In the first part of this article we talked about the real players in real-world marketing: people.
We have seen how emotions, fears and human relationships matter much more than theoretical models and what you read in books.
But that is not the only thing to take into account, there are other, equally complex variables: those related to scarcity!
If theory is written in a world of unlimited resources, practice comes up against the tough management of what is lacking (time, money, skills, etc.) every day.
So let’s not waste time and talk about three other ‘truths’ that books often don’t talk about, and the ‘gurus’ don’t either, but that every entrepreneur knows all too well.
Truth #4: the budget is that and time goes by fast
The Theory: “Devote 10-15% of your turnover to marketing”, “Publish one blog article a week and three social posts a day”, “Create a podcast and a YouTube channel”. Sure, that takes, as if companies have unlimited staff and budget.
The Real World however raises its little finger and points out to the ‘gurus’ that you can’t. You can’t because the marketing budget is ‘what’s left if this month goes well’. You can’t because maybe a van breaking down, a NAS inspection or an unexpected bill can wipe it out for a quarter.
And the time? Time is not enough to do everything. The owner who is supposed to ‘create content’ is the same person who has to manage suppliers, solve a problem with a pissed-off customer and find the time to go to the inps to resolve an issue concerning his employees.
When you point these things out to the Guru, what does he say? It didn’t say that in the book. In these cases the role of the consultant is not to present a utopian plan, theoretically perfect, but unrealisable The consultant must become the one who dictates a ruthless prioritisation, otherwise one goes nowhere. The consultant must be able to apply the law of 80/20, must be able to find that 20 per cent of activities that can generate 80 per cent of the results with the minimum expenditure of time and money, and start from there. And then, one step at a time, bring home the best result. There, it is no longer a question of working so much on ideal models, but on heuristics.
Truth #5: Data is dirty and incomplete (and that’s OK)
The Theory: then, if you read this blog with any constancy, you will know how much I love these topics. “Make 100% data-driven decisions!”, “Build dashboards with all your KPIs”, “Analyse your CRM to discover powerful insights”. All good, and when you have the opportunity to do this within a company, it gives a lot of satisfaction both to me (as a consultant) and to the client when they see the benefits. But.
The Real World shows us that CRM is often a collection of messy Excel files, a smartphone address book, an owner’s memory and a couple of notebooks thrown away somewhere. The data are incomplete, fragmented, ‘dirty’, sometimes obsolete and come from 15 different sources that do not fit together.
Again, what is the difference between someone who has only read books and someone who, in addition to reading books, works in these situations every day?
It takes time to sort out the data and interpret it. Waiting until you have perfect data to make a decision means never deciding. Or it means acting too late. The consultant, in this context, must try to piece together the available clues, cross-reference the imperfect data with his own experience and the entrepreneur’s intuition. The goal is not absolute certainty, but to reduce uncertainty and make best, not perfect, decisions.
Truth #6: Today’s urgency (almost) always beats tomorrow’s strategy
Theory teaches us the long-term view: ‘Invest in SEO, results will come in a year’, ‘Build the brand, it is your greatest asset’, ‘Customer relationship is a marathon’. And it’s all true. These are things that have to be done if you want to make the leap.
The Real World however, is the one where the entrepreneur has salaries to pay at the end of the month. Long-term projects are nice, but here you have to pay the rent for the shed, the bills, the suppliers, you have to account to the financing partners for the quarterly results. You have to live.
Very often the company lives by managing urgency. It needs strategies that will bring in cash tomorrow, not in a year’s time. This creates a constant conflict between what is important (the long-term strategy) and what is urgent (the promotion to make cash now).
A consultant who only thinks in the long term, the question of suppliers, partners and salaries to be paid, I think he has not understood it. Perhaps he lives in a world where all this does not exist, and lucky him, but here the reality is different.
The real strategic work here is to create a double track in which on the one hand one must bring home the actions that guarantee survival and generate results in the short term; while on the other hand one builds and, bit by bit, develops the long-term strategies that will build the future of the company.
so we flush theory down the toilet?
No. I stated this at the beginning of the article. Theory, models, strategy, are all fundamental. But they are not enough. There are no ready-made solutions for companies. And whoever tells you this is cheating you.
The value of a consultant is not to repeat the lesson learnt in books as if he were a kid at a quiz in front of the teacher.
If you are an entrepreneur, reading these articles probably confirmed something you already knew: your company does not and will never look like a case study from a textbook!
And rightly so! It is simply your reality. Family dynamics, scarcity of resources, the need to make decisions with imperfect data and the pressure of urgency are not ‘bugs’ to be fixed to resemble a multinational corporation. They are simply the rules of the game in which you move every day.
Having these ‘problems’ is not a mistake. It is not at all. It is the norm, it is right and sacrosanct that it is so. The mistake, on the other hand, is to try to ignore them and try to necessarily apply theoretical solutions that were not designed for your context.
My free advice today is: Stop trying to fit your company into a model that does not belong to it. Do the opposite.
Become fully aware of how your business really works. Accept its uniqueness and build a strategy that is tailored to that reality. A strategy that:
- Works with human dynamics, not against them.
- Be sustainablewith the time and budget you have, not the ones you should have.
- Value your instinctiveknowledge of customers and the market as the most valuable of data sources.
- You wisely balance the actions needed to cash in today with those you need to build your future.
Always with a view to smoothing out the problems you have become aware of a little at a time. Of course. But without rushing things and without falling in love with the fashion, the model or the guru of the moment.
Don’t look for the perfect solution. Look for the best, the most convenient for you. And don’t think that what works for others will work for you.
