Achieve more with less: as easy as finding a Unicorn?

Times are hard. Not as hard as in Dickensian London, but there’s an Oliver Twist feeling about the relationship between marketing and business. The business, in this case, is Oliver. But, they are not asking for more... they’re demanding it.

"You must give me more for less"

What I am hearing again and again is the same thing: “you must achieve more with less.” Both in-house teams and the agencies that support them must achieve more for the business, while consuming fewer resources. So, this week, more for less is my subject.

What's my research source?

The Unicorny project has turned into a highly successful podcast, but it didn’t start life as a podcast in its own right. The original idea was to write a book about how businesses we can all relate to, are succeeding in creating value through marketing. The podcast was just meant to be a research method for the book.

So, we've done our research and what we're finding isn't what we expected.

As we've interviewed more and more senior marketers, the method they are using is less important than the pressure they are under to perform. Or indeed their purpose. Or indeed their place in the pecking order (as explained using the RACI framework in last week’s newsletter).

As an aside, we’re also seeing procurement teams taking over the pitch process in the mistaken belief that less means cheaper through negotiating rates. I might come back to that in a future blog because less *may* mean cheaper, but that’s only possible if we can address both productivity and effectiveness first.

Three big drivers

There are three big drivers for achieving more with less: AI, offshoring and automation. These will all be subjects of future podcasts, but here’s how I see them. They are productivity and effectiveness drivers.

Artificial intelligence allows you do more for the same, but faster. Offshoring allows you to do the same for less. Automation allows you to do more for less. Of course, automating processes might include both AI and offshore resource. The key is you and your team are not having to do the work manually.

Beyond that, there are things you can do today to help you achieve more with less.

Things you can do now

1.  Stop doing things that don’t add value.

We referenced accidental diversification in our resisting recession podcast episode recently. What applies to businesses also applies to individuals.

When times are good and things feel easy, it’s tempting to take on more and more. But, when times are tough, you need to be very focused on where you’re spending your time.

If we’re honest with ourselves there are things we all do at work that are ‘nice to dos’ or ‘fun to dos’ but which don’t really move the dial. I used the phrase “if we’re honest with ourselves” because most of us instinctively know which parts of our work are more important than others. Focus on the important stuff and lose the rest. That takes some discipline and you could take the view that work without the fun stuff is simply too dull to contemplate. If that’s the case, do the value-creating stuff first, and come back to the fun stuff once you've achieved.

Working out what you’re not going to do is as important as working out what you must do to win.

If you are in any doubt about which parts of your work create value, do a pre-mortem. Imagine that, six months from now, you are in your boss’s office and you’re getting fired. Write a list of the things you ‘didn’t do’ that got you fired. There is your value creating activity.

Now, do that stuff.

2.  Create, test and refine your playbook

Take a leaf out of the Private Equity world by building and executing value-creating playbooks. As marketers, we love new creative, new assets and new campaigns, but every time we ‘do new’, we risk inefficiency at best and failure at worst. Build a playbook, test it, refine it, then work it.

And, once you’ve built and refined your workbook, ask yourself which parts of the process you can automate.

As an additional benefit, if you have created playbooks that are highly successful, you should document them using a tool like Methodgrid.com. Capturing and documenting your intellectual property adds value to your business, reduces mistakes and reduces the training burden.

3.  Blended Teams Build Better

Harry S. Truman said: “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit."

He was quoted by Radish ’s leaders, Lorna Charlish and Renaye Edwards , to wrap up a keynote at B2B Marketing’s Ignite event in Chicago earlier this year. Lorna and Renaye were diving deep into the omni-channel ABM engine they co-created with Quantexa under VP Field and Pipeline Marketing, Christine Broomhead .

When you take ego out of the mix and blend teams, you build better business.

So, here’s a challenge. How can you integrate your agency team more tightly with your in-house team? Can you implant or co-locate some of the time? How can you blend resources and focus all attention on outcomes that matter to the business?

With shorter communication lines and specialist resource on tap, you’ll shorten your cycle time, increase productivity and I bet you’ll increase the effectiveness of your work too?

Achieving more with less is going to be a key theme for the next 18 months at least. We’re seeing confidence return to the market in H2, but the three key drivers that enable more for less are also catalysts for the long term. AI in particular is going to revolutionise how we work. So, let’s not wait for it to happen ‘to’ us. Let’s get ahead and start looking at more for less right now?

P.S.

We are coming back out of hiatus on the Unicorny podcast very shortly. If you haven’t already registered to be alerted when new episodes drop, you can do that for the time being at marketingdifference.co.uk or you can subscribe on your favourite podcast platform.

The podcast has really picked up, so we now think it needs a website and channel of its own. So, we’ll be setting up unicorny.co.uk very soon. But, register at Marketing Difference and will make sure you never miss an episode!