New Trade Routes

Drawing digital pathways on the new trade maps.

Seattle, WA USA

Trade drives the way people interact.  People, products, money, and ideas follow the trade routes and impact everything in their path.  Keeping pace with the way trade routes are changing is essential to success or even survival.  New Trade Routes is working to better understand the changes so we can help our clients, investees, and grantees improve their chances of success.

 

Value Delivered and the Flower Shop Test

January 29, 2013  /  Jay Leon

There are many ways to assess the viability of a marketing idea. None is better in my mind than what I call the flower shop test. The next time you come up with an amazing new idea, imagine yourself pitching it to the owner of a retail flower shop. That person has flowers to sell and every day the flowers lose value – so they have to be sold fast. If you can pitch your new marketing idea to the flower shop owner with a straight face – then you probably have a winner.

Here are a few other things that we do at CSG to ensure that we never lose our focus on delivering value:

FlowerShop.jpg

Stay Away From the Fluff

Although turning away business is not one of our favorite things to do, we prefer it to explaining how a project was doomed from the start. So we are rigorous about asking: How do we measure success? And How does this make financial sense? Right at the beginning. If we cannot wrap our heads around the logic of it all, we will decline the business.

Assigned Value

We know that all marketing projects do not produce direct revenue. In such cases we work to assign a dollar value to specific outcomes. In many cases there are values that have been established by third parties that can work. Whether it be the lifetime value of a customer, or the average revenue generated by a certain type of channel partner, we want to denominate every project in a concrete dollar figure so we can calculate the value delivered.

Test and Re-Test

Smart people with spreadsheets can convince themselves of just about anything. We intentionally ask ourselves the hard questions so that we will have confidence in our numbers. At the end of the quarter it is tempting to grab onto the nearest good looking number and hope it keeps you afloat into the next budget cycle. This sort term thinking does not lead to long term business relationships so we do whatever we can to resist the temptation.

Many marketing efforts get caught in the crossfire with sales or budget reductions or intermediate measures and lose sight of the only goal that really matters: increased revenue. Increased revenue is revenue that would not exist without the marketing effort and should not be confused with revenue that would have happened anyway. This is the only measure of value delivered that should be used to assess the viability of marketing efforts.

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