Erik Wolf5 min read
If you read Everyone Hates Marketing, you’ll remember the Compass. If you didn’t, here it is in a paragraph, because everything I’m writing this fall lives in the middle of it.
The Compass is how I describe what a working marketing strategy has to contain. Four directions radiate from a center: Investment (what you’ll spend and what you expect back), Success (how you’ll know it worked), Ingredients (the content, assets and people you have and need), and Execution (the tactics you’ll actually run). In the center, where all four arrows start, is the Ecosystem.
I used that word instead of “market” on purpose. A market sounds like a place you go to sell. An ecosystem is a living thing that’s never idle. It holds your customers, your former customers, and the customers you haven’t met yet. It holds your competitors and their counter-moves. It holds the vendors who help you deliver, the economy, and the general mood of the people you’re trying to reach on any given Tuesday.
Everything you do in sales and marketing has to survive the Ecosystem, and a good portion of it has to thrive there if you want the business to grow. That was the argument of the first book, and nothing I’ve seen since has softened it.
So the question is simple: how do you actually know what’s going on in there?
Secondhand
Here’s an uncomfortable fact about being the owner. Everyone in your building either works for you or is selling to you.
That isn’t a criticism of your people. It’s the structure. You are the person who signs things, and there is no version of that arrangement in which the information that reaches you is unfiltered. Your employees tell you what they think you can hear. Your vendors tell you what keeps the account. Your sales team tells you the reason that isn’t anyone’s fault.
And your customers? Your customers are polite to the owner’s face. Think about the last time a business owner asked you, personally, how things were going with their company. Did you tell them? Or did you say “good, yeah, it’s been good,” and save the real answer for someone else?
The ones who leave are the politest of all. They don’t tell you why. They stop calling, and six months later your sales team has a theory about price.
So you build workarounds, and the workarounds are good ones. A peer group. A board. An advisor or two. The two people you call when something’s gone sideways at eleven at night. Every owner I respect has some version of this, and I’d never tell anyone to give it up.
But look at what all of those rooms have in common. The input is you. Your account of the customers. Your reading of why the deals were lost. Your version of what the market wants. Everyone advising you knows your Ecosystem only through you, and you know it only through what people were willing to say to the person who signs things.
Nobody in any of those rooms has talked to your customers. In any honest sense, neither have you.
You would never make a bet-the-company decision without running it past somebody. The one room that has the actual answer is the one room you’re never in.
Try it on yourself
In the first book I gave readers an exercise I call the Disappearing Act. A magician makes your business vanish. You write down what you’d miss most. Then you put a customer in the chair to your right, the one who buys, and write down what they’d miss. Then the one in the chair to your left, the one who actually uses the thing, and do it again.
I’ve run it in rooms full of CEOs and watched the quiet set in. It’s a good exercise, and I’d still recommend it. But notice what it is: it’s you, guessing what your customers would say. It’s the owner’s account of the customer, one more time.
The exercise only becomes research when somebody goes and asks the people in the chairs.
The thing you sell and the thing they buy
The drill-and-hole idea comes up in every marketing book, including mine, so I’ll be brief. People don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole. Actually they want the bike rack hung so they stop tripping over bicycles. The thing you sell and the thing your customer buys are almost always different things.
Everyone nods at this. Almost nobody acts on it, and the reason is practical rather than philosophical. You can’t sell the hole if you don’t know which hole they want. And the only way to know which hole they want is to ask the person holding the drill.
Not your sales team’s account of what they want. Not the owner’s. The person.
What the Ecosystem actually requires
Here is where I’ve landed after eighteen years of agency work and a few more years of doing nothing but this.
Connecting with the Ecosystem isn’t one task on the marketing plan. It’s the foundation the plan sits on, and it has three parts.
You have to ask. Not survey. Ask. A survey tells you how many people picked B. A conversation tells you why, and the why is where every useful decision lives.
Someone else has to do the asking. This is the part owners resist, and it’s the part that matters most. A customer will tell a neutral third party things they will not tell your rep, your owner, or anyone with your logo on their email signature. Not because they’re hiding anything. Because with an outsider there’s nothing to protect. The conversation stops being a breakup and becomes a description.
It has to be fast enough to use. A finding that arrives a quarter after the decision is trivia. This is the piece that was broken for most of my career, and the piece I eventually built a company to fix. Research is only as valuable as its arrival time.
Everything else I’ll write about this sits on those three. Next time: what “asking” actually means, and why most people do it in a way that guarantees polite answers.
This is adapted from a book I’m working on. The first piece, on why owners hate research and why they’re not wrong, is here. If you’d rather see what asking actually produces, there’s an anonymized sample study at ophea.ai/samples.