Does your marketing focus on your Customers?
This week on the If You Market podcast we talk with Tim Parkin about Inside Out Marketing. What’s Inside Out Marketing? It’s about waste, NPS, People, Process, Structure, and addressing internal issues before you focus on the customer.
Tim Parkin is a global consultant, advisor, and coach to marketing executives of many world-renowned brands. He specializes in helping marketing teams optimize performance, accelerate growth, and maximize their results.
By applying more than 20 years of experience merging behavioral psychology and technology seamlessly, Tim has unlocked rapid and dramatic growth for global brands and award-winning agencies alike.
Tim is a speaker, author, and thought leader who has contributed to AdWeek, Forbes, MarTech, TechCrunch, and dozens of other marketing outlets. He is also a member of the American Marketing Association, the Society for the Advancement of Consulting, and was inducted into the Million Dollar Consulting Hall of Fame.
Contact : Tim Parkin
If you have questions about the If You Market podcast or would like to suggest a guest, please email us at info@IfYouMarket.com.
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Transcript:
Sky
00:00:05 – 00:00:17
good morning marketers and welcome to the market podcast brought to you by Mountaintop data. We are the only podcast that markets the ship
Tim Parkin
00:00:17 – 00:00:18
out of it.
Sky
00:00:18 – 00:00:46
I’m sky Cassidy and today we’ll be talking with Tim parking of parking, consulting about marketing Inside out. What’s marketing inside out. Well we’ll we’ll get to that in a minute. It’s um from the little I know about it. Let’s say this is going to be a very interesting and counterintuitive episode. So tim’s a global consultant advisor coach to marketing executives of many world renowned brands, which is another way of saying really big companies I think. And Tim thanks for coming on the show.
Tim Parkin
00:00:46 – 00:00:50
Hey Sky thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to get into this and talk about it.
Sky
00:00:50 – 00:01:03
Yeah. So let’s dive right into it because the listeners are thinking, what the hell is marketing Inside out? We’re gonna talk about marketing Pixar movies now or something. So can you tell us, what do you mean by marketing Inside out?
Tim Parkin
00:01:03 – 00:01:28
Yeah. You know, there’s there’s a really big problem in marketing that a lot of people are afraid to talk about and that is that marketing organizations waste a massive amount of time and money and we think about that, you know, there’s really two ways that it manifests itself. The first is that half of the money and time is spent on doing the wrong things right things that have absolutely no impact, no bearing and get no results. The other half is wasted on doing the right things, but doing them really
Sky
00:01:28 – 00:01:31
poorly quote that
Tim Parkin
00:01:31 – 00:01:53
it is doing the right things very poorly, you know, and that’s what we see in so many companies and as you mentioned, I work with really large companies and these companies have all the resources, all the budget, all the people and yet still they suffer from these issues. So marketing inside out is about addressing those two issues and by focusing internally first then you can focus externally on the customer.
Sky
00:01:53 – 00:02:38
So something you said when we talked before that really caught my interest on this topic was was you said um something about not focusing on the customer and I was like what? That nobody ever says that is is this a trap? Is he setting me up? Um So you say inside out and looking at these wastes and stuff like that. But what is the not focusing on the customer? Obviously that’s not a customer thing. Um And I feel like I don’t think you’re saying don’t focus on the customer, You’re just saying, hey here’s another thing you can do that isn’t like you should also probably focus on the customer but then there’s a whole other area where you can find profits or are you saying really forget about the customer and just get efficient.
Tim Parkin
00:02:38 – 00:02:57
Yeah I think your customer always matters for sure. But a lot of marketing companies, market organizations spend too much time pretending to focus on the customer. You know customer eccentricity, customer focus is this buzzword that people throw around and when you get inside these organizations, you look at what they’re actually doing. They really don’t care about the customer because they’re making posters
Sky
00:02:57 – 00:03:07
and they put them on the wall that says we care about the customer. They make commercials about how they love the customer. You know, you know what the product is. Come on. Isn’t that caring about the customer?
Tim Parkin
00:03:07 – 00:03:28
I guess it’s one way to care about the customer, right? But not if you want real results, if you want to actually see growth and so there’s this pretend going on and we’re all talking about the customer but no one’s actually doing anything about the customer. And so you know, I like to ask companies, I work with them. When’s the last time you talked to your customers and what have you done a survey recently? What have you done customer interviews? What have you done usability testing
Tim Parkin
00:03:28 – 00:03:51
and they just stare at me, you know, like a deer in headlights because it’s been, you know, last year we did a survey or you know, we just did some user interviews, you know, six months ago. That’s not frequent enough. If you really care about the customers want to make the customers central, you have to be talking to them nonstop. But you know, the other problem is NPS nps is complete garbage. You know, that’s not customer trance central city either. But all of these are just pretending about the customer.
Sky
00:03:51 – 00:03:57
Okay. I’ll, I’ll pretend like I know off top of my head what mps means. But I’ll ask you for the listeners.
Tim Parkin
00:03:57 – 00:04:08
Nps is a net promoter score. You’ve ever gotten one of those emails that says, you know, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend on a scale of 1 to 10 and you click a six or a seven because you think what the hell? I don’t know
Sky
00:04:08 – 00:04:15
because the salesperson told you, hey, if I don’t get a tent, I’m fired man, my family will starve. So please, you gotta give me a 10 every time.
Tim Parkin
00:04:15 – 00:04:33
That’s right. And some companies just send this out without even looking at the results. You know, it’s bad enough that they’re using mps, but they collect this data and don’t even look at it to make a decision about it. So, you know, if you want to pretend about the customer, that’s one thing. But if you want real growth, you have to look inside because as I mentioned, there’s a massive amount of waste in terms of time and money
Tim Parkin
00:04:33 – 00:05:05
and we’ve seen this made even worse by the pandemic that a lot of teams now are remote and they’re trying to figure out hybrid or remote. So they’re not even in person, You know, when you can walk down the hall and yell at your, you know, teammate or colleague and say where is this or why did you do it this way that helps accelerate things. But now we’ve lost that. And so companies are really struggling right now to figure out how do you drive and manage an effective marketing team and effective marketing organization remotely or through hybrid. And it’s been a big issue for a long time. Even before that. So now it’s being exposed thankfully.
Sky
00:05:05 – 00:05:47
Okay. I want to touch this net promoter score thing because I had a thought as before the mps you were talking about doing customer surveys and stuff like that. And that is kind of a customer survey. It’s just a really weak ah, worthless kind of one. And I thought, oh, well we have all these sales cadences and stuff now. Why wouldn’t companies just do a automatic cadence when certain touches happen where you give people a survey and the marketing, uh, can update the survey from time. Oh, that’s kind of what mps is. They just do a terrible job of it. So instead of once a year, once every couple of years looking to do some, some surveys and talk to customers. It’s like, well, how about you have it on an automatic drip whenever people cross certain thresholds.
Sky
00:05:47 – 00:06:15
Okay. They have that with mps. It just seems like it’s done poorly. Maybe. Um, would I mean, would that be a good idea to do that? Just more effectively and not just trying to create a score where that you can using marketing to tell people how much you care about. Look they are customers love us. It seems like the only use for it is to be able to say, oh yeah look how much our customers love us. We told them to act like they love us. So they did and now we can use that marketing to prove that we care about the customer.
Tim Parkin
00:06:15 – 00:06:44
Yeah to justify and get a bigger budget for next year. I think I think you’re right. You know any time you can get feedback from people is valuable and you can do it on an automated basis. That’s valuable. Also we can’t forget the human element as well though which is to train people to actually talk to customers. And customer service is a great source of this that customer service, customer support whatever you call it. They’re talking to customers all the time, through email, through phone, through chat that insight. Those conversations are pure gold mine.
Tim Parkin
00:06:44 – 00:07:10
And you know I’ve worked with clients before and I said can you give me all the call data that you have so we can scrape it and see what’s happening and they said oh no we can’t get that or we can’t use those conversations from email or we don’t have access to live chat data. You know that’s gold. Pure gold to understand the voice of the customer to see the real issues people are facing and again you want to be customer centric central focus central centralized, You need to have that data, you need to use that data actually have access to it.
Sky
00:07:10 – 00:07:35
We’re getting away from the topic that we’re saying yeah you got to do this with a customer but your whole point here is forget about that like look for, look for growth, look for profit, look for marketing success aside from the customer side. So I don’t want to dig into that too much because then it’s a um an episode about how you need to be customer centric instead of not like
Tim Parkin
00:07:35 – 00:08:07
yeah I think most people you know just to give you a glimpse of what it would look like. Most people aren’t even doing that. And so that’s where this whole thing is a farce to begin with that we pretend we care about the customer but we really don’t. But yeah if you look internally I’ll tell you you know growth is like a tree and this is the big fallacy. If your business is a tree you wanted to keep growing you want to get taller and taller and you wanna have this massive tree. But the problem is in marketing, most managers, most you know cmos forget that the tree has apart underneath of it the roots in order to grow tall, you have to go deep
Tim Parkin
00:08:07 – 00:08:34
and that’s the real point of marketing inside out is that you can only grow as tall as you grow down and so you need people and you need process and you need structure to support this growth and without that any growth that you have vertically above ground is flimsy and weak and will collapse. It’s not sustainable. And so marketing inside out really is about developing that internal capability so you can have deep and strong roots to support and sustain and drive your growth.
Sky
00:08:34 – 00:09:17
I feel like I’m starting to really like this and that we’re a data company, Mountaintop Data, we provide lists for sales and marketing and one of the things we’ve always preached throughout the years is look if If your data is is 50% accurate, like you want to double your productivity, But what if it was 100% accurate now, you’re not going to get there. But a lot of people have such dirty data that they have and everything else cascades up from that. So it’s a multiplier, just up through all the activities and we’re always screaming like you’re getting everything is wrong from here because your foundation is uh, is wrong and you’re spending all this effort marketing to companies that aren’t even in business anymore because you’re starting off with this,
Sky
00:09:17 – 00:09:23
you assume it’s right, but it’s all wrong information at the base. So it’s those kind of efficiencies you’re talking about?
Tim Parkin
00:09:23 – 00:09:57
Absolutely, yeah, I think data is a great example of that as you described because if that’s wrong, all those efforts after that are complete waste and leading you down a path where you’re just wasting more time and money and you know, performance. The formula for performance in my opinion is people plus process equals performance. You need the right people because you have to have good, smart, intelligent people who can do the right thing and you need a solid process. And if you have great people but not a good process, you know, that’s not gonna work out for you, it’s going to be unreliable and sustainable. And if you have okay people, average people with it
Tim Parkin
00:09:57 – 00:10:10
tremendous process. You know, you can get consistent results, but it’s only if you have exceptional people with a really well defined process that you can achieve substantial and incredible growth as you need both those components.
Sky
00:10:10 – 00:10:51
I’ve always said that I believe a good process, you can be successful with average people if your process requires amazing people, it’s not really a good process because that’s not really sustainable. You can’t assume you’re always gonna have rock stars like, no, no, no, it has to work with average people. Otherwise it’s not really a good product. You have a 19 eighties jaguar, like it’s not really a good car, it’s breaking down constantly. It’s not just gonna work. It’s just so there’s so many little points of failure. Okay. Um, so, I mean you’re saying you’ve got to focus on the customer, you gotta do regular marketing. But there’s all these other areas. My initial thought was okay,
Sky
00:10:51 – 00:11:19
tIM works with these large companies. This is really something that applies only to large companies. But then when you make me think about the data, I’m like, oh wait, if a small company has these inefficiencies, so is this something that’s generally applied once they have maxed out growth from their marketing activities and there, then you need to get more efficient or is it something that’s kind of small? Large all along the way? Should be, should be employed.
Tim Parkin
00:11:19 – 00:11:52
Yeah. You made a great point earlier when we were talking about this briefly that, you know, depending on the stage that your organizations that really determines where you should focus. And for example in subscription or in SAS businesses, you know, software as a service. A lot of companies are focused purely on growth, on acquisition, acquiring new customers and they ignore retention and that’s to their detriment because every customer you acquire that you can’t retain. You know, you’re wasting time and money acquiring more customer. You have to keep filling this ship that’s leaking. You know, it has a huge hole in the bottom. And so this is where, you know, obviously in subscription model you should focus on retention
Tim Parkin
00:11:52 – 00:12:34
and focus on acquisition. So you can solve that problem. And so there’s really three stages of growth here. The first is if you’re a startup where you have a new business, you know, you need product market fit and no amount of internal or external is gonna solve that. So you have to get product market fit. That’s mostly for start ups for entrepreneurs for small businesses you need that fundamentally. Next though is internal and this is what I talked about. Mark marketing Inside out you need the right people and processes so you can have that foundation that we were just describing and then and only then should you focus on the external on scaling through span and through partners and through other means because it’s only with the solid foundation that you can really amplify that growth that you’ve already gotten gotten there. You’re
Sky
00:12:34 – 00:12:41
talking about like marketing campaigns, product market fit people in process an actual like actual marketing out to the customer
Tim Parkin
00:12:41 – 00:12:44
large scale campaigns. Yes. Absolutely.
Sky
00:12:44 – 00:13:25
Okay. But then where does the inside out stuff, where do you go looking for inefficiencies or for loopholes that you can close or whatever it is to to I mean I guess if you’re looking for R. O. I. In your marketing, if you spend half as much money because you removed then you’re doubling your Ri it’s like oh well crap. But then some companies don’t really care they need the growth, they don’t they don’t care too much what the R. O. I. Is to get there at some stages. Um So can you give some examples of these efficiencies? Because I feel like I mean I kind of throughout the whole data thing like oh have cleaner data. Okay but are some of these not even
Sky
00:13:25 – 00:14:00
in like part of the marketing campaign where like oh if we tweak this, we can get better results from this campaign. You’re talking about like personnel and hey this person should get a raise and these two should get fired and you will be more efficient than or let’s say laid off or something, let’s move on to another career or or whatnot. Um Is it getting to those kind of things we’re talking about like accounting tricks, are we talking about um negotiate renegotiating contracts and stuff? Um How much of this is really outside of marketing at all and how much of it is making more marketing efficiency?
Tim Parkin
00:14:00 – 00:14:23
Yeah, I’d say there’s two sides to it. One is optimization which is you know optimizing your campaigns, your strategy or tactics, your marketing approach. The other is operations which is you know, the people in the process side of it and so you know, one of my clients has many agencies that they use for the same function and it’s been kind of juggling act right of, you know, we have this agency now we’re bringing another agency, we got rid of that agency.
Tim Parkin
00:14:23 – 00:14:43
If you can consolidate those things then you can save a lot in terms of communication that happens in terms of the efficiency of the budget, in terms of the consistency of the results so that’s part of it is just you know operationally management wise, how can we do that? But you know, finding these inefficiencies is not difficult and I imagine that people listening to this right now, I can already think of some of them, you know, in the latino organization,
Tim Parkin
00:14:43 – 00:15:26
if you’re having more than a few meetings a week, if you’re having to meet on the same thing multiple times, if you’re having to follow up on tasks or projects or if you don’t have insight or ideas about, you know, how the performance of your campaigns are going now, those are obvious indicators that the people in the process within your organization have issues and have inefficiencies that you can address and you know, and oftentimes these organizations operate based on assumptions and common knowledge rather than documented processes, principles and procedures. And so if you don’t have those things, if anything I just described there sounds like you, then you more than likely have one or more of these issues and I can tell you, I’ve been surprised, you know, as I’ve worked with larger and larger companies, No one has this right? Everyone is struggling.
Tim Parkin
00:15:26 – 00:15:56
You know, one of my clients right now just went from 15 people in the marketing team to 30 people, you know, doubling in size and what they found is that different people have different levels of experience, different skill sets, different backgrounds, different personalities and how they operate, how they communicate and so that’s a challenge of trying to make all those people gel have a consistent language and process around that so we can all operate and be efficient and maximize our chances of success. So these are real issues and they’re unfortunately extremely common
Sky
00:15:56 – 00:16:31
and are they? And it seems like they become more common the larger a company gets, it’s easy to be efficient with one person kind of and then you add two and you get communication inefficiencies and you have to have processed more processes when you have more people. And so does this two parts of this question. Does this amplify when the companies get larger? Which is maybe why you you tend to work with larger companies also they usually have larger checkbooks. Um, but and then on top of that, Well let’s just start with that one. Let’s let’s I want pile questions on you.
Tim Parkin
00:16:31 – 00:16:53
Yeah, absolutely right. There’s a network effect and so adding one note to the network, you know, it has to connect to every other node. And so when you add someone, you know, in the digital team for example, they’re obviously working with everyone else in the digital team but then they may also interface with someone from the creative team. And so it creates this network effects. You’re absolutely right that in larger companies, if your team is bigger, it gets more complicated, you know, the flip side though is also true to some extent
Tim Parkin
00:16:53 – 00:17:20
but larger companies work with a lot of agencies as well if you’re working with agencies, you know that also creates a two way network effect where now your people are working with their people and it gets complicated, how do you keep all the communication flowing? How do you organize that? How do you reduce the number of meetings? So we don’t have to just, you know, repeat things. So there’s a lot of just management that has to happen and organization, even if you’re a medium sized business, but at enterprise level, it definitely becomes quite complicated the more people who are involved
Sky
00:17:20 – 00:18:07
so you want to and it seems like the processes help with that. If if you do the product market fit people and processes, you’re much less likely to have these. If you have good processes, then you’re going to have less inefficiency. The process is kind of designed for that. But then again you get large, of course there’s still going to be inefficiencies and they add up to way more money. Um It also occurs to me that once companies get really large, they’ve kind of maxed out their market a bit. And then we’re now where you gonna, how you gonna increase your R. O. I. Your return has been maxed out, you own a dominant share of the market, there isn’t really much left to get, it’s returned diminishing returns on what you’re trying to fight for. Um the efficiencies are really where
Sky
00:18:07 – 00:18:48
all the remaining profit is, is to you, then you, but then you get things like Costco or not Costco like walmart where they’re like well the way to do it now is just to like squeeze everything as much as possible. Um Which is more profitable for them. But that’s you know how you’re gonna continue to grow when everybody’s already shopping there. Well now you have to get more money from each person and pay less for each product. Um Type of a thing. So I guess one once a company whether they’re small and they’ve saturated their market, maybe it’s a local market and you’re like the only plumber in town um then you kind of have to look for efficiencies. That’s all you have left. Is that at any size part of the effectiveness of this.
Tim Parkin
00:18:48 – 00:19:14
Yeah. It certainly can be. You know, I think I would say there’s a caution there that a lot of companies may think they’ve saturated the market when they haven’t And there’s a lot more customers than you think and you can always steal customers from the competition. I’ll tell you though, one of my clients is in the Internet space highly competitive. You know Internet provider and they have like 75% market share. So it’s very, you know, they’re not gonna get 90% market share in that industry.
Sky
00:19:14 – 00:19:24
It’s diminishing returns at that point. It’s really hard. You can take your customers or your your competitors business but your R o. I. Is going to be much much lower on those activities.
Tim Parkin
00:19:24 – 00:19:57
Exactly. Yeah. And so growth for them and that line of businesses, you know 3% a year. They’re happy with that. And so you’re not talking about phenomenal gains, it’s more about maintaining, you know that level of growth and and replacing the people who turn and so you’re right that at that point you can then go back and look internally and find more efficiencies and then apply those elsewhere to retention to other lines of business etcetera. Um But I would say most businesses can always acquire more customers or can launch or they’re launching new products uh or they’re acquiring their competition at that
Sky
00:19:57 – 00:20:43
launched new products. I always say I see when companies get to a point where they’ve saturated the market and the R. O. I. On getting the people they don’t already have isn’t really quite worth it anymore. They can’t grow the way they used to because they’ve done such a good job, let’s say um instead of trying to sell your product to people who don’t need it and like force it down their throat because you’ve already got all the people who do make a different product for other people or you know, start another company somewhere that one’s good. You won in that area. Great. Now focus on something, go do something else with with with your skills. Um You’ve maximized that industries um efficiency and you provide a great product for your customers awesome. Now don’t try to
Sky
00:20:43 – 00:20:48
continue to grow a thing past where it should be grown. Yeah.
Tim Parkin
00:20:48 – 00:21:00
Like you said, the law of diminishing returns really applies. And understanding when those returns start to diminish is an important self awareness that you have to have and you have to be honest with yourself about it to move on and pivot as you said to something else.
Sky
00:21:00 – 00:21:25
I think some companies getting this thing where they’re like, oh, we aren’t growing as fast as we used to, so we’re failing like, no, no, you’ve won, you can’t grow, it’s like, you can’t be most improved player forever. Eventually you hit the, you’re in first place. You’re not gonna also get most improved. I’m sorry, it’s not gonna happen. Um, you have to concede that you’ve won and focus on other stuff now get, get efficient, something like actually love your customers maybe, who knows?
Tim Parkin
00:21:25 – 00:21:45
Yeah. Like you said, there’s a lot of startups struggle with this, right? Because they get investment and they’re growing so fast and they feel like it can never stop that. They have to keep beating themselves and keep going faster and faster and it’s just not realistic. It’s not possible to do that. There’s reel, you know, factors like competition and market factors, you know, covid pandemic, You can’t grow 50
Sky
00:21:45 – 00:22:23
every year eventually. You hit the top there, like no, the hockey stick has to keep going. No, no, actually they don’t usually show the top, but whenever you start out like this and you go up, but then there’s a shoulder up here and that’s a happy place? The shoulders a good place? It’s okay, it’s okay to get into that shoulder. Now, I would say a lot of founders don’t like that place there in this part and once it even gets here, they want listeners don’t know what I’m making this little hockey stuff with my finger. Um, once it gets into the, the rapid growth area, they’re like, I really like the initial growth, that’s what I’m good at. Um and then you see another ceo steppin or something like that, especially once it plateaus are like, look, I’m not interested in
Sky
00:22:23 – 00:22:32
just running a company that’s cruising along. I like the excitement, I’m going, I’m going back to the beginning with something else and I say good, that’s what we need, more people doing that.
Tim Parkin
00:22:32 – 00:22:53
Yeah, well, I think you hit on something interesting there to Sky, which is a growth is not growth for the sake of growth. You know, we’re not just trying to create the biggest business ever. Growth is about long term sustainability, it’s about the survival ability and becoming a dominant player in the industry. And so it’s not necessarily about going from 0 to 500 million in two years,
Tim Parkin
00:22:53 – 00:23:26
it’s about, are you successful? Can you provide a useful product or service to the customers in your market and can you do that for a long term and you look at a company like coca cola, you know, they’ve been around forever. They have a great product and people love them in the brand that success, you know, they don’t have to keep trying to, you know, shove soda down more people’s throats, you know, uh success is good enough and so we have to be okay with that. There’s this, you know mentality and marketing culture that you know, growth is the end all be all. And if you’re not growing, you’re failing, you know, I don’t think that’s the case, you know, achieve success and then be happy.
Sky
00:23:26 – 00:23:57
Yeah, I love that. Now, can you give some I guess. So this is a I don’t know what the marketing inside out um forget about your customers uh concept, I’m gonna I’m gonna brand you with that but tim park in, doesn’t care about your customers and neither should you uh marketing inside out. So is this like a general mindset concept? Is there a specific technique or framework for this? What what is it really?
Tim Parkin
00:23:57 – 00:24:17
Yeah, I would say it’s a perspective and it’s a framework, so it’s a perspective that you have to really believe in and understand and I came to see this in my work with clients, you know, this isn’t something that I thought this is the way it should be, let me force fit it. I saw this after working with so many clients that you know, the real opportunity is not in their market. You know they know how to market.
Tim Parkin
00:24:17 – 00:24:40
They know how to reach customers. They know how to spend and activate on channels. You know that’s not the problem. The problem they have is they don’t know how to operate and marketing organizations have too many demands on them. Too many priorities. If you look at the tenure of cmos it’s way too short because companies try to tack on marketing and say we need to market. So let’s do some stuff and hope we get some sales. Marketing needs to be who you are not what you do
Tim Parkin
00:24:40 – 00:25:08
and the best organizations, the most successful organizations are built on marketing. And so marketing right now is in a silo and inside of companies and it should not be. And one of the things I talk about as part of this is that you know you should hire people who are your customers because they understand your customers, they are their customers. Well one of my clients is in the pet industry and you know it’s great having zoom calls with them because they all have pets. And it’s great to see all the pets. But you know they know their own products and service instead
Sky
00:25:08 – 00:25:42
of like studying them. Like there’s some type of uh of foreign alien. Um And and trying to understand your customers. It’s like or just hire people in that if you have a company that does outdoors. Where how about you hire people who love the outdoors and then you don’t have to like get the microscope out and study them and figure out how these people think. It’s like you see that with millennials, there was this thing for a while, we’re like Ohira, millennial that way we can, we can’t figure out how, how they think, let’s hire one of them ha ha We got we got our going on here.
Tim Parkin
00:25:42 – 00:26:22
It’s it’s true though, right? You know, we try to understand our customers and talk to them and market to them, but we aren’t them and that’s what makes it so difficult. But this is why, you know, startups and entrepreneurs are so successful, you know, more often than big companies because they know the market, they are the market, they created something to solve their own problems and we forget that once you become a medium sized business or an enterprise that you know the customers are this taboo thing higher customers and this is why I truly believe and we’ll probably see this next year that influencers have become a massive opportunity. I think companies gonna start hiring influencers, you know, they already pay them money but they’re gonna, you know own these influencers basically and hire them, bring them on and say
Tim Parkin
00:26:22 – 00:26:27
go ahead and run our marketing because you know more customers and you know the marketing messaging much better than we do
Sky
00:26:27 – 00:27:05
in the B two B space, There is a bit of that. You’ll see somebody like ANn Handley B two B influencer and the company is just like oh well like we want we don’t we don’t want to hire you as a consultant. We want you to be our brand kind of and and and they’ll bring her on. I really do love that. Um you mentioned framework. Okay. So you said there’s a framework, what is it like are there distinct areas you look at where you say, oh like are there specific things when you go in where you say okay, we’re gonna look at this and this and this and this and this. Or do you just go in and like start sniffing around and looking for inefficiencies in general?
Tim Parkin
00:27:05 – 00:27:46
I’ll tell you two things. One is when I go in, you know you can trip over these things quite easily. You just talk to people and there’s still their guts and tell you, you know, all the terrible things that are happening or not happening. So that’s pretty easy. But to you know, I’d like to talk about T T. E. A. And the type that you drink and that stands for transparency, expectations and accountability and it’s those three areas that most marketing organizations are lacking severely so on the transparency side, you know, is it clear what you’re focused on what’s happening and who’s doing what and I can talk more about each of these expectations are the expectations for the team, clear about what to do and how to do it and who does it and when it happens and all that
Tim Parkin
00:27:46 – 00:28:22
and then accountability. Are you holding people to that, those expectations and to what they need to be delivering on the priorities. And oftentimes we see, you know, all three of these areas, but at least two of them, there’s massive gaps and by addressing those, which is not complicated to do, you can improve the performance again, people and processes performance, you can improve the performance and this is a windfall to your marketing because if your people are more efficient, if they’re not wasting time, if you level up their skills, if they’re making better decisions, you know, all of this adds up and so it can dramatically improve the results, the company gets
Sky
00:28:22 – 00:29:08
okay. So we got t I don’t even know if I want to dig into that because I want to dig into something else. Um and maybe we’ll get the t your choice. You can say you can talk about whatever you want, but I want to take a quick break over the break, think about this. I want some specific examples because you’re saying like transparency, expectations, accountability, but I want to hear like data efficiency, higher cutting the dead weight, letting people go who aren’t necessary um you know, Crm efficiency or something like that. If there’s specific areas where people usually have um waste. We had an episode recently on recently. It’s it’s almost christmas here in this episode will air in a couple of months. So the listeners like what you mean recently I was a couple of months ago um
Sky
00:29:08 – 00:29:56
but we had an episode on content and efficiency and content making sure your content isn’t competing for S. C. O. With your other content. So clustering your topics um those kind of things, I want to challenge you to come up with some specific examples of areas that people can benefit in our marketing from getting more more efficient. So we’ll go to a break, we’ll be right back with Tim Park in talking about why you should not love your customers, you know, what was the topic Inside Out marketing, finding efficiencies in areas other than your campaigns and you’re listening to the market podcast. We’ll be right back.
Sky
00:29:56 – 00:30:37
- Welcome back to the if you market podcast, we’ve got Tim Park in here. We are of course talking about forgetting about your customers and marketing inside out for for profits and and R. O. I. From your marketing. Um tim I do want to get to those specific examples I mentioned, but I also want to get to you and your company and make sure we can kind of highlight who you are. Um All the people know right now is your name, tim parking brief one like one sentence introduction. So I’d like to dig into you kind of how you got two specializing in this like where did you start out and then what was your path to um parking consulting?
Tim Parkin
00:30:37 – 00:31:09
It’s an interesting story, Sky and I’ll tell you the short version, you know, I started out in software development at a young age, I was a programmer and I was doing software development for many companies, you know, startups, big companies, all sorts of companies and by doing that I really enjoyed it, you know, as an engineer mindset but I realized I was building software and websites and the customers weren’t coming in. You know these companies didn’t have a programming problem, a software problem. They had a marketing problem and that’s when the lightbulb really switched for me and I realized this marketing thing seems interesting, you know, you started
Sky
00:31:09 – 00:31:14
going up the ladder, you’re like, I thought I fixed the problem but it’s farther upstream and further upstream.
Tim Parkin
00:31:14 – 00:31:53
Exactly yeah. And and my background simultaneously was as a kid, you know, I wanted to be a professional magician, I thought that’d be so much fun and so I practiced, I was in a magic club as a kid, even if you can imagine that. And uh when I realized that to be a professional magician, you had to work nights and weekends, right, that’s when people are having dinner and parties. I said no forget that it’s not for me. But in magic, what I learned was how people think and how they act, Human behavior, human psychology and so combining my, you know, experience in technology with my passion for how people think and act and behave. That was really the perfect marriage in marketing. And so that’s where my, you know, passion and interest in direction has come from is
Tim Parkin
00:31:53 – 00:32:19
combining technology, which marketing is synonymous with technology nowadays and behavioral psychology, you know, how people respond to things and perceive things, you know, that’s marketing the marriage of those two things. And so as I started working with more and more companies, I was helping them optimize their marketing. But then as I found as I’ve said here, the biggest problem they have is not so much in the marketing per se. It’s in how they manage and perceive and make the processes around marketing.
Sky
00:32:19 – 00:32:28
So you said to somebody I like technology, I like human nature and I like magic, what can I do? And they said, oh, you’re talking about marketing.
Tim Parkin
00:32:28 – 00:32:57
It took me a while to come to that realization. But yeah, in a roundabout way, yes, it’s been a journey, it’s been a crazy thing. I’ve worked in all types of industries, you know, I’ve seen behind the scenes of big companies and startups and everything in between and it’s it’s so fascinating to me and it’s really enjoyable. I’m extremely privileged to get to work with really smart people doing really cool things. But you get to see the mess as they try to figure it out and it’s it’s extremely rewarding and sometimes it’s extremely frustrating, but we always get through it.
Sky
00:32:57 – 00:33:44
It’s interesting. I feel like the and I’m gonna kind of label you here, but efficiency consulting. Um and then you have the marketing experience, you have the technology, the programming experience and you can also slide a hand if things get out of out of control, se ha look over there, that’s right, you’re gone. But consulting where you’re working with efficiencies, um I’m trying to not say something mean here, it seems like a much easier type of consulting than some of the others because you’re just finding the inefficiencies and being like tada, look what I’ve found, it’s um uh you know, you’re, you’re able to, you’re able to come in and and you have to find those things I guess, but
Sky
00:33:44 – 00:34:17
it’s a much easier problem to highlight. Whereas a lot of consulting you come in and you say, hey, maybe try this, try that, but it’s a, you know, your campaign should be run this way, you’re talking about branding or something like that and you really can’t tell when you’re done that there was a success or that it worked, whereas with yours, it’s like, oh yeah, we’ll adjust this this way and then you just see immediately, oh, this saved us this much or made us this much. Like you can show that you were effective immediately it seems versus a lot of other consulting that you never quite know if it did anything.
Tim Parkin
00:34:17 – 00:34:44
Yeah, I mean that’s the, that’s the secret benefit of what I do, right, is that it’s extremely obvious and visible immediately. And also it has a long term annualized impact. If I can help your team be more effective and more efficient, improve your results. That doesn’t just help you now. It helps you every day for the next several years. And so my impact on these organizations is massive. And then by being large organizations, you talked about their checkbooks earlier, you know, the reward here from my work is quite substantial. And so
Sky
00:34:44 – 00:34:52
you ask for the, For a piece on the back end, like an actor where you’re like, look, here’s my upfront cost, but then I want 1% of the savings over the next 10 years.
Tim Parkin
00:34:52 – 00:34:55
If I did, I’d be retired by now. I’ll tell you
Sky
00:34:55 – 00:34:56
that much. Yeah.
Tim Parkin
00:34:56 – 00:35:35
You know, I’ll tell you three things. One is, you know, I did the strength fighters test and my strength. My primary strength according to that is maximize er, and I think that really speaks to what you’re saying about the efficiencies is I’m able to go in and I have a real passion for finding, how do we get the most out of this out of the people out of the tools we have, out of the, you know budget, we have etcetera. So that’s really something I enjoy a puzzle I love solving And and a large organization, you know, a 1%, 2%, 3% improvement is millions of dollars. And so as you said, it’s not hard to have these impacts, you know, substantially with very minimal intervention. And the third thing I’d say is, you know, um
Tim Parkin
00:35:35 – 00:35:39
humbly here as you were trying to, you know, be careful not to be disparaging and that’s fine.
Sky
00:35:39 – 00:35:40
Um My clients hire
Tim Parkin
00:35:40 – 00:36:11
me because I’m an outsider. They hire me because of my ignorance. You know, they can’t see it because they’ve been dealing with these issues for so long or they can’t create change because of politics and they know that they can’t deal with this. So I’m brought in just to see the things they can’t see and to deal with the issues that they can’t deal with. And that really is my true value. It’s not any kind of special sauce I have per se. Obviously I have a framework have an approach I’ve experienced. But a large amount of what I do is just being the outsider and saying you see that thing over there, we need to fix that. And they say, yeah, you’re right, we couldn’t and I said, well let me show you how and then we do it together.
Sky
00:36:11 – 00:36:49
It’s um it almost seems like you are a paid customer feedback but you have specific skills you’re coming in with. I remember early in my career I thought consultants were just kind of a con most of the time. It was like, these guys, they come in and then they point out this because I wasn’t buried deep enough in the company to realize that that I wasn’t gonna be able to see these things. I hadn’t really got into any sort of a career where I could see that problem even existed to me. I was always coming from the outside, so I was like, hell, I’m a consultant, I just started working here and I’m 18 years old. I could I could I saw the same thing, like, yeah, but this guy has skills and comes from the outside
Sky
00:36:49 – 00:36:55
can tell us stuff because he’s not worried about his career within the company. That’s exactly not want to say
Tim Parkin
00:36:55 – 00:37:10
yes, he’s a scapegoat. And often I’m the scapegoat and that’s fine. You know what they say about consultants. A consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time, you know, and that’s often the perception. But real consultants, true consultants, you know, improve the client’s condition and leave them off better than when they showed up.
Sky
00:37:10 – 00:37:27
I’m gonna start a company that does that, that’s the scapegoat consultant where I don’t even pretend to fix anything. I’m like, look, you’re gonna need somebody to blame this disaster is about to go on your head. I come in, I’m the guy that gets in trouble and like, you need somebody a sacrificial lamb, right? You can hire you sacrifice, Yeah,
Tim Parkin
00:37:27 – 00:37:29
This is $1 million dollar idea right here.
Sky
00:37:29 – 00:38:14
I think there’s a lot of executives that would look for that. It’s the uh the super rich guy looking for somebody to take the rap and a crime for him then go to jail and they’re like yeah I’ll pay for you to spend five million years in jail. Just confess, I’ll be back with the the corporate confessor. I come in and confessed that it was my fault. You can fire me really when he’s happy. That’s I mean that is a dirty that has to I bet you should it exists, but nobody’s publicizing that that exists. So somebody’s listening to saying holy crap, I got to do that. It’s like saying you want to be a hit man. They’re probably out there. They’re just not advertising in the yellow pages. Okay, so back to um parking consulting. Do we
Sky
00:38:14 – 00:38:28
is there anything else we need to cover on this? I mean talking about you, it’s kind of like this one thing. Um I guess specifically who do you guys work for? How do you get jobs? What are you looking for as a company? Because we kind of were going over what you do.
Tim Parkin
00:38:28 – 00:38:56
Yeah. You know, I’d say I’m an independent consultant. So it’s just me, I am the whole company. Uh and unfortunately I mentioned to work with the wonderful clients. Most of my clients are large companies, you know obviously they have a marketing team. So you know, they have a team of 10 or more. Some of them it’s you know a team of 100. But you know my clients are global, they’re all over the world and there’s every industry you can imagine B two c b two B. But any marketing organization that wants to improve that wants to accelerate their growth. You know, I can help them
Tim Parkin
00:38:56 – 00:39:29
and I’ll tell you for your listeners here, you know, regardless of your size. This applies to everybody in marketing and I have what I call a vault which is all my videos and templates and worksheets and playbooks and tons of I. P. That can help you maximize your marketing and it’s what I share with my clients as well. So anybody listening wants access to that, it’s completely free. And all you have to do is open up your phone and text. The word grow To this number 844311 30 200. One more time just text the word grow to (844) 311
Tim Parkin
00:39:29 – 00:39:43
30 200. I’ll share it with you do as you will with it. I really genuinely hope it helps you and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. But there’s a lot of great stuff, a lot of stuff we’ve been talking about here and as we’re about to talk about the specifics of what does it look like, How do you do it?
Sky
00:39:43 – 00:40:11
Excellent. I’ll put that in the show notes for everybody to the text grow 8443113200 feels like it’s a used car dealership commercial now where you just say the number over and over and over again. But that will, that will be in the show notes. All right. Let’s get to those specifics like some, I mean, I guess if there’s not, here’s the five things you look at and break down some examples from um, from from clients would also be great as specifics.
Tim Parkin
00:40:11 – 00:40:55
Yeah, let’s start with that. You know, one of my clients realized that they have three teams in the market authorization brand digital and Creative and these teams needed to have a shared language and really get together and there was, you know, some discrepancies between them. Some kind of battles between them, I would say. And so they brought me on to create this training program specifically for the brand team to become more familiar with digital marketing and the terminology and the use of it and how internally they used it. So they could, you know, collaborate more effectively. That grew in size and became a training program that most of the company has participated in, you know, marketing, all the different teams, even sales has been involved with it.
Tim Parkin
00:40:55 – 00:41:31
Uh, and it’s become really valuable for them because obviously now they have a shared language, they’re on the same page. They can collaborate more effectively. But it’s created conversations in the hallways and in meetings about how they operate and how they should be thinking about things and framing things and it’s a tool that they can now put new employees through to say, go watch these videos that were recorded in the discussion so that you can get up to speed of how we operate here and how we’ve done things traditionally and how we’re thinking about doing things. So I think that’s a real tangible example of leveling the playing field and aligning everyone together so you can be most effective and collaborate in a really meaningful way.
Sky
00:41:31 – 00:41:33
So which team won?
Tim Parkin
00:41:33 – 00:41:56
Which team won? Well they had actually a graduation ceremony where there was quizzes with all this stuff and you had to rate it. So different people within each team, you know, had taken the quizzes and support it, but because it was around digital marketing, the digital team didn’t really, you know, um, take the quiz is that much they were more there to support and provide explanations, etcetera. But I think it helped the brand team certainly, but every team, you know, really, even sales said they learned a lot of stuff,
Sky
00:41:56 – 00:42:25
you’re emerging teams together basically that we’re really siloed separate teams, competing with each other even and saying, hey, I know we’re big and you start fashioning off and have politics, but let’s kind of merge this all back together, I suppose that removes inefficiencies in in the communication area like you said with different words being used was was part of it just like defining like okay look when this happens, we gotta call it this, this is what we’re calling this thing,
Tim Parkin
00:42:25 – 00:42:47
some of it is that simple. Yeah, just terminology, otherwise it is approaches, you know, how do we think about things, what’s possible, what’s not possible, why do we do certain things and why not, what are other ideas we can think about for the future and so you know, even some innovations came out of this so and the new ideas and things we should look to do in the future. So it’s been tremendously valuable for them and exceeded their expectations
Tim Parkin
00:42:47 – 00:43:10
and it was really enjoyable to be a part of it, but that’s the type of thing that a simple training like that, right, this is not revolutionary is necessary and can really help and this is a large company that has a massive amount of people in marketing that need to have that on a regular basis and the ability to share it with new employees and onboard them in this way to kind of indoctrinate them for lack of better term is really helpful.
Sky
00:43:10 – 00:43:31
I think when you have a large company like that, when you start you should hire the bobs from office space like the actual guys just for one day to come in and freak people out. Yeah, that would, that would be a great thing for a large company to get those two actors to come in and just see who first is like, wait a second what?
Tim Parkin
00:43:31 – 00:43:32
This is a joke.
Sky
00:43:32 – 00:44:02
This is a joke. Oh my God, I thought I was worried this is a joke. So so you we’re talking about efficiencies, specific examples, you’re taking the multiple marketing departments kind of bringing them together. Um what else, what else you got in specifics and I guess um Boy I had one top of mind that I wanted to ask about and I’ve I’ve totally forgotten now this is great pod. Um so I’ll let you take
Tim Parkin
00:44:02 – 00:44:27
it away. What else? Let me ramble while you think about it, you know, one of the other real basics, real fundamentals that anybody can apply today is the responsibility assignment matrix, that’s what’s called. You may know it as a racy matrix, R A C I. And if you just google are a Ci matrix, you’ll see examples of this. What it basically is is you list out everyone in your team, in your organization, your marketing organization and then you define who is responsible for what
Sky
00:44:27 – 00:44:30
this is the accountability you were talking about.
Tim Parkin
00:44:30 – 00:45:01
And it also provides transparency because we can see who’s doing what, but if you list out everyone and say when it comes to this campaign or to this project or even just holistically, here’s who’s responsible for what and here’s who’s accountable for what and here’s who will be consulted or involved in these different elements or aspects? What often happens. And as the team grows is that people overstep their bounds or they’re unclear, you know, who do I talk to for this or who should be involved in it? Or they don’t involve someone who should have been involved, you know, and decisions made and now it’s too late.
Tim Parkin
00:45:01 – 00:45:23
So the responsibility assignment matrix really helps with that too. Just bring clarity and transparency and accountability to who is responsible for what. So it’s a very simple tool you can build in a spreadsheet, but it’s one of the first steps that we do to figure out who’s here, who needs to do what and now what processes do we need to build around those individuals around those areas of responsibility?
Sky
00:45:23 – 00:45:35
It sounds almost like cheating because you do, you’re saying you’re doing it for them, but really for your job, it seems like you need to know who’s responsible for what I’m doing this for you. Not for me, really.
Tim Parkin
00:45:35 – 00:45:36
I
Sky
00:45:36 – 00:46:00
got to know who handles what here. And the thing I was thinking about was meetings. I remember seeing this charted. I think it just went Massive online and it was basically like, Hey, here’s the only situation you need to have a meeting. Like if this if this, if this you don’t need no, you don’t need no, you don’t need okay, here’s the one situation where you really do need a meeting. Um, is that something that, that you hit on that you’ve mentioned it earlier in the meetings that you have in 50 different meetings.
Tim Parkin
00:46:00 – 00:46:16
Yeah, there’s too many meetings. Meetings are absolute waste of time and you have to obliterate every meeting you’re having and oftentimes what happens is you meet on the same thing multiple times because someone wasn’t included or you have to recap it’s a total waste of time. So you have to just
Sky
00:46:16 – 00:46:45
do, I want to, I want to add something in here. Meetings are a total waste of time unless you don’t have any. And then you realize really quickly how bad you need some meetings. Uh, because I’ve been in companies that had no meetings and we said, holy crap, we need to institute some meetings for efficiency. And people were like, yes, we need to get together and talk about this stuff and be on the same page. And then it was like, yeah, we’re gonna meet. And then after a while, yeah, you get meeting creep. And then people are like, meetings suck. And then there, you know, it swings back and forth.
Tim Parkin
00:46:45 – 00:47:20
It’s, it’s so true. Yes, that’s a great point. And a great addition. I appreciate that. You know, and meetings should never happen unless there’s a genuine need for it. And meetings are not about disseminating information there about making decisions. And so if you’re gonna meet, you have to know what you’re gonna decide on and everyone has to be prepared. If there’s prep work. If there’s pre read material, everyone has to be given that they have to be given advanced notice for the meeting. And there must be an agenda for the meeting of here’s what we’re gonna talk about. And here’s the outcome of the meeting when this meeting is over. What have we done? If you don’t clearly define that you can’t meet.
Tim Parkin
00:47:20 – 00:47:37
And one of the things I tell my clients is you have to empower your people to reject meetings to decline meetings if they don’t meet those conditions I just outlined because what happens is you get invited to a meeting and it’s your boss or your manager or something. So you feel obligated to go and that’s nonsense. You can’t go to these meetings.
Sky
00:47:37 – 00:47:44
You said invited. You weren’t invited, you are assigned to.
Tim Parkin
00:47:44 – 00:48:00
And the other thing too is arbitrary timelines for meetings. You know, we have a meeting that’s 30 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour. Why? You know, I can run a meeting in 15 minutes or less. Um, and that’s because we’ve already defined everything. We know we’re going to talk about, we know the outcome we’re trying to achieve
Sky
00:48:00 – 00:48:01
In a three hour meeting
Tim Parkin
00:48:01 – 00:48:29
easily. Right? Sometimes longer or you meet, let’s, let’s meet again to finalize this. It’s a total waste of time. And so you have to set a minimum time frame there of 20 minutes and say after 20 minutes, let’s just end this. You know, people get exhausted. We’re on zoom all day. It’s a waste. And the other factor is the people, you know, make sure you only have the people there who can participate in the decision and who need to be involved and in amazon they have this, the two pizza rule, you know, don’t have more people in a meeting or a project than can be fed by two pizzas.
Sky
00:48:29 – 00:49:06
If you have to cater it, then it’s too many people. You mentioned the, the length of the meeting and it makes me think, um okay, I was meeting with some people and they’re using zoom, There’s paid zoom and you can have beyond as long as you want. But then there’s the free zoom and I think it limits to 45 minutes or something like that. And I remember saying this limit is great um because it forces you to get done in that time. Like if you’ve got a log out of zoom and get everybody to log back in for a second session, you blew it in the meeting. Like you need to figure out a way now We go over 45, but this is a, you know, a longer podcast. So it’s gonna, we, we have to actually pay for this stuff,
Sky
00:49:06 – 00:49:22
But most people should really use the free zoom just to limit themselves to, or at least have a free account that you can use most of the time to limit yourselves to that. Uh, that 45 minute heart out where you’re like, Hey, we got to wrap it up because it’s about to shut us down.
Tim Parkin
00:49:22 – 00:49:51
That’s absolutely right. You know, and you bring up an interesting point Sky because there’s two problems. One is at the end of the meeting when that limit pops up for some people, you’d be shocked at how much progress they make in the remaining five minutes and then they did the whole previous 40 minutes right in the second part is the beginning of the meeting. The 1st 10, 15 minutes are spent on pleasantries, you know, hey, great to see you, How are you doing? You know, that’s great. But get that out of the way in the end of the week or do it offline or do it individually, You know, not in the meeting when you waste everyone’s time
Tim Parkin
00:49:51 – 00:50:03
and people are too sensitive to not interrupt each other, Talk over each other or change the topic and say, you know what Sky? That’s a great point. Let’s take it offline or we can’t talk about that right now. We have a decision to make.
Sky
00:50:03 – 00:50:15
It comes up in our general company meetings all the time and say, wait, this is a, this is a technical thing and we’re, we’ll discuss that offline again. This is a, this department. This is that, that department. We’re in a general company meeting right now.
Tim Parkin
00:50:15 – 00:50:16
Absolutely.
Sky
00:50:16 – 00:50:35
You have to be cutting it off. I like it. Um Okay, okay, so we got meetings there, we got the racing metrics, we got the bringing together of the departments, whether it’s one department fractured, um, do you have any any other specifics for Us?
Tim Parkin
00:50:35 – 00:50:56
I get a lot more. Yeah, I’ll tell you one of the interesting ones that I like is what I call the book of knowledge. And this is something I try to get all my clients to build and put together and the book of knowledge can take a lot of shapes, but there’s a lot of internal knowledge that people have. You know, some people have a guru in their company has been there for 20 years and knows all the ins and outs, knows all the people, knows all the history of, you know, what have we done? What have you tried?
Tim Parkin
00:50:56 – 00:51:18
There’s a lot of knowledge, even even new employees have have ideas that they don’t share. So the Book of Knowledge is a place to put all that, is. What do we know? What have we done in the past? What have our results been? What are we thinking about for the future? You know, any kind of testimonials from customers, customer case stories, any results of experiments we’ve tried or channels we’ve tried or partners, we’ve worked with
Tim Parkin
00:51:18 – 00:51:42
everything should go in this book of knowledge and it becomes this tome that’s extremely valuable. Right? Because now you can flip through that and say, well what if we tried in this area or if you’re thinking about trying something new, let’s look at, you know who we’ve worked with in the past or why this has not worked out or what has been successful. So there’s so many insights you can get from this Book of Knowledge, but you have to actually put stuff into it. And that’s the hard part is getting people to put a
Sky
00:51:42 – 00:52:21
blank book of knowledge. Knowledge isn’t isn’t a lot of, So I think this is similar to what I call the hit by a bus document. Uh and I frequently tell people like, okay, you know, how to do this or you know this, that’s great. But what if you got hit by a bus tomorrow, would we be screwed if this isn’t down somewhere for somebody else to step in and know the process? No, the Oh yeah, I saved that their type of a thing, then we’re screwed. Like you can’t have that kind of were a pretty fairly small business. And yeah, one person goes out and nothing is documented anywhere. You just lost the department.
Tim Parkin
00:52:21 – 00:52:39
So true. You have to rebuild all that. I think it’s it’s absolutely that. And the other aspect to the layer of that is, you know, when I work with my clients, I’ll be in these meetings and they’re looking at the results of their campaigns or an experiment or something they launched and they’ll talk about it and say this is great. You know, this part wasn’t great. This part was
Tim Parkin
00:52:39 – 00:53:01
and that’s it and they move on and then a month later it’s like they completely forgot what they did, what worked and they do it again or they’ll try something else and not remember what things they said. They do differently next time. So that’s where the book of knowledge really comes into play as well. Is to say what have we done historically and what did we say we do differently next time. And now let’s actually reference that. So it’s not just in our heads but it’s on paper that we can point to.
Sky
00:53:01 – 00:53:35
And one thing that we have and tell me if this fits in that category also is um a running log of meeting notes. But we do have meetings and things are discussed and decided and all that kind of stuff. I mean I guess when you look at the developer developer department, you have things like gee era or something like that where you have, you can look back and see, oh yes, this task and this was done and this exists because it was done on this date and and all those kind of things. But with individual departments having discussed certain things, um you know, we just have a running tab of all the meeting notes from anything important that happens in a meeting
Sky
00:53:35 – 00:53:43
and those can just be looked back through at any time. Would that fall under this or is that a different animal or is that a bad idea?
Tim Parkin
00:53:43 – 00:54:20
No, I think it’s a great idea the challenge becomes how actionable is it and how searchable is it? It sounds like yours is pretty searchable or accessible. But the actionable part is what I would recommend, you know, two people listening is if a meeting is about making a decision, then you’re gonna have an outcome of what was the decision documenting those things is extremely valuable. I think the other notes are probably also valuable depending on the context here, but at least making those decisions, you know, clearly visible and easily findable or would be paramount so that you can go back and say, what have we decided and why did we decide that? Because that’s often the case is something, you know, a decision is made, it’s a year later and you’re like, well why did we do that?
Tim Parkin
00:54:20 – 00:54:24
We need to make a similar decision and we have no idea basis to make it on.
Sky
00:54:24 – 00:55:05
But sometimes for me it’s Oh yeah, we discussed this two years ago now. Let me look at the emails from that time frame, like what was sent right before and after this meeting. That’s where all the info really. It’s like the meeting notes are just kind of like a little cliff notes on topics and stuff and then you got it now you can narrow down what year to start digging around into to figure out what happened somewhere. Um Another thing I was thinking about when you talk about efficiency. Um I know in my company I have chastised people a bit in the past or just begged them not to do it anymore. When when you’re emailing back and forth with somebody and they have to thank you for sending them the email
Sky
00:55:05 – 00:55:34
and I say I don’t please don’t send me an email. And now I’m like oh I got I got to check this email and I look at it and all it says is thanks. Like I don’t need to thanks email, we’re this is professional. We can get like you were saying with meetings, get the pleasantries out of the way at the beginning of the week. Like with emails I’m like we can get the pleasantries out of the way outside of email if you don’t say thanks I’m not gonna think you hate me or something like that unless you’re confirming you got the email and that’s important. Like please I don’t need to check 50 emails a day that just say thanks.
Tim Parkin
00:55:34 – 00:55:39
As long as they have a smiley face to with the thanks then it’s ok.
Sky
00:55:39 – 00:55:42
I gotta read three paragraphs just to find out the point was thanks,
Tim Parkin
00:55:42 – 00:56:20
you’re right well this goes back to t t A. And the e being expectations that having clear expectations with people to say as you describe, I don’t need an email that says thanks when we email, let’s be to the point and succinct and it’s expected that I am grateful for your work and you’re grateful for my response in my work. And so we don’t have to say that. Let’s just say what we need to say and nothing else and I don’t need a response back. And so when it comes to expectations there’s three steps there. The first is to document those expectations and to you know, create processes and principles of operation to say here’s how we operate and here’s what we’ll do and not do.
Sky
00:56:20 – 00:56:22
It sounds
Tim Parkin
00:56:22 – 00:56:52
ridiculous but it’s necessary. And the second is to communicate those expectations. If you just write them down and no one knows about them, it’s not useful. So you have to communicate that whether it’s corporately or for a project or if you’re assigning someone to task and say I want you to do this. Here’s what I expect. And then the third part is to review those expectations. People forget people fall into their habits. So we have to on a regular basis, you know bi annually annually quarterly review expectations with people and say just as a reminder, here’s what I expect from you from the team etcetera. This reminds
Sky
00:56:52 – 00:57:27
me earlier you were you were saying something and it made me think oh what you do, your job kind of is to be the band manager, you’re like these people are really good at what they do. They can really play the instruments and write songs and stuff, but they suck at getting the equipment from one stadium to the next and making sure it’s set up and having a, and this is really now we’re talking about the writer, you’re saying like, yes, we need all these things. Um, we’re gonna list them out. We just have to put into a document. Don’t email, thanks. We’re busy getting on to the next show and we don’t have time to worry if that was an important email or not and we need to read it.
Sky
00:57:27 – 00:57:42
Um, so you’re kind of setting out all your, your little rules that really are important for the efficiency of moving this machine of people who are super good at their thing, but they got to have a band manager to do all the details, the logistics of the business.
Tim Parkin
00:57:42 – 00:58:16
I love that it’s so accurate, more accurate than you realize. And just tangentially, I’ll tell you, you know, as a kid, I was in band, I was in concert and symphony and marching band and you’d probably never guess that I played the flute. Uh, and I played piccolo and marching band. So I’m very familiar with bands and I liken it to, you know, these celebrities when you go behind the scenes and they’re setting up their green room and you have to have, you know, only green M and M’s and you have this there, that’s the level of detail that companies need to have with their processes is to outline these things. Here’s how we operate, here’s how we don’t operate and make that clear and make it transparent and make sure people understand it.
Sky
00:58:16 – 00:58:37
I’m gonna edit piccolo out and we’ll put in like drums or at least the saxophone or something. Come on. You don’t want to tell people that you, Yeah, I was in a band, I play the piccolo like you’re real cool for a second. And then I guess he got Jethro tull out there. There’s not, there’s not a whole lot of rockstar flute players, but
Tim Parkin
00:58:37 – 00:58:38
there’s some
Sky
00:58:38 – 00:59:16
right, yeah. You got, what was the news movie, The jazz flute going on there. Yeah, that’s where it’s at. Okay, so, um, we’ve got some specific examples. Another thing that came to mind for me was with, with the efficiency thing Elon musk. I remember seeing a story and I think a lot of these great leaders when people read their books, one of the takeaways they get is like, oh wow, these are the details the guy was focused on for efficiencies as a leader at the top. Um, they’re really one of these little things, I remember hearing one from him about acronyms in the company. He had to like crack down on acronyms because
Sky
00:59:16 – 00:59:46
it was like running amok and people were acronym. Izing everything and they couldn’t communicate. And he had to make rules about when you can and can’t make an acronym for something and use it in your department. Uh, and that kind of fascinating. But I realized, once you get to a scale, it can cause problems because it’s a communication problem. it is, yeah. And you don’t realize that it sounds so stupid to talk about, but like you said, any delay is an issue. And especially if you’re confusing one acronym for another? You know, if we’re talking about the OTP and you meant the O. N. P. Or something, you know, that’s A
Tim Parkin
00:59:46 – 01:00:23
- B. A. You have acronyms are like the D. B. A. When I say, most people think probably doing business as You’re a small business, you’re you have a D. B. A. It’s your license to do business under a certain name. Um, database administrators, how we use it in our company, because we deal with data, there’s a lot of database. There’s a ton of acronyms where you look up online and you’re like, what’s this acronym? You know, you mentioned one earlier and I was like, well, if I type that in, I’d probably get 50 different things that it could be. Um, and that could be a problem if you have multiple acronyms, especially usually doing like three letter acronyms. Now there’s only so many combinations, you’re gonna have some really, uh,
Tim Parkin
01:00:23 – 01:00:36
some overlapping acronyms that could cause problems at a company that size. But you see the richest man in the world and he’s dealing with rules around when you can and can’t have acronyms in the company. And that’s worth his time.
Sky
01:00:36 – 01:00:48
And for complex technology. You know, like you said, they’re not building simple things over there. Uh, and so it goes to show that even in complex situations, you know, there’s no justification in their scenario for acronyms.
Tim Parkin
01:00:48 – 01:00:51
What happened? Oh, you meant that D B A.
Sky
01:00:51 – 01:01:11
It’s catastrophic. Yeah. Well, I think it’s really about communication as you described and it obviously changes based on your business and your needs. But making sure your people can communicate and collaborate as efficiently and effectively as possible is paramount. If they can’t, if there are issues there, it’ll cost you,
Tim Parkin
01:01:11 – 01:01:23
yep. Excellent. Excellent. Um, it’s okay. I think we have time for like one more specific situation or example, if you’ve got another one you want to throw out there.
Sky
01:01:23 – 01:01:40
Yeah, we were talking about acronyms, so I thought it would be appropriate to share an acronym, which is always, you know, a lot of people are familiar with SLA service level agreements that you have with businesses or, you know, you think about hosting, they have up time, we guarantee this level of service that you’re going to be up time, you know, for 99.9% or whatever.
Sky
01:01:40 – 01:02:12
The overlays are similar, but they’re operational level agreements or operating level agreements and they have to do with people and processes and so we might say, you know, uh sky, I’ll get this to you in three days. And so in this process, this part of the process will take three days or I need to have, you know, this type of resource and it will be available to me when I need it or, you know, john and Susan are going to be available to support me in this project. So those are the basis for operating level agreements, agreements about how we’re gonna operate, how quickly going to operate and who’s going to be involved. And there’s like a
Tim Parkin
01:02:12 – 01:02:17
computer program almost for people’s processes saying if
Sky
01:02:17 – 01:02:46
that’s true and if it’s violated its an issue, right? Because if I say we get this to you in three days at this part of the process, you know, I’m gonna design the creative and get it back to you in three days. If I take more than three days we’re gonna miss a deadline or we missed an opportunity. And so you have to have delays, especially in bigger companies. And you have to again hold people accountable to those that if something is missed there, there’s usually a deeper issue, you know, is it a people problem with someone out? Are they, you know overwhelmed? Do we not have the resources to support that? So,
Tim Parkin
01:02:46 – 01:03:00
but if somebody’s out, you say, okay, well where’s the hit by the bus document? So somebody else who’s the next person who’s supposed to pick that up? Um Somebody can’t just be out because we have a O. L. A. Here that says this has to be done within three days and now it’s been four.
Sky
01:03:00 – 01:03:36
Exactly. Yes. And those indicate oftentimes people who are overwhelmed or parts of the process that are overwhelmed or assumptions that are being made that, you know, there’s something that’s reasonable or possible and it’s not and then we can uncover and find more issues there and like you said, overlays help the companies, but it also helps me identify those bottlenecks and helps the company identified with bottlenecks to which they need to know if you can’t identify your bottlenecks and you can’t improve your process. And so it’s really healthy and helpful to have overlays to establish again, here’s how we operate here is the expectation and here’s the repercussion or consequence if this is not meant. So
Tim Parkin
01:03:36 – 01:04:05
that makes me think, uh, I should let you go now because I really need you to get to work on the supply chain issues everywhere. It seems like they need some, oh, Ella’s and they need a lot of these other things put in place. There’s probably a lot of small trucking outfits and stuff like that that don’t have these efficiencies. And then when something gets tweaked, it starts falling apart and that ripples everywhere. Um so I’m looking forward to fixing that for everybody. Thank you very much, gym parking
Sky
01:04:05 – 01:04:05
problem.
Tim Parkin
01:04:05 – 01:04:09
When it does get fixed, we’ll just give you credit.
Sky
01:04:09 – 01:04:10
Hey, I appreciate that.
Tim Parkin
01:04:10 – 01:04:19
Reach back out. We’ll say thank you, we’ll post it online. Hey, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but supply chains fixed, I’m pretty sure tim did it.
Sky
01:04:19 – 01:04:22
It’s only fair, I’m glad I’m here, I’m here to serve.
Tim Parkin
01:04:22 – 01:04:49
Okay, fantastic. Um I feel like we’ve kind of boiled this down pretty well, people have a good idea what you’re talking about here, just to recap for, for the listeners. Um, marketing inside out basically why you should not be thinking about your customers or forget about your customers as it’s been put. I’ve heard, um, the other areas of marketing to, to think about, um, would you say this is mostly or all around efficiencies?
Sky
01:04:49 – 01:05:25
There’s a lot of it around efficiency. I think efficiency is the how, but the what is about, you know, achieving rapid growth that a lot of organizations are trying too hard to grow and they’re looking outside and not inside. And if you look inside first, you’ll find tons of opportunities to build a strong foundation that will help you grow a lot faster. And so this is really ultimately about working smarter, not harder. And too many of us in marketing are, are trying to find a silver bullet to help us grow faster when the silver bullets right in front of you, it’s your own people. It’s your own processes. If you get that house in order, then you’ll have a much easier and faster time growing.
Tim Parkin
01:05:25 – 01:05:38
When you say the silver bullet is hard work in the trenches. That’s that, that goes counter to a silver bullet, I just want a magic thing. I can do, you know, you studied magic, just do the magic thing to make it all awesome.
Sky
01:05:38 – 01:05:56
It’s funny because the paradox of magic I’ve shown my wife, you know, magic tricks and I’ve shown you how they work, you know, the behind the scenes, there’s so much that happens behind the scenes in the magic trick, you’re so far ahead of the person. There’s so many, you have to memorize the script and what you say and respond to people. It’s hard work. So I think your point, even magic, you know, it’s hard work and
Tim Parkin
01:05:56 – 01:06:01
that’s magic, magic, magic. It is, it’s actually a ton of hard work to make it look like magic.
Sky
01:06:01 – 01:06:05
That’s right, it looks so seamless and fluid and magical because of all the hard work that went
Tim Parkin
01:06:05 – 01:06:24
into it. So you say cool, yeah, I can come in and do some magic in your business. And then when you get there you say, okay, you show them the trick and you’re like, now how to do that, you have to practice this for three hours a day for the next six months and then you’ll have the first step down and they’re like, holy crap magic is a lot of hard work.
Sky
01:06:24 – 01:06:36
It really is. You know, there’s one, there’s one move that I do in magic with cards and it took me literally three years to master. So um some things just take a lot of hard work, but you know, the rewards come to those who put in the work,
Tim Parkin
01:06:36 – 01:07:06
I’m gonna, I’m gonna quote you on the magic is a lot of hard work thing, I think that’s a good good if you take away one thing from this episode. That’s right, that’s the most important thing. A lot of hard work. Alright, fantastic. Well um let’s see. People can find you at tim parking dot com um linkedin of course to search for tim parking anywhere else you’d like them to look. And of course we will have that that number to text in the show notes as well. Um anywhere else people should be finding you reaching out, connecting with you.
Sky
01:07:06 – 01:07:13
No, linkedin is great. My website, as you mentioned tim parking dot com. That’s parking without the g. Yeah, that’s wonderful. I appreciate it.
Tim Parkin
01:07:13 – 01:07:58
Oh, Tim park in. Yeah. Um Okay, and then uh show notes. You can find it if you market dot com and uh thank you for for listening to the show and I’ll give you I’ll thank you ahead of time for giving us a good review on Itunes or wherever you listen. And on behalf of the if you market team and tim park in of parking consulting, thank you for listening to the if you market podcast where we believe if you market the ship out of it with Inside Out marketing, they will come. Oh and I think your description tim was way better than just saying forget about the customers. Like you described it in all these efficiency for growth, looking inside yourself type of things. I was like, that sounds better than Forget about the customers.
Sky
01:07:58 – 01:08:01
Hey, I appreciate that. Yeah,
Tim Parkin
01:08:01 – 01:08:03
Fantastic. Thanks for coming on tim.
Sky
01:08:03 – 01:08:05
Hey, thanks so much Skye. It’s been wonderful.
