When I first came to this job 5 years ago, this was an
established broking outfit. It had a marketing team and it believed that things
worked. They did not believe that they really needed anyone like me. They would
be fine doing their job and that what could one other guy who came in really
help. On the other hand as I saw it, it was a boring place with no real
marketing activity happening and anyone who would come in would be able to add substantial
value to the beast and thereby improve the lot. So when I came here as a
transfer from the wealth management business to the retail broking business, I saw
no big challenge. Of course I could add value here. How difficult would it be? The
marketing function over the last couple of years was run by sales guys who
generally lacked marketing direction and had taken marketing to a place where
the senior most guy felt that he was the most highly paid courier boy in the
country. All they did was emailers and posters. A few brochures and leaflets
thrown in for good measure. Anything else was a question.
I came in not really knowing what to do. I tried to destroy
some stuff, invent some stuff and I came in from my wealth hangover where we
would spend inordinately large amount of time for trivial stuff. Beinga marketing
manager in the wealth management business is a complete waste of time and
resources. You do very little through the year, so people like me who would
like to be busy would spend a large amount of time and effort for the little
that we did. So we would spend so much time planning and organizing an event that
the kids under me would go crazy trying to make sense of it all. They called me
Raavan, with ten heads. I would come and think of what could go wrong and then
try and mitigate it. It was a really pain in the ass. But that was me. Try and
do the best of what was possible. So I came with a similar mindset to run eth marketing function
for a much larger base of customers that securities business seeks to provide. I
think I was a disaster to start with. I did not think that giving leads through
digital marketing was anything that cool to do. I generally ignored the lead
side of the business. The leads was a black hole. We take leads and put it into
the system and then wonder what happened. Whenever the top management woke up,
hastily one presentation would be arranged in which some statistics would be
twisted to show the efficacy of the system. It made no sense.
One of the first things I worked on, I remember was to
design a brochure; I took team meetings and what not to try to design the perfect
brochure. That was complete rubbish as well. This was retail business. No one
really looked at the brochure and most of our customers did not care too bit
for the English we put in to it. I spend a long time trying to design a few
thank you emailer. I over designed them and then no one really used them.
Simple shit was complicated. In all this there was only one thing going for me.
No one really expected anything of me. I had to just keep doing what was
happening and not ruffle feathers and all would be well. The sales head was an
ass who only played political games and tried to keep all the key things to
himself. So while I was promised the product role by the MD, he played games to
ensure that product stayed within his control. But one thing he did not
understand – was the power if digital. That was one thing I did not understand
as well, but atleast I was well placed to understand that one thing.
Anything new requires a strong sense of curiosity and ability
to tinker, experiment and trust. And of course measure what you are seeking to
achieve. Digital is tough business. Stuff changes every day. Google will change
its algorithm and Facebook will introduce a new set of measures. What will you
do then? You have to learn every day. I was no stranger to digital. I was part of
the first dotcom boom, but that was completely different. In the year 2000, there
was a boom but there was no Google to consider. Now Google was a behemoth and
Facebook was taking root into the minds of people. What was happening? I knew
one thing from my earlier job. I had read a book called “the Search” by John Battelle.
It opened my mind to the potential of Google as a medium to get free leads. If you
optimize your pages correctly and put the relevant content traffic would come
and if you put your lead form or a way for someone to contact you on every page
then invariably people would contact you. You would have lead flow. As a gujju
guy, this was free money coming in.
SO while I was a part of the wealth business, I was also made
responsible for the marketing of the international business. That time I pushed
the idea of search engine optimization (fresh from eth book) and got it done. This
was in around 2005/6. It was pioneering in India around the time and I think I was
the first in my company to implement these ‘radical’ ideas. I did not think
they were radical, I only thought of it as things to do with little money. I think
if I was a marketing manager with tons of money to spend then I too would have
gotten busy trying to spend that money. The best argument for this is simple – I
did that for the international business and did no such thing for the wealth
business as in the wealth business there was enough stuff to do. So it’s not
like I saw it early. It’s just that I had the energy and drive to do new things
and a strong curiosity to back it.
So here in the broking business, I implemented the search optimization
thing (SEO). Actually its not that I implemented it; it was there, I gave it a
lot of focus and teeth. I pushed it hard. We did simple things like increase
the content, rearrange the content and then put the lead form on every page on
the site. Every page. I did not want to see a page without the lead form. What’s
the point of a page without a lead form upfront staring at you. The result is that
the leads went up 10 times from eth time I joined the place to now.
I then started other digital marketing stuff – like buying
clicks from search terms. Here I think the genius lie in a simple thing –
measurement. The way we measured the efficacy from the start was clear to me –
how much brokerage did all this result in? I fought as hard as ever to get eth
MIS and reporting right. The simple thing was that there is enough metrics
available – the simplest would be the metric that we would like to intuitively think.
I put x money in month 1. How many months would it take me to get this money
back in terms of brokerage. This figure was the holy grail. The term we coined
was cost per rupee of brokerage. The aim of a presentation would be to show how
long it takes to get a figure of 1. 1 Is the breakeven point. This was the
corner stone of all we did. Of course we then did a lot of work in a lot of
areas but this was the greatest achievement ever. No one was tracking digital
spends but we were. No one was going into the granularity of the stuff like we
were in the banking and especially the broking space. We pushed hard and we were
buoyed by the success we got. It made me what I am today. I plunged myself head
long into this space. It excited me like no other. We put in a culture of trying
everything. I could try everything as I could measure the efficacy of all my
investments. Everyuthing was possible as long as it could be measured.
Itw as one hell of a
ride. Until it was small and no one really bothered about it, I could do everything
I wanted. Now it was a big beast and everyone has gotten involved. Everyone wants
to regulate the thing and wants a pie of it. Further improvements in digital to
incorporate every small portion of the pie require a larger investment and more
so require people to get out of the way. This was getting too tough to do.
Everyone started having valuable input to put it and generally mess things up.
Too many people were involved in it and believed that it was in their career
interest to be a part of this. It was designed to stop.
And hence the change – now I as am gearing up for my new
innings in my new firm, I am a little scared. Here there are expectations. People
expect me to do stuff. I know that I know stuff, but is it adequate. I came
here and I was burned a bit by the politics, but in the new firm would I survive.
There would be a different level of politics, insecurity and willingness to
change (or not). I am confident. I would be able to solve most of it, but I have
to put systems in place, I have to put processes in place and all this will
have to be done at warp speed. Agile development as they call it. The
fundamental thing here in agile processes is that you keep releasing features
into the market by means of ‘releases’. You can’t have a perfect product but
you test as you go and keep building on what you have. Marketing, my suspicion
will need to follow this agile development. You keep putting things out and you
manage as you go along. the internet throws up this definition “Agile programming is an approach to project
management, typically used in software development. It helps teams react to the
instability of building software through incremental, iterative work cycles,
known as sprints”. This is new and interesting. Its exciting.
As Rehan who coached my kid for swimming for a brief period (a
former Olympian from India), there is good nervous and bad nervous. You like
good nervous, it gives you that tingling feeling when you move out to conquer the
world, and there is bad nervous that stops you, puts self-doubt and seeks to paralyze.
This is good nervous. I am thinking, I am all senses open, I am keen not to
take anything for granted, I am ready to work hard. I am on! Completely ON! I
cant make the same mistakes, I have to build support and build rapports with
all. I have to take on board suggestions and opinions. I have to inspire and to
trust. And I have to trust myself as well. I know my stuff. I have been trained
to think, I have trained myself to think. It has to work. The place I am
joining is start up. The pressure is larger. If I get things right, I can
change the face and the orbit of the startup. 100 of millions of dollars are
potentially at stake with my success in marketing the product and making it
work. As one of my bisses explained to me once – you have to be able to
constantly move between two three things and give adequate focus to all that
you have at the moment. Can you focus on multiple things one after the other. That
is going to determine your success. Prakash Dalal – your words ring true. That is
going to be the key to success as one moves up the corporate ladder.
Focus, refocus, repeat!
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end note
Here is another entry on agile
Agile software development is a group of software development methods
in which solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing,
cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary
development, early delivery, continuous improvement, and encourages rapid and
flexible response to change
I see no reason why marketing can’t
be like this. You have to keep the focus of the customer and hold a few things
like core insights dear. But the rest has to be evolutionary. If your market is
not static and is evolving, your targeting methods are evolving, your product is
evolving – how can marketing be static. It has to be agile!
free bonus inspirational video!
