Resolving Conflict in Marketing Teams with a Data-Driven Culture

*Some of my favorite people are in sales. This is just a joke.

Coda Hale gave a speech at GitHub’s CodeConf that really stuck with me. There was one line that stood out, in particular:

“Do you think your solution is working, or do you know it’s working?”

While Coda’s speech was about using data to understand your application’s performance, I saw many applications of this mantra in marketing.

Drinking liquor and guessing about your customers can be fun, but is not necessarily effective.

Marketers often use data for more quantitative aspects of our jobs (KPIs, revenue, ROAS, etc), but what about the qualitative aspects of our work? Ask any designer, copywriter, or social media manager about how many people give them ideas for “what to put on the website” or “a new campaign idea or blog post.” People have all sorts of random ideas that might not always work together. Often the person with the loudest voice, greatest persistence, or the most political clout will win out.

That’s not always good for the customer.

So someone pitches a random idea for a campaign or new slogan. Did this person come up with an idea on a whim, or does he or she have empirical data that supports his or her case? While there is no substitute for talking to your customers regularly, data also helps us connect better with their motivations. It also helps us resolve internal marketing disputes, if it is collected properly.

Here are sources of conflict within marketing teams that can often be resolved with good data collection.

1. Marketing personas. Often Product Marketers suffer from unconscious bias, causing them to lean towards customer types that they are most familiar with, while ignoring the others. This bias can reek havoc as employees struggle to answer a basic question: “Who is our customer?” Why not go into your CRM, pull out a list of closed leads and their job titles, industries, and company sizes, normalize the data, and see who your customer base really is? If you don’t ask for job title data, try a CRM add-on like Clearbit. Take a look at this data across your entire customer base, as well as your highest paying accounts.
2. Product messaging. Everybody seems to have an opinion about what message should go on the website. This is where qualitative data comes in handy. Rather than assume you know what customers like about your product, try sending out a survey to ask them. Why did they choose your product over others? What do they like about it? The more personally you can reach out to these customers, the better.
3. Acquisition strategy. Some people like a low touch sales approach by offering more product information on a website and in documentation. Some people like high touch sales, opting to bring leads to salespeople as soon as possible. While it’s possible to do both, it’s hard to know where to throw resources, headcount, and time. Rather than opting for a political and hiring battle, why not focus on what works? Which channel is more efficient at helping you meet your goals, a free trial or freemium offering, or a push towards a contact form?

Show that you understand customers

When I lead a team, we were never short of ideas. I had a rule though, if you wanted the team to spend time on your idea, you had to build a case for it first. With data. That meant a lot less, “Well what if we did…” and a lot more of “Because customers have shown that…” Why? Because as marketers, it’s never about what we think or want that matters. It’s about what customers think and want. They might not always know the exact solution, but that doesn’t mean their input is not helpful.