Author: admin

Sneak Peek!

December 9, 2024

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I am working on two book projects. It is likely I will self-publish the books, and as soon as next year. The “things I’ve heard in job interviews” is further along than the “stuff I’ve seen in concerts” concept, so that one will get published first. Here is a sneak peak of three stories that will be in the book.

When the candidate’s phone rings…

Instead of saving the best for last, I will start with one of the strangest things I’ve ever encountered. We were hiring a content writer for the team, this writer would be one of my peers, and I was one of the interviewers. It was a few days before Thanksgiving. How did I recall that factoid? Because the candidate’s phone rang during the interview. She glanced at her phone and took the call, diving into a lengthy discussion about logistics and menu-planning for Thanksgiving dinner. Her call went on for about 10 minutes. Remember, she’s the candidate and is taking a call during an interview in my office! Boundaries? None. A few minutes later she ended the call but did not apologize. You can bet who didn’t get the job…

I’m a candidate just like you!

This was something my dad would have described as a Rod Serling Moment. Rod Serling was the genius creator of The Twilight Zone TV series. He also created Night Gallery, which played on similar themes. Serling was a brilliant author with a deadpan delivery. This story would have fit in well with the Rod Serling canon. Back in 2010, I applied for a director of marketing communications position at a trade association that was based here in North Texas. I matched the requirements well and was one of the first to apply. Three months went by, and I never got an interview. Adding insult to insult, the association re-posted the position on their website and on job boards. The position had one change – they used my email address and cell phone as the contact information! Did they hire me and not let me know? Soon I was getting calls and emails from other candidates to ask about the status of their applications. Unfortunately, I had no answers. My calls, emails, and personal visits to the association (their office was a mailbox in a UPS Store) all went unanswered. Can you hear the Twilight Zone theme playing in your head?

Shall we speak Klingon?

Technical people such as programmers are a breed unto themselves. They can be very big into science fiction. I am too, but within limits. Imagine my surprise when a candidate for a website programmer role asked me if we could conduct the interview in Klingon! Since my knowledge of Klingon is nonexistent and nobody else at the company is at all conversant, I quickly answered, “English would be fine.” While the candidate may have gained bonus points for totally out of the box creativity, it quickly evaporated when he admitted he had never visited our website. He had no idea what we did nor had any notion of what he would be programming. Priorities? None. Asking to speak in a made-up foreign language while ignoring the basic reading material for the role is a great way to get yourself withdrawn from consideration.

There are plenty more of these stories. I’ve been offered a cigarette, given an incorrect location, called out for dressing too flashy, and more. But I’ve given too, such as offering to take the drug test there on the spot, or helping put up holiday decorations in the lobby because I was early, and explaining why a company’s recent marketing campaign would tank (and I was right!!).

So who did wear that tattered jacket?

October 22, 2024

Much of my love for literature and poetry comes from my paternal grandmother, who lived with us for about 15 years. She had a degenerative eye disease named Retinitis Pigmentosa. By age 40 she was completely blind. Despite losing her sight at a young age, she had a phenomenal memory for books, songs, and poems. She could recite entire lines and verses to suit almost any situation. It would take me many years to sort through whether they were classic poetry or dirty limericks. Sometimes both. One such poem she was fond of reciting was “when a hundred years have come and gone, and a hundred more to back it, who will be around to say t ’was I that wore the tattered jacket?”. Who wrote that line? Good question. My grandmother thought it was Robert Burns or possibly Nicholas Brady. ChatGPT claims it comes from “The Tattered Jacket” by Robert Service, although I’ve searched his archive and can’t find it. There is an Anglican hymn with a similar theme but none of the same lyrics. Regardless of who wrote it, the poem certainly is powerful.

What does the line mean? There are a few theories. One theory is the details of some events get lost in the passage of time. Who was the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? That was a long time ago but an easy answer – Aretha Franklin! Ah, but who was the second? For this music trivia nerd, the answer is almost as easy – there were three (Florence Ballard, Diana Ross, and Mary Wilson of the Supremes). Although the first to accomplish a feat is almost always remembered, there are dozens of others who have also done it. So the tattered jacket could have been worn by anyone.

A second theory looks at the grand scheme of things. Does it really matter who did what and to whom? Maybe to a writer of murder mysteries. The butler doesn’t always do it.

The third theory involves attribution. Successful marketers can track (almost) every penny spent to a specific activity that either generates pipeline or publicity. That website retargeting campaign that brought in a $5 million per year client, or that random conversation at a trade show that sparked a discussion that a year later was a closed deal, or that blog post that an influencer listened to and called you to learn more. We all have a few of those in our portfolio. You can point to a particular element in the mix as the one igniting moment. Even with a sales cycle that can take years (and multi-million, multi-year deals often take a year or more to close), you can track an activity to it.

Yes, even after 100 years, you can still point to that campaign as the one that made the day.

My workstream

September 2, 2024

My job search was conducted across four different workstreams:

  • Applying to posted jobs
  • Reaching out to LinkedIn connections
  • Direct outreach – Researching companies based on industry news
  • Interacting with headhunters

Each has their plusses and minuses as I’ve worked through them to land a job. Applying to posted jobs and interacting with headhunters are basically self-explanatory, so this blog post will lean into what I mean by direct outreach.

Direct outreach begins with news sources that will help you identify companies to target. There are tons of news sources out there. You can set up Google Alerts about specific companies or topics. News feeds such as Feedly are easy to set up and maintain. You can also search for newsletters about industry events. Companies such as Crunchbase, G2, or Owler that post reviews and comparisons of products can be very informative. In my previous post about the quantity of choices in the marketing tech stack, I found a lot of repository-with-calendar companies by feeding prompts into Crunchbase. You can also follow industry analyst firms, which has been my sweet spot. Most of them publish reports about companies in a space or discipline. The inventor of the industry analyst game is Gartner. They publish 80+ reports known as Magic Quadrants. These reports (and numerous others, such as Wave by Forrester, PEAK Matrix by Everest Group, and RadarView by Avasant) mention the capabilities of companies in a specific market, giving you a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the market’s competitors. Since I’ve piloted or co-piloted industry analyst relations programs for decades, I have relationships with those firms. I follow them on LinkedIn and look forward to their posts about new reports. The analysts will sometimes tag the companies that have participated in the reports, or at least those in leadership positions. Viewing the LinkedIn profiles of companies that are tagged is helpful because there are many companies with similar names.

Now that you know who the companies are, you’ll need to find out who to write to at the company. Since I’m looking for a role in marketing, I would start with the Chief Marketing Officer if they have one, or Chief Growth Officer (the senior executive who owns both sales and marketing). You can learn who these people are on LinkedIn or the company’s public website. Remember my blog post about email addresses and phone numbers? Here is where such contact details will come in handy.

Next, write to them! Start out with a bit of congratulations on making Everest Group’s Insurance Intermediaries Services PEAK Matrix® Assessment 2024 or whatever the credential is. Starting with something positive says many things – it shows you’re keeping up with current events, you know some recent news, you’re not making it all about you. and you are acknowledging a job well done. Then explain in a few bullets what you can do for them. Read your email again, and make sure you’ve personalized it. Make sure the addressee’s name and company are spelled correctly. Hit send.

Following up on the send is essential. I have a one-week rule. If they haven’t reached out to me first, I am on the phone to follow up one week after writing to them. A quick reminder that I wrote last week to congratulate them on the credential and let them know how I can help. Simple. It takes about 45 seconds to leave this as a voice mail message. Practice it a few times before picking up the phone.

Direct outreach is an approach that works. I’ve landed jobs lasting years with this method. You can too.

Candidates are customers, too

July 9, 2024

My inspiration for two upcoming book projects is “I Killed Pink Floyd’s Pig” by Beau Phillips. His book is an often-hilarious collection of short stories from a life spent in the music radio business. While I never drank beer from or with the late Dickie Betts nor discussed hedgehogs with Robert Plant, I enjoyed his story-telling style of brief (usually 1 to 2 pages) anecdotes. One book project is about things I’ve seen at many decades of attending and performing at rock concerts. The other is what I’ve seen or heard in job interviews, both as a hiring manager and candidate. Some of the candidate experience I’ve had don’t apply to either concept, so I’ve included a few in this post.

I was ghosted…and then hounded. In early March, I applied for a VP Marketing role at a healthcare SaaS company. Minutes later I received an autoreply email to confirm that my resume was in their system. That was the last I heard from them. Until yesterday. Yesterday morning – 4 months after I applied for their job – they sent me an email to participate in a survey about my candidate experience. I was at an offsite meeting in the morning, so I planned to complete the survey when I returned home. A few hours later they sent me a text to remind me to complete the survey. Now here’s where it gets a little obnoxious. After the text, they called me to remind me to complete the survey! Not a robocall, a real live call center agent called me. But in all these months I’ve heard nothing from them about the job, despite calling them several times to check on the status of my application. The agent who called me was apparently with their survey partner and knew nothing outside of the script. As a marketing professional who has been in the CX industry for years, I totally applaud the concept of surveying. But my candidate experience was practically nonexistent until yesterday. An email, a text, and a phone call within a few hours, to survey me on what? The company would have done better to follow up with candidates at points during the process. Opportunity squandered.

Do you have to kick me twice? Go ahead, send me a rejection email. Tell me I’m not a fit for this role. But please only tell me once. I’ve seen an increasing number of companies that send two or more rejection messages for the same role. Sending two identical emails is probably a glitch in your applicant tracking system, which is regrettable but it happens. I’ve seen Marketo, HubSpot, and Pardot do it too. But sending two different emails, sometimes a day or two apart, is just plain heartless. Come on employers, do better.

Master class in dissatisfaction. My worst application experience in years was applying to a marketing leadership role at a well-known healthcare company. Their application took more than two hours to complete. Not only did they require excruciating details such as the street addresses and phone numbers of every company I’ve ever worked for, their buggy application made me go back and re-key entire paragraphs. As I noted in a previous blog post, there are a lot of off-the-shelf Applicant Tracking systems out there now. No company should have to build their own. If it is not your core business, then work with an expert.

Bottom line – prospects and customers interact with your brand on multiple platforms. Companies have an opportunity to showcase their brand when inviting people to apply for jobs. Candidates are customers, too. Make the candidate experience so good that they’ll want to tell the world about your brand.

It’s All Too Much

June 28, 2024

Somewhere in the great murk of the 1990s, the British songwriter Joe Jackson (check out his catalog – it includes lots more than just “Is She Really Going Out With Him” and “Stepping Out”) wrote a song called “It’s All Too Much” which is about being overwhelmed with choices. One of the verses is:

I hate this supermarket, But I have to say it makes me think
A hundred mineral waters, Fun to guess which ones are safe to drink
Two hundred brands of cookies, 87 kinds of chocolate chip
They say that choice is freedom, I’m so free it drives me to the brink?

Yeah, Joe, that’s about what it is like in the business world, too. The choices of products available is overwhelming. There are categories, subcategories, and subsets of categories. Think you’ll get killed in the marketplace? Invent a new category. Everyone is doing it. So how do you decide what products should work in your marketing tech stack? I’ve been there, and it can be an all-consuming experience.

One reason is the sheer volume of stuff out there. According to Chiefmartec.com’s latest Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic published in May, the marketing technology landscape exploded in 2024, with a 27.8% increase in tools from last year (now featuring more than 14,106 products)! Let that sink in for a moment. More than 14,000 products to choose from, and nearly a third of the products out there didn’t exist a year ago.

Wow! Here are a few highlights:
– Content Marketing: 1,404 products on the market
– Sales Automation & Intelligence: 1,037 products, and you probably haven’t heard of most of them
– Social Media Marketing & Monitoring: 468 products

I experienced this abundance of choices firsthand. When my previous employer had been divested and sold to a private equity firm, I had the opportunity to build the marketing tech stack from the ground up. Choosing the CRM, marketing automation platform, and intent data tools were easy decisions. But something was lacking. That something was a repository of all documents related to the sales process. My vision was a searchable, browser-based repository that would house the usual brochures, case studies, and sales decks; I went expansive and added published articles, videos of speaking engagements, analyst reports, and more. Going the extra mile, I wanted a calendar of events and campaigns. In one quick glance, people would know when and where the tradeshows were, along with what I was doing to support them.

This repository-with-calendar straddled a bunch of categories, so finding vendors was a challenge. More than 100 companies did repositories and a third of those also did calendars. I wound up sitting through product demos from about 30 different companies. Some were repository rockstars while others did a good job on the calendar. Finding the right one took several weeks. My eyeballs glazed and even my cat could recite the spiel I presented to the vendors.

Overwhelmed by choices? You’re probably just getting started. A recent survey by the software products review site G2 stated that 78% of buyers focus on products they’ve heard of before starting their research. Even after diving into the search, people have already made up their minds. And it’s all too much.

Your number or your name

June 20, 2024

Finding a phone number for a business, or an executive at that business, shouldn’t be an Olympic sport. But find phone numbers is getting increasingly difficult and complicated. The once-common practice of companies listing a phone number in the footer of their website is long gone. Even the investor or media contacts at an organization (me included) have removed their phone numbers from news releases. I did it out of self-defense, because I was getting inundated with calls for employment verification, accounts payable, and sales pitches for everything you could possibly imagine. And even several months after leaving my last role, I still get these calls.

B2B companies typically have a team of Sales Development Reps (AKA Business Development Reps), who reach out to prospects by phone or email to set appointments for the company’s salespeople. So how do they find phone numbers or email addresses? Reps located offshore would often unknowingly populate the CRM with toll-free numbers. I would advise them that most area codes in the 800 range are toll-free numbers, which are rarely answered by someone who works for that company. In fact, the people answering those numbers probably work for an outsourced customer care partner (our competitors). Not only would the agent taking the call not know who that decision maker is, they wouldn’t have contact information or the ability to transfer a call to them. Toss out the toll-free number and continue searching.

You can consult a search engine, but the chances are excellent that the phone number will be wrong, disconnected, or not answered by humans. Aren’t there tons of companies that claim to sell contact information? Sure. ZoomInfo, UpLead, Apollo, and others provide email addresses and phone numbers. But these are not especially accurate. The email addresses stand a better chance of being correct because there are only a handful of email address conventions (e.g., first initial then last name, or first name dot last name, followed by the email domain) so if you find one person’s email address at a company you can guess your way to finding your prospect’s email address. Telephone numbers are a totally different story. My experience shows that 10% to 20% of company phone numbers provided by ZoomInfo and their ilk are correct, and maybe 5% of the individual phone numbers will get you to the correct person.

Once you’ve found a number for the company, the next hurdle is reaching the prospect. Call the main number and set the bar low. Gone are the days when a helpful receptionist would answer and route your call. Press 1 for Sales, press 2 for HR (usually a link to an employment verification service that I hope isn’t me), press 3 for Customer Support, and so on. Good luck getting a human. And if they have a dial-by-name directory, run screaming.

Companies such as Ring Central, Mitel, Dialpad, 8×8 and more develop dial-by-name directories. Unfortunately, they are all frustrating to use. With technology that has been around for more than 30 years, why doesn’t it work? Can we use AI to make them useful?

As the eternal optimist, I think we can. Full disclosure – I’ve never purchased, installed, implemented, or maintained a dial-by-name directory in my life. I just try to use the things. This is all just conjecture based on some research I’ve done on the subject. Here goes…

AI can significantly enhance dial-by-name directories by improving their accuracy, efficiency, and user experience. Here are several ways AI can be applied:

  • Speech Recognition: Implement advanced speech recognition algorithms to accurately transcribe spoken names. AI models trained on large datasets can better understand diverse accents and pronunciation variations to improve recognition accuracy.
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP): Utilize NLP algorithms to interpret user queries and match them with the most relevant names in the directory. This includes understanding synonyms, variations in naming conventions, and contextual clues to provide more accurate results.
  • Machine Learning: Train the models to continually improve recognition accuracy by learning from user interactions and feedback. Maybe these directories don’t get enough use for machine learning to learn anything?
  • Contextual Understanding: Develop AI systems capable of understanding the context of a conversation to refine search results. For example, if a user asks for “Kevin from the marketing department,” the system should prioritize names matching both “Kevin” and “marketing” over other results.
  • Integration with Other Systems: Can you integrate the AI-powered dial-by-name directories with other enterprise systems such as HR databases? This would go a long way toward matching the letters on the dial pad with up-to-date contact information.

By leveraging AI technologies, dial-by-name directories should become more accurate, efficient, and a lot less frustrating to use.