HR and Social Media Need to Align
One Happy Candidate and Hundreds Not Happy... An opportunity exists.
Think about the job that is coveted. Now thing about the process...
Hundreds if not thousands of candidates could apply. One person is happy, but, what happens to the rest? Well if the lame process of sending a standard rejection letter candidates could take to social media and share negative sentiment. Or the Chief Internet Marketer at the company can get with Human Resources and work on a strategy to have that be a positive sentiment, which through the nature of social can reach tens of thousands.
Jeff Stanislow, the Chief at Chief Internet Marketer talks with Alan See the CEO of cmotemps.biz about some of these key digital marketing strategies including:
- Leveraging the power of social media for good in Human Resources
- Marketing and HR aligning for common goals.
- Re-thinking the current application and hiring process
- Turning a negative into a positive
If you want to learn more about social media and strategies like this, check out these great courses.
Enjoy the show, it is about 20 minutes.
The Host: Jeff Stanislow, CEO of Chief Internet Marketer
The Guest: Alan See from,cmotemps.biz
Transcript of the Digital Marketing Podcast -
Jeff : 00:00 Hello, this is Jeff Stanislow, The Chief, at Chief Internet marketer. Thank you for taking another few minutes and enjoying a conversation about digital marketing. Today I'd like to introduce Alan See, the CMO of CMO Temps LLC. How are you doing today, Alan?
Alan: 00:21 I'm well, thanks so much for inviting me.
Jeff : 00:24 I appreciate it. I appreciate it. We got a chance to talk for a few minutes. We are a couple of guys from the Midwest originally, Huh?
Alan: 00:30 Ah, yes, the good old Midwest. I grew up here in Iowa and I'm now here in Ohio and I really like this area of the country.
Jeff : 00:42 Yes, I'm a native Michigander for 40 years, but now I got a little too cold, so I moved down south to Tampa last 10 years, but I definitely miss the seasons. I missed the... There's nothing like a fall day and going to a college football game, and going to see my Michigan State Spartans play. What are you, Ohio State Buckeyes?.
Alan: 01:04 Oh no. You know, I'm practically in the Buckeyes backyard but I actually went to school down in Texas, and so I prefer my Alma Mater and that's The Abilene Christian University Wildcats. Jeff : 01:20 Yeah. They got a channel, you got to watch them on ESPN or you got to go a little harder for that.
Alan: 01:27 They just recently become a division one program. They have a nice program there. It's not a real big school, but I really enjoyed going to school there in Abilene.
Jeff : 01:40 Oh, fantastic. So, today we're going to talk a little bit about digital marketing and in our little backstory prior to our recording we talked a little bit about some of your accomplishments and, you're one of the Forbes...you were recognized as a top 50 most influential CMO on social media. Tell us a little bit about that and then we'll get into some of the great ideation that you have.
Alan: 02:05 I guess to add some of the backstory there, I actually started the first 20 years of my career in sales. I've been an individual sales person, covered a territory, carried a quota, been a sales manager, started new sales channels and this was with a NCR corporation. So, it wasn't until around 2000 when I got into consulting with companies like Cap Gemini, Ernst and Young and analysts like Aberdeen and Forester that I started making that gradual switch into marketing. So, as a marketer particularly in the B2B space in which I'm in I tend to look at things through the same lens that a salesperson would look through that type of our channel. The reason for that is within that space, most salespeople are looking for that lead generation. So, creating the content and distributing it through the channels that help soften the beach, so to speak, is really what the salesforce is looking for.
Jeff : 03:20 I think that's really interesting in regards to this because you know, most of the people that digital marketers you know, kind of report to have a lot of different things that they're measuring, but a lot of the things are really measured by some of the basic sales principles. You know, how much revenue did it generate? What was the return on investment? What was the cost per lead or the cost per acquisition? I would imagine, so you probably have a really good spin on that. Tell me what you think the, maybe one of the most important things that, there might be a disconnect between like the marketing and the sales team and how things work. Is it just maybe like a matter of like the timeframe for an ROI or is it just measuring the ROI?
Alan: 04:06 Yeah, so there's, you know, there definitely can be disconnects between sales and marketing. Of course, marketing is saying, well, we've generated plenty of leads. You're just not closing them, and sales is coming back and saying leads, I don't know that I'd call those a lead, a click isn't a lead, and so there's definitely a disconnect. Now again, I'm speaking from the perspective of B2B, which is certainly what I've grown up in. I'm also talking in terms of solution selling. So my space is typically it's hardware and software. It's professional services. It's a big project that involves a very long time frame, a long decisions cycle, and also can involve multiple people. So you've got the people who actually use the system, you know, moving up to the people who have budget authority. So, sales cycles are long. The deal is complex and there's lots of people involved from that perspective where, you know, you can measure clicks, you can measure downloads, you can measure whatever you want to measure. We all like to talk about the ROI, but at the end of the day, we do business with people we know, like, and trust. And no matter how much the sales force wants to think that they can microwave the relationship and get a decision made, they can't. No one can, because again, it takes time to build relationships. If you want to be looked at as the trusted advisor, the go to person that president of that company or this, the CEO would say, yes, I trust you to be telling me that this is the type of solution that we need, that we're going to invest millions of dollars and we're going to go forward with you to get to that level. To get to that level it takes time. There's not anything you can do about that. So, if you're not creating content and having constant conversations, that's building that authority, that's building that confidence, then you're not going to win the deal.
Jeff : 06:17 Yeah. I think part of it too is understanding that you have to build multiple formats of content for the different decision making process. You know, where there might be someone that is the user of the machine. They would like more technical oriented documentation that gets into the details of the machine's capabilities and specifications where someone who might be the CFO, you have to kind of talk to them about like the financials and the return on an investment or the way they can structure deals. So, having that multiple format is really important.
Alan: 07:00 You're spot on and you are constantly in this mode of creating the content and this content as much like a funnel and each of these funnels, again prepared for each of the different personas that you're going to be approaching, and in the beginning you don't get much time. You might only have five to eight seconds. So perhaps it's some type of a high level, quick hit video where you're just trying to introduce yourself and get that initial, you know, attention. Whereas once you've started to get the attention and build the confidence maybe at some point they would be willing to take some type of an assessment or something that's going to let you dig a little bit deeper in order to be able to start pulling together exactly what the solution should be. Then finally, of course, getting down to the proposal, and then hopefully closing the deal. But again, a lot of the mistakes people build are due in this situation is they're trying to throw everything right up at the beginning, and the problem is you don't have their attention at that point. So, you're really wasting your time and theirs.
Jeff : 08:14 Yes, I completely agree. I was doing some consulting and some training for a larger manufacturer up in Michigan and we had the sales team together in the marketing team. Its just a funny backstory on that. It was like the marketing team thought we could do ecommerce for a two point $7 million machine and the sales team giggled. So that breaks it down. That's probably a pretty good analogy, you know, click to buy this two point $7 million machine and the salespeople we're kind of had a big chuckle over that.
Alan: 08:48 I wouldn't blame him. I'd be laughing as well. Jeff : 08:54 Say, Hey, taking a quick pivot in our conversation. There was a video that you sent to me to before we had our, our talk and, and you kind of, I'm gonna say this scenario and then I'm gonna let you talk about it. You know, so you have a job opening for vice president of sales or marketing, 200 applicants come into it. One person gets the job. Tell me what went wrong with that in that process and why is this important to talk about for if you're a HR hiring manager or director of marketing?
Alan: 09:29 Yeah, so I mean we've been talking about the interaction between sales and marketing and of course for those of your audience who are involved in marketing, you know, that over the last five years or so, you've heard quite a bit of conversation of how more conversation between the CIO and the CMO needs to be going on because of all the new technology that's been placed within marketing, but one area that I see that's being overlooked is that, the scenario that you just described, and that's conversations that need to be happening between marketing and the HR group. And it's because in that process of boiling things down from, you know, 200 applicants to one person who gets the job, there's 199 people there who were rejected and rejection causes pain. Social rejection activates the same part of the brain that physical pain does. So literally your killing, you're hurting that person, which is killing your brand because the 199 people who don't get the job, it's not like they're gonna go away. I mean, they applied for that job for a reason. These are either perks and you know, I'll tell you what, if that person ends up in a competitive situation or perhaps one of your business partners that could put your future business with that company in danger.
Jeff : 11:10 I mean, it's amazing when I read that it really resonated with me because here you have an opportunity if done correctly, to almost have a hundred and almost have 200 you know, advocates of your brand if done correctly. In the opposite way, the way most traditional HR departments do it now, it's actually 199 people that are now turned off from your brand and one person that's happy. So what would it be like, you know, one kind of recommendation that you would put forth? I know this is kind of what you do, so you don't have to give everything away, but you know, one simple thing that you would mention to an HR person to maybe make their thing, make their experience better.
Alan: 11:58 Right? So one of the things that I think that, well, let me just say this way, having been both in sales and in marketing, I think that Linkedin is one of the best business development tools on the planet. In fact, if I were to lead a salesforce again, I'd have them learn Linkedin forwards and backwards before I'd have them learn to CRM tool that we're using. The reason is because I was actually a part of the Beta group for Linkedin in 2002. I was the 74,000 person to join Linkedin, which sounds like a big number, but you know, I get a email every couple of years from the CEO who is thanks me for being one of the first hundred thousand people on the platform. And for me, when I look at that platform, I think that like, again, it is the best business development tool on the planet. Alan: 12:49 So, one thing that could be going on is particularly for all those, those candidates that, you know, maybe you're not going to interview them, but you can clearly see that they're qualified. Maybe they just don't live in the area of the country that you prefer for them to, you know, to live in or whatever. Is that I would be giving those names to my sales and marketing teams so that they can figure out how to create a Linkedin connection between that person because I can tell you that person's going to show up somewhere and certainly you know that that person's likely to show up in your sales process, and when you're trying to find out who the decision makers are in everything, and if you've already reached out, established a connection with them, then in an essence, you've already taken that first step and trying to soften the beach, but if your sales and marketing team are absolutely clueless as to the people who are applying for that position then you've just clearly missed an opportunity.
Jeff : 13:48 So you're saying like, basically the disconnect is HR gets these applicants and they don't even share them with the sales and marketing team. So there's no way for them to connect, and whether that person gets the job at the company or not, they're in the industry, they're kind of in the target area. They may end up getting a job as a decision maker at a company that your company is selling to. Why don't you want to foster a relationship?
Alan: 14:13 Absolutely, it happens all the time. But that's just, again, a HR looks at Linkedin as a hiring tool, and for me, being from a sales and marketing background, I don't look at HR or at Linkedin as a hiring tool at all. I look at it as a business development tool because that tool lets you know how people are connected and where they are within their organization and lets you know what they think is important and not important. So, it's a great tool to learn, to get some G2 on in background information on your targeted audience.
Jeff : 14:50 That's fantastic now, and I mean, I really think that if someone, a digital marketer listens to this, definitely, hopefully they'll share it with their HR director, and maybe even contact you. Wrapping up what's one of the things you had mentioned about the best advice to give to our listeners that you can think of based on your years of experience in the industry?
Alan: 15:20 Well, for a while, I also was an associate faculty member for a university where I taught marketing. I like to think of myself as a lifelong learner and I would just encourage your audience to think in terms of being a lifelong learner because the environment's going to change, technology will change, and it's really important as you progress through your career to continue learning and to adventure education in any way that you possibly can.
Jeff : 15:58 Yeah, I completely agree with you Alan. Even my company, I've done professional services for 20 years, I'm pivoting into the learning business. I want to teach people about digital marketing and kind of bridge that skills gap. I myself ate my own dog food. So I just went through and became a certified digital marketing professional through my partners at digital marketing institute. I'm reselling their courses in North America now cause I fully believe in it, but I was an adjunct professor at a small business school up in Troy, Michigan, Walsh colleges as well, really enjoyed it. And so I completely agree. If you're not learning you're dying in essence, so you always have to, especially in our industry, that moves so fast that's becoming so fluid that the touch point in digital marketing is becoming even wider, crossing so many different more disciplines in a business ecosystem. So I completely a hundred percent agree. So what I want to do is why don' you tell me your website tell me maybe your Twitter handle or whatever you want to communicate here and, give me the kind of short elevator pitch on what you do and how can someone contact you and why should they contact you.
Alan: 17:24 My website is cmotemps.biz and my Twitter handle is @AlanSee. My focus is on the B2B area. I like to be able to play at that intersection between content based marketing and social media channels. So it's the distribution of content through social media for purposes of lead generation. So, at CMO Temps the "s" at the end of temps is a bit deceptive because I am the product and the service I don't have a staff and there's no type of applications or solutions from that perspective that I'm trying to sell. I'm literally the product end and the solution and I'm helping companies bring together that intersection between content and social media channels for purposes of lead generation.
Jeff : 18:27 Well, fantastic. Alan, I really appreciate your time today and we'll get this out and published sometime in the next few days and then I'll get it to you. You can search, share on your social networks and I will do the same.
Alan: 18:41 Sounds great. Jeff, you have a great day.