Revenue Journal®

The people you hire can make a big difference to your revenue growth. That's why I help CEOs find and hire the best people for each position. I've been building a marketing and sales team for one of my clients for the past few years. The people we have found are making a difference. The company's revenues are way up. The marketing and selling efforts are bearing fruit.

All of the people we've brought in are contributing. The webmaster/IT guy is technically brilliant, as well as productive and pleasant. The head of marketing loves marketing online, has a great sense of the big picture, and understands how to optimize marketing and tracking efforts. The head of sales has been working with each salesperson to improve their outgoing efforts - and has set up programs to consistently interact with existing customers, at just the right time in their buying process. Sales to new customers has increased along with sales to existing customers.

One of the most satisfying hires is the data-oriented person we brought into marketing. This is not someone you would think would make as much difference as, say, the head of marketing or sales. But it's an incredibly important position. I've long advised CEOs that every marketing department needs a number-cruncher, a data-oriented person who can help build tracking systems, analyze the data, and create reports that lead to better decisions.

As a result of this person's efforts, we've been able to see trends that we couldn't see before. For example, we've been able to clearly identify when clients buy certain types of products during the year, and have been able to adjust marketing efforts to pitch those products to clients when they're actually thinking about buying them.

This seems so obvious. But until you have organized the data into a form that makes it possible to identify and interpret patterns, you're guessing. And guessing in marketing and sales is a dangerous game.

Sure, your salespeople will tell you about trends. But salespeople have very short memories and tend to be agenda-driven. I've seldom seen a salesperson look at customer trends over a year's period. On the other hand, I've often seen a salesperson make long-range decisions based on the last client he had lunch with. Data from salespeople is very anecdotal and client-specific. The decisions you make based on this data often ends up pleasing just a few clients, while and irritating and alienating the rest.

Why do you need someone dedicated to data in your marketing department? Because there are a lot of bright, articulate people in marketing and sales who can benefit from datamining - but simply can't do it themselves. They literally fall asleep as they begin to gather, organize, and format the data that is needed to make decisions. The more dedicated and disciplined folks will slog through it, but their hearts aren't in it, it takes too long for them to do even the most simple task, and they certainly won't come up with anything spectacular. They just don't have it in them. It's not how their brains are wired.

Instead, CEOs should hire someone who loves crunching numbers, fussing with Excel charts and Web logs, creating and tweaking reports, and thinking of new ways to look at data. Let the marketing and selling people go back to what they do best.

Personally, I think this function is essential, not optional. If I were an entrepreneur just starting to hire marketing people, I would hire this person before hiring a marketing director or marcom manager. Why? Because you can always outsource the creative, once you know where you should be heading.

First you have to find out what your customers really want from you. You can do that through customer interviews. Done properly, interviews will tell you what your message should be, where your customers expect to find it, and how your customers will buy once they've found you.

Once you have this information, you can go to a creative person to create several appropriate messages. The messages should be straightforward - "Here is what you want, this is how we provide it to you." You should come up with several approaches, and then you should test. You should run the different versions of the message, and measure your results.

This is where the marketing data person's contribution kicks in. She can help you build systems and reports to track and evaluate click-through rates, resulting sales, shopping cart abandonment, and buying patterns. Once you know what's working, you can use that same creative over and over - for a surprisingly long time.

The right title for this marketing data cruncher seems to be "datamaster" - someone who spends their day deeply immersed in data.
You simply can't take full advantage of online marketing vehicles without tracking and measuring, as my friend Jim Sterne is sure to tell you. Jim puts on the always-sold-out Emetrics Summits around the world, and is the founding president of the Web Analytics Association. As Jim says: "Why on earth wouldn't you want to track, test, and tweak your campaigns? On the web, you can conduct meaningful tests in a matter of days. This is the road to continuous improvement - true marketing optimization."

Online marketing is interactive - people see it and click on it, and then do something. You must know what causes them to click, and what they are doing after they click. And you can't do that with the usual marketing, sales, and web people.

You need a datamaster.