The Courage to Be Great

DM Review: Trends in the Job Marketplace: Recruiting the All Stars presents an excellent overview of the reasons it's dangerous to take employees for granted, especially the ones who really understand direct marketing.

It's not the dot com era, where an HTML programmer could demand an exhorbitant salary to write code. To be successful in Online marketing, we need to create a customer experience leading to our goal, not just a pretty Web page. Marketers are at a place where we have the opportunity to be great if we execute our direct traditional and digital sales programs couragously and correctly.

Both traditional and online direct marketing programs are becoming more important than ever before, because they speak to the need for relevance and measurable results in the marketing realm, familiar territory for the classic direct marketer. No longer can we just buy ads, even in targeted publications, and expect them to drive our sales.

At the risk of being accused of shameless self-promotion, I would consider myself a direct marketing all-star, having worked in this business for the last two decades, and in the Online marketing world for the last eleven years (I started as a mailing list broker in the early '80's and started online promotions for computer companies pre-Web.) I even leveraged my skills in direct marketing to become successful in public relations, deciding that it was really direct marketing that asked for coverage instead of an order.

Of course, this willingness to try new things and question old assumptions can be threatening to those who don't "get it." When I tell people about the success I have had at executing programs generating sales, profits and new customer acquisition with literally no ad budget, there are usually one of two reactions. Some marketers scoff at the idea that this was achieved without any national ad buys. Others want to know how we did it and are eager to talk about new ways to initiate and execute the process in their own organizations.

Some companies that scoff I would consider among the chronically corporate. They are the ones that tend to pile on the management layers and create bottlenecks to success with the justification that they are necessary because of the organization's size or "image."

Guess what? Bigcompanyitis still slows rather than speeds, and adds cost to the equation no matter what the actual size of the organization. If you want a corporate drone, you can always find someone who is happy to come to work at a set time, take an hour lunch and leave after saying yes to all of the old ways all day long and not rocking the boat with new suggestions or plans.

Finding individuals who understand the power of relevance, the relevance of ROI and have the execution skills to generate results is a rare occurrence, though. It is also one that only the enlightened few seek. It can be uncomfortable to manage an entrepreneurial type, and, yes, his or her approach may make the commissioned agency that places your ads cringe (think about it, if you can get the sales for free....)

Does your organization have the courage to recruit the All Stars?