the reason why marketing needed to deliver 40,000 leads and 35% market share, etc, was so that the company could sell $25 million in graphics boards at 45% gross margin.

What we taught everyone is that the intention is more enduring then the mission. (“Let’s see, the company is trying to sell $25 million in graphics boards with 45% gross margin. If marketing can’t deliver the 40,000 leads what else can we do for sales to still achieve our revenue and profitability?”) The mission was our goal, but based on circumstances it may change, but the Intent was immovable.

When faced with the time pressures of a startup, too many demands and too few people, we began to teach our staff to refer back to the five Mission goals and the Intent of the department. When stuff started piling up on their desks, they learned to ask themselves, “Is what I’m working on furthering these goals? If so, which one? If not, why am I doing it?”

They understood the mission intent was our corporate revenue and profit goals.

Core Values
Even after we had Mission and Intent down pat, one of the things that still drove me crazy was when we failed to deliver a project for sales on time or we missed a media deadline, everyone in my department had an excuse. (Since a large part of marketing was as a service organization to sales, our inability to deliver on time meant we weren’t holding up our end of the mission.) I realized that this was a broken part of our culture, but couldn’t figure out why. And one day it hit me that when deadlines slipped there were no consequences.

And with no consequences we acted as if schedules and commitments really didn’t matter. I heard a constant refrain of, “The channel sales brochure was late because the vendor got busy and they couldn’t meet the original deadline.” Or, “the January ad had to be moved into February because my graphic artist was sick but I didn’t tell you assuming it was OK.” Or, “we’re going to slip our product launch because the team thought they couldn’t get ready in time.” We had  a culture that had no accountability, and no consequences –  instead there were simply shrugged shoulders and a litany of excuses.

This had to change. I wanted a department that could be counted on delivering. One day I simply put up a sign on my door that said, “No excuses accepted.” And I let the department know what I meant was we were all going to be “accountable.”

What I didn’t mean was “deliver or else.” By accountable I meant, “we agreed on a delivery date, and between now and the delivery date it’s OK if you ask for help because you’re stuck, or something happened outside of your control. But do not walk into my office the day something was due and give me an excuse. It will cost you your job.” That kind of accountable.

And, “since I won’t accept those kind of excuses, you are no longer authorized to accept them from your staff or vendors either.” The goal wasn’t inflexible dates and deadlines, it was no surprises and collective problem solving.  After that, we  spent a lot more time working together to solve problems and remove obstacles in getting things done on-time.

Over time, accountability, execution, honesty and integrity became the cornerstones of our communication with each other, other departments and vendors.

• We wouldn’t give excuses for failures, just facts and requests for help
• We wouldn’t accept excuses for failures, just facts, and offer help
• Relentless execution
• Individual honesty and integrity

That was it. Four bullets. It defined our culture.

Why Do It
By the end of the first year our team had jelled. It was a department willing to exercise initiative, had the judgment to act wisely, and an eagerness to accept responsibility.

I remember at the end of a hard week my direct reports came into my office just to talk about the weeks little victories. And there was a moment as they shared their stories, that they all began to realize that our company (one that had just come off of life support) was beginning to kick the rear of our better-funded and bigger competitors.

We all marveled in the moment.

What did I learn so far?

• Push independent execution of tasks down to the lowest possible level
• Give everyone a shared Mission Statement: why they come to work, what they need to do, and how they will know they have succeeded.
• Share Mission Intent for the big picture for the Mission Statement
• Build a team comfortable with independent Mission execution
• Agree on Core Values to define your culture

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