success isn't a magic trick.
It isn’t a secret recipe, or a lottery either: it’s a carefully choreographed dance we perform every day.
Of course, even the most practiced dancers, athletes, and performers make mistakes. Sometimes even the most carefully, the most thoughtfully crafted strategy goes awry. Or, as Mike Tyson famously put it, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
But what if you had a plan that anticipated that punch? What if your plan could account for the reality that plans tend to be imperfect? What if you had a plan that was designed to be adaptive to the reactions of others?
We built our Unified Marketing System™ (UMS) around those ideas exactly: the necessity of adaptation and the need to interact WITH your market, not onto it.
UMS provides a standardized set of strategies, best practices, and customizable templates allowing any business to concept/build/deploy customer-centric marketing plans and tactics and effectively/objectively measure success.
UMS Defines:
- What needs to be done, in what order, and under whose guidance
- How we can effectively and objectively measure results and quantify what we need to fund success
- How sales and marketing can effectively collaborate to serve the same goals and drive towards the same results
- What tasks and priorities add the highest value to the effort
- How much time, effort, and budget to devote and how those resources align with objectives
- How priorities, roles and tasks are interconnected and how they relate to the needs of the customer/buyer
- What tasks/roles can be most easily outsourced
- How to make good decisions and avoid time-wasting "slacktics"
Envision
Setting goals, defining what we need to accomplish. Aligns sales/marketing with the rest of the business.
DIRECT
Based on objectives we decide how to proceed. We decide how to break objectives down into key results, how we measure success, how we spend to fund that success, how we empower our people.
Evaluate
We gather the information we need to make decisions as a business unit. Information filters down to drive/refine messages, creative, and sales pitches and filters up to inform strategies and report analytics.
EXECUTE
This is where we deliver at the points that touch our customers most directly.
Most importantly though, the nature of UMS as a “cycle” serves as a constant reminder that marketing is a process that never really ends. We do this dance over and over again, learning, improving, gaining efficiencies, and rolling with whatever unexpected punches come our way.
None of this implies perfection, no baseball player maintains a 1.000 batting average, no investor always picks the right stock, no courier delivers on-time every time. The purpose of having a consistent approach though — the reason we keep performing the dance — is not that we want to, or ever can guarantee success, but simply to increase the chances of success by minimizing the risk of failure.
