• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, March 6, 2019

Time for a career review. Are you back in the 1980s, suffering from the imposter syndrome, afraid to look at the numbers (the few that exist)?

Those T-shirts you hand out at trade events — of course they work. You don’t have to prove it. Sure -- but all that all happened “less on the science side of the house,” says Michael Korch, Full Circle Insights, a SaaS supplier that helps firms get to the data they need.

Or are you here and now, with access to real-time data that you can show your CFO and utilize in planning your next campaign, thanks to improved telemetry?

You could be suffering from one of two pathologies: FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) or FOFO (Fear of Finding Out). 

It’s not a joke — your CFO may be looking over you shoulder and making real-time quarterly financial projections instead of “looking in the rear view mirror," Korch says.

“Only the most mature and sophisticated teams are in a forward projection state,” he says. You need “a management team that grasps on to that, and invests not only the tool set, but also the training of people or teams to use those tools adequately,” he adds.

Korch should know. He’s a Seattle type who used Full Circle Insights three times before joining the firm. Each medium presents its own challenges in an omnichannel campaign.  

He is against the “arts-and-crafts” model in marketing. 

Take email. The channel “is evolving from batch-and-blast to moving more toward having instrumentation that allows you to do triggered emails that respect what people were looking at, how they came in, what kinds of keywords,” Korch says. “You can speak in automated fashion at scale." 

However, “it has always been responsible to understand where to use email and how the structure of email communications is based on where the individual is in their buying journey,” Korch says.

Case in point: Korch says it's “stupid” to send a blast that fails to consider what kind of prospect the person is. 

Let’s say the person “has bubbled up in the past and maybe even had a conversation — or two or three. It’s not linear — the wave comes in and out. They lose their budget or there’s a change in priorities.” You don’t want to put that person into email nurture. Introduce yourself and the basic problem you’re trying to solve.

"The clicks are higher when you personalize,” Korch contends. He adds that things are so measurable that everybody has to do that. "You can’t show up at a meeting and not talk about the ROI — you’re going to get shot out of a cannon.”

It's all about the content. Younger marketers tend to be more focused on tools than creative. 

You also have to examine the nuances. At one firm, the team was over-delivering on the pipeline and the revenue. But it was coming from fewer sales than they anticipated.

One tech product sold for $400,000, but the average sale price was modeled at $175,000. “You sell a few of those, and the numbers are messed up,” Korch says.

Korch is happy that his firm's product exists in the CRM, where the sales are. 

Are you meeting with your CFO? Don’t hide things the CFO can't see. Instead, “get to the bad news in the quarter, and move on to deals we actually have a chance of closing,” Korch concludes.