#104: How to Pass the Baton
The MessageUp Newsletter | Vol. 3, Edition 4
Hello there! Matt here from MessageUp.
Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where you’ll find:
An important business update.
Some interesting news about cookies.
A discussion on the importance of proper handovers.
Summaries of our latest blog posts, the most recent of which described a framework for prioritizing and responding to prospects.
Three article reviews, covering digital marketing regulations, the importance of buyer groups, and B2B influencer marketing.
Hopefully you’ll find something here that’s relevant and helpful to your B2B marketing efforts.
As always, you can see more of our content on LinkedIn.
Thanks for spending a slice of your precious time with us!
Cheers,
~ Matt
Business Update
Welcome to August! Is any ready for Fall yet?
As usual, there’s plenty on the boil over here at MessageUp, from project work to project handovers (more on that in a moment) to filming segments for an online conference (more on that in the next newsletter).
For this edition, I want to focus on a content delivery approach that’s been requested by several people but that we’ve not had time to properly research—until now.
Cohort-based learning is the idea that several clients can usefully work through a program of content at the same time, deriving additional benefit from seeing each other’s work and making beneficial contacts.
We’re firm believers in using a common marketing framework to develop unique marketing strategies that are best-fit for each business.
The question we’re trying to answer is: Can we honor that belief while simultaneously delivering a common set of content to a group of distinct companies?
In short, yes, we think we can!
Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be launching a call for participants to join our first cohort-based B2B Marketing Tune-up.
This will be an eight-week program, with one 2-hour group session each week, followed by individual calls with the participating teams.
The aim will be for B2B leadership teams to work rapidly through the key elements of a marketing assessment, making minor adjustments as they go and taking note of any significant changes they might want to make after the program.
This program will be especially relevant to businesses that are either (i) preparing to fundraise, or (ii) have recently secured investment and are preparing to embark on strategic marketing, or (iii) have been marketing the same way for a while and are feeling stuck or stagnant.
If any of those sounds like your company or a company you know, please drop me an email.
More details will be published on our website and LinkedIn page as soon as the call for participants goes live. And, of course, subscribers to this newsletter will be among the first to learn more.
Marketing News
Cookies are back! Or are they?
If you’re actively involved in your company’s marketing—or pay attention to your marketing team’s updates—you’re likely aware that cookies are headed the way of the dinosaur.
To allay users’ privacy concerns—amplified by hawkish security laws passed in the European Union and elsewhere—websites will no longer be able to park pieces of microcode on your computer to help Google (and its minority competitors) track your journey around the internet.
Or so they said.
As it turns out, Google has begun to back-track.
Although Google’s Chrome browser has been updated to give users greater visibility into cookie land and more control over how cookies are used, its parent has never quite lived up to a 2020 promise that it would make third-party cookies “obsolete”.
While marketers fretted and made plans for a cookie-less world, Google discovered what we all instinctively knew: it ain’t going to be that easy.
In a statement issued by Google in April, they said : “We recognize that there are ongoing challenges related to reconciling divergent feedback from the industry, regulators and developers, and will continue to engage closely with the entire ecosystem. It's also critical that the [competition authority] has sufficient time to review all evidence including results from industry tests […] Given both of these significant considerations, we will not complete third-party cookie deprecation during the second half of Q4.”
Then, in July, Google announced that the ‘Privacy Sandbox APIs’ it has been developing will “support a competitive and thriving marketplace that works for publishers and advertisers, and encourage the adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies.”
Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, Google will “introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time.”
This ‘controlled cookie’ approach hasn’t yet been approved by the regulators who were calling for change. Nor is it clear how last week’s landmark ruling by a US federal court against Google’s monopolistic practices might affect things.
What we do know is that none of this will play out overnight.
We will continue to follow developments with interest—and you should too.
There’s no need to make any radical changes to your marketing strategy but, given how much uncertainty still surrounds the future of web cookies, we recommend hedging your bets between tactics that benefit from cookies and those that don’t.
How to Pass the Baton
Or: The Importance of Proper Handovers
As Heraclitus taught us in the fifth century BCE, “The only constant in life is change.”
For those of us running client-facing businesses, whether consulting, coaching, or providing other specialized services, never a truer word was spoken.
Projects ebb and flow, which makes it a challenge to plan and balance resources. Somehow, unrelated clients’ urgent deadlines always seem to coincide!
More challenging still is the paradoxical balance between project delivery and new business development. In other words, how much time we spend finding and winning new clients versus keeping existing projects running.
When the slate is full, there’s little time or incentive to chase new work.
As soon as a project ends, gaps appear on the calendar and revenue drops—issues that can only be rectified if start-ready projects are in the pipeline.
When one of our larger clients decided to wrap up their engagement with us, it represented an inevitable—and desirable—outcome of our work. Our job was done; it was time for someone else to build on the foundations we had helped the business lay.
But it also thrust us into the business development paradox, tempted to divert as many resources as possible into securing a replacement project while still keeping an eye on the project delivery ball.
Let’s pause that story for a moment and switch our attention to the Olympic Games. How much did you watch?
This two-week spectacle of sport is captivating, no matter which event(s) you follow on an average weekend.
Pommel horse, anyone? (yeah, we love Steve too!)
The Games always culminate in a handful of signature events, among them the sprint relays.
And of those, the men’s and women’s 4 x 100-meter relays are about as high-energy as it gets.
Some of the fastest human beings on Earth are grouped into teams and asked to perform at their usual level while introducing the fraught task of passing a baton to the next racer in their team.
Sounds innocuous enough, right?
Try telling that to the men’s team representing the USA.
They botched a baton transfer in the 4x100m relay at each of the 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020 Olympics, meaning it had been 20 years since the team had stood on an Olympic podium.
Talk about pressure.
And then it happened again.
The 2024 team was disqualified for fumbling their first baton pass and completing it beyond the 20-meter allowed distance.
Each of the four athletes ran a brilliant leg. They would likely have taken home gold medals if they had executed the three baton handovers properly.
Which brings us back to the project work paradox.
Completing an effective handover is one of the keys to delivering a service project.
Get that wrong, and the good work you’ve invested over many weeks or months can be undone.
It’s important to remember that your work is just one leg in a relay race—often many more than four legs long.
If you fail to execute the handover properly, the next person—and the people who follow them—can’t fully benefit from the work you’ve done.
In the worst case, it will be abandoned or forgotten—disqualified from the company’s marketing race.
I try to put myself in the client’s shoes as much as possible—a practice that yields dividends throughout the project lifecycle, not just at the end.
What would I want to hear and receive from a service provider at the end of this project?
I invest time to clean up working files and organize final versions (and source files, where applicable) into a structure that will hopefully be intuitive to whomever works with them afterwards.
I send a summary email, capturing any ongoing or outstanding work and providing a download link to the project files.
And I always leave the door open to answering questions that arise in the weeks ahead—although this mustn’t become a pass to free consulting work; ending the project means cutting off access to the good stuff.
I feel awful for the men on that relay team. And yet, I wonder if they practiced their handovers as much as the criticality of that element deserves?
Which begs the question: Do we spend enough time thinking about, practicing, and reviewing the handovers at the ends of our projects?
With the relay race analogy in mind, we might be well served to do so.
Recent Posts on The Framework Blog
A 3x3 Approach to Ranking B2B Prospects Based on Knowledge and Receptivity (August 7, 2024)
Practices like lead scoring and target persona selection are integral to strategic B2B marketing. They help us to prioritize high-value leads and focus on prospects for whom our solution is likely to be a great fit and deliver the most value.
However, those approaches are usually based on our assessment of the prospect’s need for our solution, budgetary authority, urgency or enthusiasm for making a purchase, and so on.
A different approach involves assessing their current knowledge about the situation and their willingness to change their mind.
In this post, we explore a 3x3 matrix built with those two factors as its axes to discover news ways of prioritizing—and responding to—prospects with very different attitudes toward the information we’re delivering.
Should B2B Marketers Imitate, Emulate, or Originate? (July 3, 2024)
As a resource-constrained B2B marketer, it’s tempting to imitate your competitors' ideas. After all, what's wrong with creating your own version of something that has worked well for them in the same market?
Or perhaps it’s better to emulate a successful marketer’s approach—either within your sector or one you’ve found on social media—without directly replicating the output?
This post examines the pros and cons of both approaches, and contrasts them with the far more resource-intensive process of creating your own original content.
The decision is not as straightforward as you might think, since there are times when each approach has its merits—but also times when they simply don’t work.
What We’ve Been Reading
This months articles span the gamut of content marketing, from digital marketing regulations to the importance of buyer groups to B2B influencer marketing.
Whatever corner of the B2B landscape your business occupies, one or more of these developments is likely to be affecting marketing in your sector.
Privacy Plus Personalization: The New Frontier of Digital Advertising
Geoff Crain, MarTech, April 2024
In this article, the author explores how brands are adapting to the implications of ever-more-stringent privacy policies by crafting marketing campaigns that place consumer privacy and agency in the foreground. Interestingly, he finds that going back to the basics of organic content and storytelling never goes out of fashion.
Why Buyer Groups Matter in B2B Demand Gen and How to Target Them
Natalie Jackson, MarTech, July 2024
We're big proponents of evaluating the buying committee at your target customer—what the author of this piece calls a ‘buyer group’. She provides a solid explanation of why this matters and how it should impact different aspects of your marketing strategy. The only thing missing, in our opinion, is a discussion of buyer's journey mapping, which we would recommend to help tie all of the pieces together.
Corporate Influencing—A New Frontier in B2B Marketing
Amit Tarighat, Fast Company Executive Board, August 2024
When many of us hear the phrase "influencer marketing," we instantly think of Instagram or TikTok and B2C content aimed at teenagers and young adults. But that connotation is outdated. As the author of this piece explains, billions of dollars are already flowing to enterprise influencers—people from the business world who influence corporate buying decisions rather than those of individuals.