Deconstructing Your Direct Marketing- Pragmatism, Planning, Execution
Direct mail campaigning is the crux of business-to-business marketing. Success should be measured in figures above 4.5% response with a sales conversion on numbers of around 1% original mailing ( >20% of respondents actually buy).
Personally I have achieved this and much better in both a professional capacity and actually job seeking activity with my own custom e-mail! An e-mail with over 80% response and about 10% fruitful interviews is pretty much amazing but was based on the fundamentals of marketing as were my successful mail campaigns.
First let’s forget the word “strategy”. Much loved of all academic MBA types, the key to successful direct marketing has little to do with strategic planning unless a business will wholeheartedly focus on this as the largest route to market. That which matters is getting down to basics and delving into data in detail.
The Key Factors for Success
1. Data That Works for You and Not You Working for the Data
a. A Target oriented /segmentable Mail List (CRM)
b. Clean Data
c. New Data or at least ageable data
d. Well Organised, well populated Record Fields
e. Quality controlled buy-in lists
f. Good Data Tracking from the Campaign
g. Known numbers of quality leads out and hits back in.
2. An Eye Catching Creative with A Sharp Value Proposition
3. A Snappy response mechanism – reply paid, SMS, web
4. A pragmatic and researched delivery schedule
5. Following Up systems for people and IT
6. Tracking of Success and input to Continuous improvement
Direct mail often goes very wrong in B2B contexts because of a lack of seriousness, professionalism and common sense. “Do unto others as you have done unto yourself” is one starting point- would you respond to your own DM material? Take it one step further, if it is warehouse managers would your own warehouse read it and respond?
The fundamentals are to target market- have a key message, related to benefit or demand, which reaches the right people, and an appropriate response mechanism. Easier said than done. Especially when this is coordinated with a follow up telesales round.
Marketing suffer from both having their heads in the sand of data mass, and wearing the emperors new clothes. At one well known Californian company, about 2 million dollars was spent on a SIEBEL database which was installed then promptly furnished with unreliable, incomplete and largely out of date contact data. Marketing had minimal budget to clean the database and did not want to admit to their earlier lack of data quality control. Using the system for sales reps and product managers became an administrative task in addition to their work rather than a tool to facilitate sales and the interaction between direct marketing, web and the front line of customer visits.
These failures in quality management and attention to detail are unfortunately value chain deep with DM suppliers- at the end of the day someone, somewhere has paid for phone calls and a resulting data list to be generated and after it’s first sale it is becoming not only obsolescent but also potentially fatigued ie over utilised. Lists are sliced and diced, sold on, sold out and even sold illegally. The key thing is of course that marketers hate detailed, repetitive work and that is right down the feeding chain to your basic little list broker.
Managing Internal Expectations
As a marketer it is most important politically to understand expectations and manage them! This is mainly in dealing with sales management, but also with IT, senior management, customer teleservices and even technical services.
Expectations can be obvious yet overlooked or devious and unconsidered !
Examples:
• Sales expect to save the quarter on your leads and want 2000 good ones
• Management gods expect higher growth and mean 2% points
• Accounts expect to save money diverting away from advertising
• Customer services don’t want to have any extra work / hassle
• Your own “marketing excellence” programme dictates an improvement from 2% to 5% response
• IT expect to get to install a new CRM system and win more power over what marketing authority has had previously
• The previous ‘free stress ball when you call’ campaign by Bert Numfunk and Doreen ‘The ass” Glamerpuss had a huge response ( people like the balls, but didn’t buy anymore product )
• The sales management don’t want to double discount- ie. existing customers getting a discounter mail which is an offer they may need to honour!
• Sales personnel expect to do no cleaning of the database or feeding you with ‘pre-leads’ for your own successful marketing.
• Your own staff expect “some intern/student/outside company” to actually clean the database.
• No one anywhere in the company expects or desires to change working practices without a damn good explanation and crucially a steer from senior management.
So expectations are diverse and some are not obvious or actually predictable. This is why women do so well in marketing because their softer, persuasive and listening abilities ie “people skills” are frankly better. If you came into marketing and didn’t want to stoop to working in sales first, then sorry- you have an even bigger, multi level sales job to do in order to get your ideas accepted and not be rolled-over by the likes of sales, IT or worse visiting management consultants on departmental raiding license.
You have to understand perceptions, change them or at least move them a little, and otherwise manage expectations around this proactively. That means selling- confronting people,getting their attention, explaining the relevance, listening to their viewpoint, charming them (yeuuch!) and persuading them to cooperate or at least take a non partisan view on a DM activity.
In this respect your biggest job will probably be to wrestle the CRM and prospects database out of the control of IT and make them your bitch, not you theirs. Sales management swing into this equation but usually don’t have the time or if appointed don’t stay long in the position once they get bored with the be-pluked IT guys body odour.
Objective Setting and Planning Pragmatically all the Way!
Mean while, back at the ranch…You have to understand what is achieveable in DM. A mass market e-mail or mail blast to a new leads list can result in a less than 1% response with only a 10% conversion within that. In other words the marketer would have been better off spending their time on other tasks! What is the expectation? Companies can only grow the top line in a few ways with respect to customers- sell more to existing customers, sell to new customers, sell different products to either or put up prices! The latter is often unpopular with sales of course. Usually they will be interested in leads to new, fat customers who are ‘hot to trot’ i.e. in the market for the company’s offering. Often they are not very keen on mail campaigns that try to sell diverse or larger quantity items to their existing contacts at customers because they like to “own” this area, but in terms of new contacts in their larger existing customers for new products they are only too happy to get the leads.
If senior management really have a serious expectation that marketing will deliver the platform for top line growth then they must put their money where their mouth is. As a marketer you have to realistically get more budget for new resources and channels. One thing to avoid is the IT director taking a big slice, as above zillion dollars, for a system to which marketing play Cinderella. Big data CRMs are often seen as panacea for the faults in data quality and sales management people-systems.
• Get the objective correct- manage the expectations and investment in resources around this:
• who you want to target, why , how many responses, how many from internal data
• Get the data cleaned*. Funnel it. Get down to a target customer and prospect group who are actually worth mailing.
• Calculate budget and have an idea that this is either going to be a really good focused and folloowe dup campaign or a mass market 1% response junket. I.e get a handle on ROI.
• Buy new lists in- quality control these before you do
• Plan the whole timetable out in advance, taking public holidays, busy periods etc into account. Find out if your competitors for example run a Q1 discount in march and run one in February! Stagger the logistics to avoid overloading your mail room or those at multi contact companies.
• Organise that responses are measurable. Make a special post box with the post office even! Set up or reserve a phone line, email address, SMS number or web form
• Organise some degree of follow ups. This can at least nurture out a few more sales meetings early after a mail to abate the sales managers. Hand pick a few good leads at big, new prospects for this treatment. Sales managers will feel good and not get bored by easily forgotten marketing stat’s.
* age the data, organise it into existing customers and non-sale prospects, buy in new prospect lists, use any product sales data, exclude people without job function, exclude syntax fucked up addresses, de-duplicate on individuals and while doing this watch out for take-overs and company name changes, exclude possible data error characters like ‘pipes | ‘ or hidden tabs, merge or demerge data field like title/firstname/initial etc.
In mailing campaigns the usual ‘head in the sand “no problem with our data” prevails in marketing because marketers are lazy and don’t like detail. That’s why they aren’t in accountancy, purchasing or R&D. They’re sales people with college degrees in marketing. So the usual approach is that marketers will either buy in or use internal telesales services to follow up a mailing to elicit more meetings with customer or a Russian doll further targeted marketing. Given the usual low quality data for new prospects this is putting the cart before the horse. If you are not sure about the quality of your list and it’s age is best measured by carbon dating, then use telesales services to clean the leads in the outset. Self cleaning mailings are a “total waste of time”. However new ‘ we listen to our customers’ market research flyers with just a few question can generate a lot of leads as can such on your big point of touch, the web site.
Getting your Hands Dirty
In order to clean your data you have to understand it’s overriding quality. You have to top and tail it so to speak. Get a feel for how hot the listing is.
The best way is to understand the basic fact that all relevant data can be reduced to ASCII and merged into one spreadsheet or table. This can then be examined ‘forensically’ in Excel or Lotus.
Excel allows you to sort data on the various columns and records with empty fields can be excluded or sent for call rounds to establish new leads.
If you are lucky you will have a date field which allows you to age your contacts and if you are even luckier a last ‘point of touch’ date may be available. This means you can at least exclude leads/contacts who are say 18months without touch or 5 years. However you may want to do the exact reverse and actually win back lost customers and reactivate prospects – this depends on knowing your market personality- do people change jobs often and do these types of companies go bust or get bought out frequently?
Other cleaning ways in excel are to exclude those with incomplete names and addresses and send them to the poor fool who has to ring around them.
Working Up Prospects From the Points of Touch
Data capture is a term which kind of defines it’s own weakness. It takes a blinkered fast fix view on placing a customer name and address onto system. IT don’t understand quality of leads, and often don’t really care about quality of data- they are more interested in the installation and running of the system and willing to blame marketing for not cleaning the data instead of fixing the ‘forms’ to exclude bad data entry.
Working up prospects means taking a little information, giving some back, getting a little more information and then getting either a sales call to them or actually just defining a good prospect for mailings. In Web terms it is sometimes called ‘permission marketing’ whereby your ‘data dialogue’with the customer begins very non committal and easy to do at their end- so just an e-post or user name. You then offer something of value back and go onto to capture their details and interest areas before eventually profiling them further.
Creep Out Your “Mailing”
The mailing in itself may be a reasonably well focused list, but this may actually reduce your actual mailing numbers. A well targeted list of say 100 is better than even 10,000 mailings to a badly screened list. However the cost of doing 100 proffessionally designed and printed items will be pretty much the same as for 5000. Excluding mail which is the one fully scaling factor.
So here comes the rub- what other points of touch do you have? The very best of all is the pack insertion of mailers. This is because they uncover a lot of actual end users who are key in the decision to buy more of that product, swap it to a newer product or buy a related product or service. Often these are ‘off sales’ that means to say no rep as ever identified them or visited them in the last couple of years so orders are either well established or just out of the blue. Most warehouses have pack insert procedures and will do it willingly. Failing that you could invest in self sticking plastic envelopes and stick these on stock items ready to go out from shelf ( frequently purchased items) . This will be a very good use of those 5000 mailers you got printed.
Also you can use mailers at exhibitions and rep stands on sites, and they find good use at distributors. Finally as a left behind calling card from reps to new potential customers or those they have just missed or “forgotten” to put on CRM.
You may need to get your hands into those catalogue requests. Customer services may have a cosey arrangement in taking the glory for these bookings or just not care to log them to CRM. An hour stuffing your latest flyer into the catalogues likely to go out in the next six weeks is good.
Also a pdf version these days seems de-rigeur and could be sent on a snow-balling or chain mail way, but this is probably just a few sprinkles on the cake.
The one last suggestion is better for the SME market is to send the mailer out with bills
Quality of Message and Creative '
This is usually top of the agenda for any marketing activity but all the time and money in agency land is wasted without being secure that at least you have tried to get the very best out your mail lists in terms of quality leads.
DM has to offer some value to the customer. Many marketers interpret this as either being headline grabbing discounts or some nice freebie either included or to be redeemed by calling in/e-mail/web etc. This is a fundamental presumption of ‘doing some marketing’ that marketing is all trinkets and no content. If the product is relevant and the creative is attention catching then the information and even entertainment value in itself is of enough value to the customer for them to atleast remember it and have more propensity to react.
• Something to avoid it going unopened.
• A creative which gets attention / interest to read the headline
• A headline or strap line which leads to curiosity for more information
• Further information in brief
• Call to Action with Response mechanism
Often the head line (and strap line) these days is based on either a benefit, a key discount or SPIN risk based approach. Often a combination of ‘don’t miss this opportunity’ ‘for a limited time only’ etc on discounts runs the spin way. A spin head line should be balanced with the solution to that ill in the strap line otherwise known as the sign off line. A double negative is probably too vague and just unappealing. It overemphasises the risk without offering cure.
You have about 8 seconds from time of opening to get to the strap line and then maybe ten to 20 more for reading any body text.
When I say earlier some reason for them NOT to just throw it in the bin this means either neutralising the envelope- a clean, quality envelope with the address in a window or making it a little personal. Any printing on the external envelop shouts spam. An alternatively shaped envelope or actually just a card which is fully visually evident is a good compromise for creativity but can end up in spam land regardless.
One campaign I sent out in brown envelopes seemed to keep up to my usual standards, people presuming they were bills and giving them some attention.
In terms of combining content and response to actually getting new data, one little campaign I did with about 10000 from our list was to go after “look warm” leads with a nicely designed “ we listen to you” mailer. This did 6% whilst normal marketing was struggling at 0.5%-2%. So sidling on up to your customer in the guise of market research can be an approach which leads me to :
Russian Doll Marketing and Mail-ReMail
Faced with a poorly segmentable yet quite ‘young and fresh’ database of prospects you may want to screen the field first. This can be done as above with a “tell us what you think of us/ tell us what is important to you in this area’ or a further questionnaire on line.
The concepts are- Russian doll- you start big and respondents get re-mailed and screened at this point before they get the gift or discount or brochure. Often the inner most doll, or layer of the onion is redeemed by a sales person actually calling to deliver the highest value item. Russian doll works very well now with the web as a second tier- capture e-post and reply opt in at least for this campaign, get them to do some more data entry on the web and then move forward by post once again.
Mail re-mail means either two general approaches- you do one cheap mass mail aimed at the *Sharon* market- who ever the hell responds to all the freebies and win a holiday shit. Then you do a second to the same list, deducted those who answered round one.- which offers something else, like a proiduct specific discount, or just with a good creative. Finally you deduct again the responses and send for instance a personally addressed letter reminding of the earlier mail and maybe including another copy. In this way you somewhat reduce production costs, but moreover find out which customers respond to which type of marketing. Products, creative or gifts. Thereafter you can segment the market a bit more for future campaigns. In many markets there are freebies and loyalty campaigns which make the difference to securing business with some customers who feel they like this and have the latitude to get away with basing their ordering around the best freebie!
The other approach to mail-remail, is simpler- just mail them periodically including a personal letter at the end of the rounds of mailing- this is better suited to pestering a well targeted list who are maybe being a little slow to respond. You will actually find that response rate goes up after the second and even subsequent mailings - if the list is ‘fresh’ i.e. not mailed too often already and quite young or at least filled with current sitting names in their positions. Only polite of course to deduct out respondees. If you deduct out those who respond within 2 weeks then you save on mailing and you save on production by just using the same item each time, with maybe a run of letters at some point. Like TV advertising, the run of how often you spike the audience is disputable but a first mailing followed by a second two weeks after is fresh enough in the mind. The majority of respondents probably do so within a couple of working days of getting the post. So if you know of strikes, holidays, geographical delays etc then stagger accordingly based around a two week minimum separation and then possibly a monthly mailing for the rest of the quarter or offer period. Pester power works because they either do get pestered into it or finally even reading it but also because sometimes secretaries and mail offices open mail and chuck out items like this. This is where the personal letter comes in infact! You get through some of the gate keepers and also you appeal to the more personal, traditional side of some people.
The first mailing can be a little cheaper in production than usual items, and offer something general to the market- like a big discount, a nice freebie. Holiday competitions outside office supplies are a waste of time unless you have like 100 to give away when people feel they have a chance. Free gifts with purchase can be good, but watch those warehouse workers sticky fingers!
The Aftermath
I use this title jokingly because armed with a new attitude to be detail oriented and hands on, charging in with heavy quality control and a healthy scepticism bears fruits of being able to objectively analyse what has worked and what has not.
If you have been so bold as to actually qualify your data and quantify how potentially good your lists are then you can at least get a metric on the top line mailing figure. Just like top line on the accounts sheet, you need to get more prospects in there and be realistic on just how many you can get. You may for example find that a particular target campaign reaches 99% of companies yet has a poor response. It’s time to find more users at those companies, new internal locations and departments and more people in the DMU chain. The top line figures for different market segments and the mass market as a whole become useful in terms of budgeting for future mailings and for aquistion of more share of “vision” on the market- ie. how many customers you hear out there! This then leads to an established share of voice in terms of DM. In a very large busy marketing department you can actually over dominate an entire market with flyers and offers and end up with the worst case- management want you to consolidate offers and promos and NPIs into a montly, worse quarterly special news letter. Hence you dilute targeting, dilute message and make measuring worse. If you like desk top publishing this may be for you though.
So now you can exclude hopefully your top line figure of propects you want to have an idea of actually how many are ‘targeted’ and how many are pretty much blind. This depends on your segmentation of the market and which data you used. But given for example job title and industry sector you should be going down one funnel which leads to more touches than using either in isolation – for example. There comes a point when the SQL build just gets too granular and you are down to handfuls of customers to mail for a three branced criteria. If so it can be tempting to work quality back up over, by reverse-profiling other candidates but at the end of the day.
Having a good idea that the lists were clean, targeted and quantifiable you can now start to consider other factors which made the campaign response either very fruitful or below average. This is creative content, message take-out, response mechanism, postal addressing, going in the waste paper basket etc.
To grab a handle on how good it is all going you need to have snappy response mechanisms which are trackable. You need to be able to tally up how many hits you are getting back to customer services, sales etc. Unfortunetly the human element creeps in and I firmly advocate removing any motivations not to note an enquiry came from a mailer by eliminating human elements outside marketing. Hence post , e-post, telephone or perhaps best for the moment SMS should be fullyu monmitored by marketing. For a really big campaign expected to run to many orders it will be hard to do this, so planning a special product number code to quote for ordering the actual item or better still a package deal ( where the new product number does not replace any of it’s components, just flings them together in a kit or bundle!) This is completely unoavoidable for the whole company and moreover the customer if they want that deal. It is also a big hit with sales because it gives them true revenue recognition when they co promote it with marketing. They get half the job done for them and just need to ice the cake, and it really works for everyone. Worth the effort and also worth the effort of putting agreed systems, awareness and training in place with the other departments.
Finally you should have historic data on mail campaigns to compare yours too, and these can be very much in the way of being % and relative until you start to run regular product # promos when it is top line which talks and not a 10% response rate.
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I hope you get an understanding, as an academically educated marketer, that you must give a shit about the small detail. You can’t want to build a gleaming machine like a new sports car when you don’t give a damn about the engine components and just hope someone else takes care of the details. Good creativity and marketing ideas are easily forgotten by endless return, addressee unknown and otherwise low response rates. It takes a great deal of planning, evaluating, going square eyed, coercing, charming, bullying and outright attention to detail to move up from being a so-so 2% marketer to being a success in this area.
Live Long and Prosper in Your Marketing Career.
Friday, June 06, 2008
Sunday, April 06, 2008
The Platu 25
As built by Beneteau as their Beneteau 25.
Establishment in the EU countries and USA as the Beneteau 25 Platu
Beneteau had previously produced the first widely spread production (SMOD- single manufacturere One Design) sports boat in the EU- the First Class 8m. Actually av highly entertaining boat to sail on which has previously attracted a high level of sailors in arranged series, and indeed was part of the french national training programme for yacht racing.
However while at a Messe in Germany, I believe, Mssr Beneteau business development came upon the thai- new zealand conceived Farr designed , McDell Built, Platu 25. Platu being a fast mackrell of the tropical west pacific, and the boat developed as a budget OOD for the kings cup in Phuket amongst other racing in Thailand. By customer request farr design number #316 was born for that market, and for some reason or other brought to europe. At time of writing still produced here by Beneteau but known as the Platu 25 now
The reasons to drop off production of the FC 8m and go for the smaller (.... and slower! ), Platu are unknown to me, so leave a comment if my presumption is wrong. I presume they wanted a smaller 7m boat which took less crew and was maybe cheaper to build and easier to market being a Farr hull. The aim was probably to compete in the EU sports boat market and establish a strong OD class, probably to complement and feed into their at that time, Mumm 30 production and Figaro.
Outside the writer's native British Isles, on continental Europe they have largely achieved a good number of boats particulariuly in germany, holland, Italy and the Iberian states.
In the UK the market was somewhat cluttered with new fangled sports boats from major marks, smaller yards and pure one offs and home build ply core like the "swordfish". However both the 707 and the cork 1720 were being actively developed as OOD fleets, to the regrettable loss of international OD potential for british sailors. Both of these large fleets have their stregnths and weaknesses. The achilles heel for the cork being crew number, and for both these boats the costs of Marinas in the UK, coupled to less leisure time and higher house prices, has lead to the explosion of the trailer-sailor SB3 from Laser (Castro desinged mini Cork 1720).
In scandinavia the platu faltered in the attempts by dealers and maker to introduce the boat back in the 90s. This may have been in large due to badly presented examples being loaned to an international match racing event on Oslo Fjord. The boat got a bad reputation for deck gear failure with a lot of top Scandinavian sailors at this event, and the more expensive and demanding Melges took a place with some enthusiastic supportes. However in Finland there is now an emerging fleet of the Platu and also several examples in the other countries being bought and transported there. The writer expects this to spread into sweden, some owners being ethnic or expat Swedes, and perhaps more examples in denmark due to the profile for the worlds 2007 in Nuestadt, Germany.
That the Platu still retains a poised potential in establishing local fleets or competitive HC racing, is clear in many countries with most of the big OD fleets actually being built in the 70s and 8os, becoming worn out and hence obsolete as one designs. ( reparation or new build costs becoming restrictive for most owners, and hence the whole thing reverts to that evil predominatn in handicap, cheque book racing! Take the Sonata and Goacher, or the Albin express and the top helms there as examples). More on this in the latter sections below, but suffice to say a ready to rig exc 6hp and sails of 22,000 € plus delivery is pretty darn good at time of writing.
Design and Construction
It is basically a scale model hull of various Farr designs of the early 90s- the mumm 30, the corel 45, the Farr 40 and the Whitbread 60 OD. Indeed the brochure from beneteau refers to the keel as "Whitbread 60 design" However exotic materials are spared from most of the production and the cost of even lead in the bulb is removed by casting is steel! There is a hidden and important bit of carbon fibre construction - around the rudder bearing assembly which no doubt contributes to tight steering and safety. Mast and boom are in aluminium and deck gear is limited to two winches, cleats and jammers.
The hull is very similar is proportions to the mumm 30 and the predecessing IMS 31 and Mumm 36. In fact you can lay drawings on top of each other as tifs or gifs and see that there are only minor alterations, the Mumm 30 have the larger sail area however.
The bow is a fine entry with a rake and flare, which is both aesthically very pleasing and also allows for a good deal of reserve bouyancy in the diamond area well above the water line. Criticisms of this bow are that it just removes water line legnth, but for general sailing in all types of waves in a 25fter, and safety of crew on the foredeck it is a good design measure to not have a narrow section 'plumb bow'.
Following the hull "abaft" the beam water line is hidden from the crews' view, by the wide and flared deck/top sides. In fact the beam on water is very narrow until the last part of the reserve bouyancy, the deck sides, do their job! The narrow pear, or fish like profile is only really apparent from aerial photos, but the stern/transom is notably quite narrow.
A nice illustration of how the flare looks in motion is on youtube -Beneteau 25 ( Platu 25 ) sailing on Lake Windermere He is sailing with a little bit too much heel BTW; Hike biaaatches!
There is little 'dead rise' although the rocker (dead rise aft of keel to transom) is nicely rounded while retaining good planing characterisitics. Performance up wind is notably relatively super fast for a 6 m water line becuase the exit for the quarter wave is very smooth and the whole wetted area of beam on water quite narrow.
The top sides are not much lower than a mumm 30 and the water line flares rather beautifully up to the deck level, which are turned for crew comfort ( if not safety!- there is little to get a foot to and the life lines are quite low).
The cockpit is nicely laid out and large for the LOA of the boat. The trimming position is a bit cramped but a foot can be stuck on the lee stanchion nicely to give a bit more of a pro job if not cross winching to be truly pro'!
One thing of note is that the outboard actually operates in a starboard side well and locker set up with a plug for the hole in the hull which must be secured! Most racers hike the outboard down below aroudn the keel in light winds or under the steps frame in more breeze.
Below topsides, the cabin is spartan but spacey, you can sit in more comfort than a 707 and stand in the gangway for a relaxing view of events. Not many people know that the Platu 25 has two full legnt berths in light foam which are fine for sleeping on. I reckon you could do a quarter berth and odd cross berth set up with some chocks in balsa or the like and sleep at least four cadavres down there!
The battery can be place around the mast. A motorbike battery is a good idea, with a solar panel on a long lead to be left up topsides after racing.
Deck Gear
Many of the lines and deck gear looks a bit under specified, but it all seems to work admirably if the new owner takes some time to swap out the weak points of the kicker, jammers etc.
The traveller, main sheet block, winches and purchases on the outhaul etc are just fine for all weathers I have sailed in. The only 'pain in the butt' feature is the main halyard being lead down to the hogg, which procludes round the can slackening of the main halyard. The cunningam on my boat was underpowered in compensating for this, so was beefed up, in order to achieve an upwind luff tension with an off wind slacken out ability, but it is a compromise and I wish the main haly. went to deck level.
A really nice touch which adds interest and involvement for the experienced crew, is the inclusion of both a jib cunningham (downhaul) and jib barber haulers. This makes fine depowering and the reverse possible from the rail, given the owner has been savez enough to cross-lead the barbers.
The traveller/ block is fore of the helm and this allows the helm to do a lot of the trimming for short handed racing or to get the maintrimmer over the rail or aft of him. The main is nicely geared and can be 'foot and thigh' cleated ie friction on your own body.
Boat Set Up
The rig absolutely requires attention before sailing if conditions are varied more than say 5 knots between days or actual races. The forestay has a pin and hole system which is complemented by the Cap Shroud tension and the rear stay tension. In light fluctuating winds, a slack setting is chosen for both of these with the rear stay being used to tighten the foretay and rig. The D1s are adjusted accordingly to induce the right bend and lateral support whereas the d2s are of course less practical to adjust between races and should be set on a loos gauge to the manufacturers / sail makers llbs or kg setting which suit your seasonal conditions i.e. stiffer for more wind. Both the caps and the forestay are tightened for higher winds with d1s being taken in to mainly take lateral bend out or excessive prebend.
So as a guide, for light winds up to 6 knots you want a slack setting so as to power along in any gusts and with your own apparent wind. Flat sails are slow whatever so we don't care with a hard, flat rig for light winds because tide or thermals can be more decisive. For more wind take on another hole or two on the forestay, some turns on both caps and D1s, and be more aggressive with the use of back stay and jib cunnigham. You can have a kind of compromise setting with a slightly slacker forestay in say 7-12 knts, which will cover you in 1knt - 10 knts breeze, but remember you will feel up to 17 knots apparent wind "over the decks ". For higher winds, everything is bang hard on and if your spring and autumn series are in bigger winds, adjust the upper D2s accordingly.
Sail Control and erm, Sailing !
Upwind, the boat sails with a very narrow slot, jib being a 105% on the foot. The jib will be trimmed like a dinghy, and not like a cruiser-racer with a fixed track and a genoa dictating far more 'outward' sheeting angles for the foresail. The upwind balance of the boat is critical with the sail set between the two sails and the slot / twist must be maintained in good balance to keep flow attached over the exhaust lee- slipstream of the jib-main feed- otherwise the boat will power up and depower too much producing jerky progress. To explain further, the very short cord keel and small water line/beam area mean the boat requires more attention to the sheeting of main and jib in harmony than say a 33ft keel boat of older design.
So this is all to say that the Platu 25 sails more like a dinghy, requiring 'dynamic stability' i.e. you use the right amount of power and balance for the wind conditions. The two controls for this are twist of both sails and size of slot, both being increased as the wind does up wind. These are luckily enough, fine tunable under way with crew hiked out by using the mainsheet/traveller and the jib cunningham for twist and the barber haulers for slot adjustment, making for a very enjoyable upwind sail for the two or three crew out on the rail. The boat will actually show the very rare 'lee helm' with an under sheeted jib upwind, and an uneasy weather helm for the same mistake on the main ( or slot being too tight for conditions, powering up the main too much)
In light winds the boat should have 'keel speed' before it is pointed ie. about 2.2knts boat speed I believe. The quarter wave should remain attached and like a tasar, through winds and boat speed of 0.5 to 7 knts a quarter wake disappearing well aft means you can point higher.
In medium winds of 7 to 12 knts, the main trimmer can hike out as well and come in for rough sets or mark roundings. The boat should be crossed winch in addition to this which adds greatly, see performance sailing under.
In stronger winds the trimmer returns to position and trims hard with the main well twisted and flattened on all controls bar the outhaul, which should leave some depth in the lower quarter of the sail to help the boat power through waves. The boat is sailed low and fast at 44 to 50 degrees and not feathered- the correct size of jib and twist should be maintained. Speeds upwind of 9knts with reasonable VMG are acheivable which means if one side is favoured then you get there PDF!
It is said that reefing is not good for the main, so on big wind days, it is a choice of the owner to sail and this is only actually over about 26knts. At above 22knts true, there is a tendency to broach on the windward mark bear away or out of poor gibes and is difficult to control on a reach.
Ssiling seems to be sweetest with little if any weather helm and with the bow trimmed down slightly. About 3 or 4 inches of bow should be cutting the waves at most sheltered waters. Like a mumm 36, weight is trimmed progressively back over up hill and off wind as the wind and waves grow in stregnth, and you can actually stick the main trimmer or one crew aft of the helmsman on very "lumpy" upwind or medium fast off wind reaches. This is one very rewarding aspect of crewing the boat- you really feel your actual body mass makes a difference !!
Off wind the boat excels, and as mentioned above, weight needs to be trimmed aft with up to three crew members behind the helm. The boat can be popped on to the plane by sheeting in on a gust and 100kg plus of crew weight running back to the stern area! Contrary to comment on the web about the boat being a WindWard LeeWard only machine, it is fairly easy to reach, given you are a dinghy sailor, and will carry a well controlled kite hard onto the forestay. Indeed it will plane at this point of sail and higher on 'white sails'. In fact the boat will sail relatively controlled on white sails but the initial bear away can produce problems for broaching
Manoevres
Getting the boat moving is not an issue, but actually slowing down can be! Backing sails works well to both reverse the boat out of a situation or to go into emergency hove to, which can dammage the jib though it has to be noted.
The boat will power up and get to target speed quickly, given that the crew hike out according to the conditions asap! Cross winching is advised as soon as conditions require the three fore crew out which makes starts, hardeing up and coming out of tacks much quicker and actually less stressful. The cost of working out how to cross winch and who does what and when is worth the weight being on the right side!
As mentioned the main trimmer sits in until about 7 to 9knts breeze when fully crewed and then hops over allowing the helm to fine trim or dump ( which will be needed less often due to the now hiking gorrilla!)
As mentioned, the bear away hoist is all imporant in winds over 9knts and many places can be lost in an OD fleet. Set-Gybes are possibe and this is one reason I may find out if bow launches are do-able and street legal. The boat has a tendency to broach and it may be best to dump off the flow from the main and fling the boat into a DDW positiion if there are problems or you are not very experienced. Otherwise the jib should be trimmed through the bear away and the main released on the sheet only with the car up at least a quarter of the way. The helm can effect a moderat winds main sheet slip out.
The spinnaker is a bit of a pain to 'gangway' launch ie a bag suspended above the cabin. The kite can be trapped at the head of the foresail, on the life lines, the stanchions or the spreaders. A wire and roller between the D1s and the mast can be fitted to guide the kite out into the best height, although I would be tempted in future to opt for bow luaunching or side launching or even chuck luancing. Before the weather mark, the clew and head should be lead outside the jib at the jibs clew area where there is a little bit of space, especially if the barber haulers are on.
The trick seems to be, as in any slick operation, to get the head of the kite out while approaching the weather mark, but hold it's height so as it is low of the spreaders otherwise it will be aft of the spreader and catch under hoisting. Not far enough up and outboard, and it can easily follow up the slot and catch on the jib battens or the top of the triangle.
Sneaking the guy is really a personal choice, but for going onto a reach in lightish winds it is a must for performance. It is really easy to snag the tack and foot of the kite on the jib-lifeline area so as said, the kite should be quite far out from the boat and I reckon with the hoist and bear away being over 75% done before the tack is made to the pole.
Oh, and you can't shoot very much before the boat just stops and drifts so hold the pole until you are 100% sure. The guy can stay in the jaws anyway.
Drop, harden up: This can be done at the last second in light airs, with a windward drop being effected by a pro-like crew. Just watch out for this large, deep spinnie catching on anything as it comes into the cabin gangway bag, maybe just drop it to the deck in light.
In planing conditions your really want to come off the plane before you harden up otherwise the boat can just trip up over the bow wave it is riding, and wipe out. So that is to say you want to slow, and pick up both the bow wave and quarter wave along the hull before the mark. If DDW you can drop early to depower hugely and maybe even pole out the jib 'goosewinging' to maintain balance until you are very near the mark. In a big wave form you can drop early, centre the main and then use the wave a bit more on the beam than the quarter to esablis more hull in water and reduce speed. The boat will dance around a bit, but if you know how it responds to the rise and fall and on the peak of a wave then you can ride it out and even harden up late if the waves dictate this as a safer option than risking a broach or drive-down onto the mark itself- worse, boats ahead.
Gybing should be done under kite to maintain balance and in stronger winds the kite is made and flying on the new side, ddw, before the main is gybed.
Relative Character, Performance and Enjoyment
Compared to cruiser racers, you are likely to be mixing it on the water with 28 to 36 footers. You will go up wind at 6knts earlier than they do and achieve speed for hardeing up higher at a lower wind speed because the weoight, hull and keel allow for it!
Straight said, you will run rings around all the cruiser racers if you get clean off the line or a clean lane up wind and stay there off wind in light airs.
However once the wind is over about 9knts you need to be really slick in your racing abilities to keep up because these larger boats now start to "chonk" at 6.6knts and igh VMG. Despite the Platu, and the other Farr babies of this boom period, being a little faster than it's LWL calculation and faster again than the best VPPs tell you, a combination of bad wind and lower top speed means that you must rely on a great start in your own wind, good choice of side and tacks up wind, super slick manoevres, heavy crew out all the time, and keeping in clear wind. It is wise to either start late behind a big boy at the RHS, boat end, and tack out onto the nice clean RHS or go mid line and rely on a safe transit to come off in your own wind and play the chess moves you need to.
In a hot HC fleet of say IRC 0.930- .980 or even up to 1.000, (or in Lys with a 1.20 to 1.30 , worse 1.35,) then as with OOD, you need to be counting the boat legnths to build those seconds you need to win. And we won on Rebell often by only seconds on corrected. This means top speed on the start, super fast in and out of tacks, picking a duck over a tack, knowing the dogs to roll over and being shit hot at marks with tactics and rule know how.
Although you cannot afford to take flyers upwind you can achieve best clean wind and a good position on the tife or back eddies. Keeping the boat moving is easier, but it won't hold its way so well into those bloody awkward inshore or hole-bound windward marks like say a sigma 38 going 200m on it's owm momentum. Off wind, or with fetches developing on a big beat or distance course, you can take flyers although I find staying with the most wind, most tide and most clean air applies to the Beneteau platu 25 as much as any other boat.
Offwind now, in the light, the boat will run rings around everyone in the cruiser racers, either on distance courses or round the cans by having better acceleration, higher boat speed and better deep VMG, also doing faster gybes with a flying kite. It is worth keeping clear of bigger, slower boats at the bear away hoist because you stand the risk of running them down! Also, always nice, attach on a lift and gybe as the fatty heads up to "take you out" and you duck his stern and head off nearer the mark than his 1 minute escapade.
When the wind is up a bit, as mentioned you will struggle, espeically against IRC goodies like the X332 and corby's. Also off wind pre-planing on W-L courses the boat will not be any quicker in the 6.5-8 knts boat speed area and higher angles are just a kid on with an even wind, even tide and well set course.
However when the wind is up a bit you can now go low and fast up-hill, doing around 7 knts at about 44-46 degrees and actually tracking very well with little leeway and a good course through the wave train or chop if it is inshore a bit. Then Off wind if you can get around 7.8 knts BS, the boat can be worked onto the plane across chop or surfed on the bigger waves for longer. When I say worked, you can go high a little and follow a gust / wave combination onto the plane and bear away on a WL or jsut hang on in their on a reach. Now you will suddenly get 9knts on the clock and a feeling of rushing over the water as the boat losses it's LWL speed limit / speed bump. So in effect you will be mixing it with the very best IRC boats of 25 to 33 ft and actually any 40 footers who you happen to be around.
Compared to Other Sports Boats.
I have the fortune to have sailed the boats closest rivals and against the J80. The rivals being it's predecessor the First Class 8m, and as far as the UK goes, the ubiquitous and tremedous little hunter 707.
The 707 is a terrific little boat which obviously has been developed to be a stable planing platform and a strict one design from outset. The hull has large chined areas aft which are slow upwind and in light airs for LWL, whereas present a concrete like platform when doing double figures off wind! The hunter should need one less crew, but is often sailed with 5 anyway, I don't recall the crew kg limit.
Due to it's modest white sail area and short pole / frac' kite, and fortuity at the conception of SBR, the 707 can excel in SBR racing because it is often slowest boat while still being fast off wind. Also OD racing tends to bring out the best in any sailor so when moving from local fleet on solent or forth to BLSS or Cork Week SBR, the boat's very sturdy, unexciting up wind nature lends itself to secure position off the start and good tactics up wind, whislt more twitchy craft suffer from head in the box syndrome, concentrating on boat set up rather than position.
Given a local OD fleet with wednesday nights in OD too, then the 707, or most any other sports boat or mid twenties racer, beats owning a lonely beneteau 25.
As commented in the very first paragraph the predecessor is not necessarily it's lesser. The FC8m goes very well up wind with a full crew against the 33ft crowd and is a little less twitchy than the 25 off wind. It is capable of big susttained planing and also sleeps 4 of its' crew.
Now compared to the other boats on offer - the Melges, j80 and Cork 1720. Latter dealt with, you sail with six, it doesn't sleep anyone and it is a dog on HC. Also fleets are in a trend downwards in favour of IRC racing or the SB3 needing only two pals for a helm / owner to find. Also outside the british isles, forget it, no one has 1720s and they would need messing about with handicap applications and temporary indicitative perf' related HCs in year one. So the Cork has had it's day as a premier fleet, but will probably come back in numbers when the majority of used boats hit dinghy prices of under GBP 10,000.
The J80 is deceptive because on top it is all sports boat with a huge cockpit, a bowsrpit and a nice white rudder on the transom. However the hull shape is pretty muc run of the mill Johnsons with a lot of dead rise for an 8m boat. True it sleeps maybe 4, but all that sail area and extra LWL doesn't add up in IRC or SBR to beating the bene. On Lys here, it is a bit touch and go but the opposition we had we could beat them if we didn't make mistakes. We could go higher upwind and lower off wind for the same boat speed.
The Melges, or to be correct, the Melges 24, is a more powerful beast than the B25, although has many similarities in hull and white sails. But the big roach on the melges and the huge kite mean that it is a faster, twitchier boat which demands far more of crew and helm. As far as a usual learning curve and crew ability the melges is off the scale. Also it is far dearer a boat.
Decision to Buy a Beneteau 25 / platu 25
1) you want a higher performance day boat y/n ?
2 you want to sail with only two or three crew who are either your core from a bigger boat, or a team you can trust and develop, or a pool of dinghy or SBR sailors?
3) You are coming from medium performance keel boats or symm kite dinghies. If you are coming from HPS dinghies or fast big keel boats then the platu may be a bit slow for you.
4) you have a local fleet of B25s or alternatively, you have a mixed SBR start line at an event you like to do ( BLSS; Scottish, Cowes, Keil, Kings Week Oslo etc etc)and there are some bencmark bene 25 platus there.
5) You may have a couple of crew on a shoestring who want to sleep aboard or you may want to yourself from time to time.
6) Short handing should be an option and competitive at that.
7) you are interested in building up to compete in a big fleet in europe and trailer sailing of easy jetting to a fleet where you keep your boat for a season.
8) you want a reasonable entry cost and predictable running costs with a trailer to garden boat, whilst still enjoying performance and quality in boat and sails. You may be a couple of ex dingy sailors looking to share the boat in a two man syndicate, one being key helm or one doing x the other y.
9) last not least- you want a boat which presents enough challenge to demand a steep learning curve yet a start point on this curve which does not leave you frustrated or actually in danger !( think melges 24!) You want the taste of high performance farr one designs without the budget. You want a boat which is satisfying for the whole team.
If in the positive to the above, espeically if you have other Beneteau 25, platu 25s around your area or better yet, a fleet like in Holland, barcelona, Keil, Portugal o0r easy jet potential for these then hey presto, it beats many other SBRs and has also a good potential to suddenly take off in an area, like in Finnland. This is because the boats are a lot younger than some fleets, a builder be that Bene or not will be continued in Europe or at least delivered here.
OD fleets do indeed suddenly take off and explode because people agree on racing in OD over necessarily which boat that will be. Many OD club or regional or even national fleets are ageing- take all the older hunter boats, the albin boats, the banner 28s, the sigma variants, the FC 8ms, the J 24/27/29/30 and realise that most of the fleet are now soft, worn out and uncompetitive no matter if Dennis Connor and Russel Coutts step on board them. Also times change and the new generation are used to more exposure to speed and spills through all other areas of sport pushing out the boundaries- skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking, kite boarding, paragliding and all the motorbikes and performance cars you can shake a stick at. Not the least that assymetrics have revolutionised dinghy sailing and pushed boats like the 505 to adopt bigger sail plans! THis is a key feeding area and plane at all pints down to crawl around in an old day boat fleet is not appealing to the newly affluent 40 somethings retiring from dinghies and looking to step on board at the marina or boost their egos by having a little on water militia to command. Put simply they want something faster than a soling or a star, a sonata and with less hassle, crew and costs than the likes of an aged sigma 33.
As built by Beneteau as their Beneteau 25.
Establishment in the EU countries and USA as the Beneteau 25 Platu
Beneteau had previously produced the first widely spread production (SMOD- single manufacturere One Design) sports boat in the EU- the First Class 8m. Actually av highly entertaining boat to sail on which has previously attracted a high level of sailors in arranged series, and indeed was part of the french national training programme for yacht racing.
However while at a Messe in Germany, I believe, Mssr Beneteau business development came upon the thai- new zealand conceived Farr designed , McDell Built, Platu 25. Platu being a fast mackrell of the tropical west pacific, and the boat developed as a budget OOD for the kings cup in Phuket amongst other racing in Thailand. By customer request farr design number #316 was born for that market, and for some reason or other brought to europe. At time of writing still produced here by Beneteau but known as the Platu 25 now
The reasons to drop off production of the FC 8m and go for the smaller (.... and slower! ), Platu are unknown to me, so leave a comment if my presumption is wrong. I presume they wanted a smaller 7m boat which took less crew and was maybe cheaper to build and easier to market being a Farr hull. The aim was probably to compete in the EU sports boat market and establish a strong OD class, probably to complement and feed into their at that time, Mumm 30 production and Figaro.
Outside the writer's native British Isles, on continental Europe they have largely achieved a good number of boats particulariuly in germany, holland, Italy and the Iberian states.
In the UK the market was somewhat cluttered with new fangled sports boats from major marks, smaller yards and pure one offs and home build ply core like the "swordfish". However both the 707 and the cork 1720 were being actively developed as OOD fleets, to the regrettable loss of international OD potential for british sailors. Both of these large fleets have their stregnths and weaknesses. The achilles heel for the cork being crew number, and for both these boats the costs of Marinas in the UK, coupled to less leisure time and higher house prices, has lead to the explosion of the trailer-sailor SB3 from Laser (Castro desinged mini Cork 1720).
In scandinavia the platu faltered in the attempts by dealers and maker to introduce the boat back in the 90s. This may have been in large due to badly presented examples being loaned to an international match racing event on Oslo Fjord. The boat got a bad reputation for deck gear failure with a lot of top Scandinavian sailors at this event, and the more expensive and demanding Melges took a place with some enthusiastic supportes. However in Finland there is now an emerging fleet of the Platu and also several examples in the other countries being bought and transported there. The writer expects this to spread into sweden, some owners being ethnic or expat Swedes, and perhaps more examples in denmark due to the profile for the worlds 2007 in Nuestadt, Germany.
That the Platu still retains a poised potential in establishing local fleets or competitive HC racing, is clear in many countries with most of the big OD fleets actually being built in the 70s and 8os, becoming worn out and hence obsolete as one designs. ( reparation or new build costs becoming restrictive for most owners, and hence the whole thing reverts to that evil predominatn in handicap, cheque book racing! Take the Sonata and Goacher, or the Albin express and the top helms there as examples). More on this in the latter sections below, but suffice to say a ready to rig exc 6hp and sails of 22,000 € plus delivery is pretty darn good at time of writing.
Design and Construction
It is basically a scale model hull of various Farr designs of the early 90s- the mumm 30, the corel 45, the Farr 40 and the Whitbread 60 OD. Indeed the brochure from beneteau refers to the keel as "Whitbread 60 design" However exotic materials are spared from most of the production and the cost of even lead in the bulb is removed by casting is steel! There is a hidden and important bit of carbon fibre construction - around the rudder bearing assembly which no doubt contributes to tight steering and safety. Mast and boom are in aluminium and deck gear is limited to two winches, cleats and jammers.
The hull is very similar is proportions to the mumm 30 and the predecessing IMS 31 and Mumm 36. In fact you can lay drawings on top of each other as tifs or gifs and see that there are only minor alterations, the Mumm 30 have the larger sail area however.
The bow is a fine entry with a rake and flare, which is both aesthically very pleasing and also allows for a good deal of reserve bouyancy in the diamond area well above the water line. Criticisms of this bow are that it just removes water line legnth, but for general sailing in all types of waves in a 25fter, and safety of crew on the foredeck it is a good design measure to not have a narrow section 'plumb bow'.
Following the hull "abaft" the beam water line is hidden from the crews' view, by the wide and flared deck/top sides. In fact the beam on water is very narrow until the last part of the reserve bouyancy, the deck sides, do their job! The narrow pear, or fish like profile is only really apparent from aerial photos, but the stern/transom is notably quite narrow.
A nice illustration of how the flare looks in motion is on youtube -Beneteau 25 ( Platu 25 ) sailing on Lake Windermere He is sailing with a little bit too much heel BTW; Hike biaaatches!
There is little 'dead rise' although the rocker (dead rise aft of keel to transom) is nicely rounded while retaining good planing characterisitics. Performance up wind is notably relatively super fast for a 6 m water line becuase the exit for the quarter wave is very smooth and the whole wetted area of beam on water quite narrow.
The top sides are not much lower than a mumm 30 and the water line flares rather beautifully up to the deck level, which are turned for crew comfort ( if not safety!- there is little to get a foot to and the life lines are quite low).
The cockpit is nicely laid out and large for the LOA of the boat. The trimming position is a bit cramped but a foot can be stuck on the lee stanchion nicely to give a bit more of a pro job if not cross winching to be truly pro'!
One thing of note is that the outboard actually operates in a starboard side well and locker set up with a plug for the hole in the hull which must be secured! Most racers hike the outboard down below aroudn the keel in light winds or under the steps frame in more breeze.
Below topsides, the cabin is spartan but spacey, you can sit in more comfort than a 707 and stand in the gangway for a relaxing view of events. Not many people know that the Platu 25 has two full legnt berths in light foam which are fine for sleeping on. I reckon you could do a quarter berth and odd cross berth set up with some chocks in balsa or the like and sleep at least four cadavres down there!
The battery can be place around the mast. A motorbike battery is a good idea, with a solar panel on a long lead to be left up topsides after racing.
Deck Gear
Many of the lines and deck gear looks a bit under specified, but it all seems to work admirably if the new owner takes some time to swap out the weak points of the kicker, jammers etc.
The traveller, main sheet block, winches and purchases on the outhaul etc are just fine for all weathers I have sailed in. The only 'pain in the butt' feature is the main halyard being lead down to the hogg, which procludes round the can slackening of the main halyard. The cunningam on my boat was underpowered in compensating for this, so was beefed up, in order to achieve an upwind luff tension with an off wind slacken out ability, but it is a compromise and I wish the main haly. went to deck level.
A really nice touch which adds interest and involvement for the experienced crew, is the inclusion of both a jib cunningham (downhaul) and jib barber haulers. This makes fine depowering and the reverse possible from the rail, given the owner has been savez enough to cross-lead the barbers.
The traveller/ block is fore of the helm and this allows the helm to do a lot of the trimming for short handed racing or to get the maintrimmer over the rail or aft of him. The main is nicely geared and can be 'foot and thigh' cleated ie friction on your own body.
Boat Set Up
The rig absolutely requires attention before sailing if conditions are varied more than say 5 knots between days or actual races. The forestay has a pin and hole system which is complemented by the Cap Shroud tension and the rear stay tension. In light fluctuating winds, a slack setting is chosen for both of these with the rear stay being used to tighten the foretay and rig. The D1s are adjusted accordingly to induce the right bend and lateral support whereas the d2s are of course less practical to adjust between races and should be set on a loos gauge to the manufacturers / sail makers llbs or kg setting which suit your seasonal conditions i.e. stiffer for more wind. Both the caps and the forestay are tightened for higher winds with d1s being taken in to mainly take lateral bend out or excessive prebend.
So as a guide, for light winds up to 6 knots you want a slack setting so as to power along in any gusts and with your own apparent wind. Flat sails are slow whatever so we don't care with a hard, flat rig for light winds because tide or thermals can be more decisive. For more wind take on another hole or two on the forestay, some turns on both caps and D1s, and be more aggressive with the use of back stay and jib cunnigham. You can have a kind of compromise setting with a slightly slacker forestay in say 7-12 knts, which will cover you in 1knt - 10 knts breeze, but remember you will feel up to 17 knots apparent wind "over the decks ". For higher winds, everything is bang hard on and if your spring and autumn series are in bigger winds, adjust the upper D2s accordingly.
Sail Control and erm, Sailing !
Upwind, the boat sails with a very narrow slot, jib being a 105% on the foot. The jib will be trimmed like a dinghy, and not like a cruiser-racer with a fixed track and a genoa dictating far more 'outward' sheeting angles for the foresail. The upwind balance of the boat is critical with the sail set between the two sails and the slot / twist must be maintained in good balance to keep flow attached over the exhaust lee- slipstream of the jib-main feed- otherwise the boat will power up and depower too much producing jerky progress. To explain further, the very short cord keel and small water line/beam area mean the boat requires more attention to the sheeting of main and jib in harmony than say a 33ft keel boat of older design.
So this is all to say that the Platu 25 sails more like a dinghy, requiring 'dynamic stability' i.e. you use the right amount of power and balance for the wind conditions. The two controls for this are twist of both sails and size of slot, both being increased as the wind does up wind. These are luckily enough, fine tunable under way with crew hiked out by using the mainsheet/traveller and the jib cunningham for twist and the barber haulers for slot adjustment, making for a very enjoyable upwind sail for the two or three crew out on the rail. The boat will actually show the very rare 'lee helm' with an under sheeted jib upwind, and an uneasy weather helm for the same mistake on the main ( or slot being too tight for conditions, powering up the main too much)
In light winds the boat should have 'keel speed' before it is pointed ie. about 2.2knts boat speed I believe. The quarter wave should remain attached and like a tasar, through winds and boat speed of 0.5 to 7 knts a quarter wake disappearing well aft means you can point higher.
In medium winds of 7 to 12 knts, the main trimmer can hike out as well and come in for rough sets or mark roundings. The boat should be crossed winch in addition to this which adds greatly, see performance sailing under.
In stronger winds the trimmer returns to position and trims hard with the main well twisted and flattened on all controls bar the outhaul, which should leave some depth in the lower quarter of the sail to help the boat power through waves. The boat is sailed low and fast at 44 to 50 degrees and not feathered- the correct size of jib and twist should be maintained. Speeds upwind of 9knts with reasonable VMG are acheivable which means if one side is favoured then you get there PDF!
It is said that reefing is not good for the main, so on big wind days, it is a choice of the owner to sail and this is only actually over about 26knts. At above 22knts true, there is a tendency to broach on the windward mark bear away or out of poor gibes and is difficult to control on a reach.
Ssiling seems to be sweetest with little if any weather helm and with the bow trimmed down slightly. About 3 or 4 inches of bow should be cutting the waves at most sheltered waters. Like a mumm 36, weight is trimmed progressively back over up hill and off wind as the wind and waves grow in stregnth, and you can actually stick the main trimmer or one crew aft of the helmsman on very "lumpy" upwind or medium fast off wind reaches. This is one very rewarding aspect of crewing the boat- you really feel your actual body mass makes a difference !!
Off wind the boat excels, and as mentioned above, weight needs to be trimmed aft with up to three crew members behind the helm. The boat can be popped on to the plane by sheeting in on a gust and 100kg plus of crew weight running back to the stern area! Contrary to comment on the web about the boat being a WindWard LeeWard only machine, it is fairly easy to reach, given you are a dinghy sailor, and will carry a well controlled kite hard onto the forestay. Indeed it will plane at this point of sail and higher on 'white sails'. In fact the boat will sail relatively controlled on white sails but the initial bear away can produce problems for broaching
Manoevres
Getting the boat moving is not an issue, but actually slowing down can be! Backing sails works well to both reverse the boat out of a situation or to go into emergency hove to, which can dammage the jib though it has to be noted.
The boat will power up and get to target speed quickly, given that the crew hike out according to the conditions asap! Cross winching is advised as soon as conditions require the three fore crew out which makes starts, hardeing up and coming out of tacks much quicker and actually less stressful. The cost of working out how to cross winch and who does what and when is worth the weight being on the right side!
As mentioned the main trimmer sits in until about 7 to 9knts breeze when fully crewed and then hops over allowing the helm to fine trim or dump ( which will be needed less often due to the now hiking gorrilla!)
As mentioned, the bear away hoist is all imporant in winds over 9knts and many places can be lost in an OD fleet. Set-Gybes are possibe and this is one reason I may find out if bow launches are do-able and street legal. The boat has a tendency to broach and it may be best to dump off the flow from the main and fling the boat into a DDW positiion if there are problems or you are not very experienced. Otherwise the jib should be trimmed through the bear away and the main released on the sheet only with the car up at least a quarter of the way. The helm can effect a moderat winds main sheet slip out.
The spinnaker is a bit of a pain to 'gangway' launch ie a bag suspended above the cabin. The kite can be trapped at the head of the foresail, on the life lines, the stanchions or the spreaders. A wire and roller between the D1s and the mast can be fitted to guide the kite out into the best height, although I would be tempted in future to opt for bow luaunching or side launching or even chuck luancing. Before the weather mark, the clew and head should be lead outside the jib at the jibs clew area where there is a little bit of space, especially if the barber haulers are on.
The trick seems to be, as in any slick operation, to get the head of the kite out while approaching the weather mark, but hold it's height so as it is low of the spreaders otherwise it will be aft of the spreader and catch under hoisting. Not far enough up and outboard, and it can easily follow up the slot and catch on the jib battens or the top of the triangle.
Sneaking the guy is really a personal choice, but for going onto a reach in lightish winds it is a must for performance. It is really easy to snag the tack and foot of the kite on the jib-lifeline area so as said, the kite should be quite far out from the boat and I reckon with the hoist and bear away being over 75% done before the tack is made to the pole.
Oh, and you can't shoot very much before the boat just stops and drifts so hold the pole until you are 100% sure. The guy can stay in the jaws anyway.
Drop, harden up: This can be done at the last second in light airs, with a windward drop being effected by a pro-like crew. Just watch out for this large, deep spinnie catching on anything as it comes into the cabin gangway bag, maybe just drop it to the deck in light.
In planing conditions your really want to come off the plane before you harden up otherwise the boat can just trip up over the bow wave it is riding, and wipe out. So that is to say you want to slow, and pick up both the bow wave and quarter wave along the hull before the mark. If DDW you can drop early to depower hugely and maybe even pole out the jib 'goosewinging' to maintain balance until you are very near the mark. In a big wave form you can drop early, centre the main and then use the wave a bit more on the beam than the quarter to esablis more hull in water and reduce speed. The boat will dance around a bit, but if you know how it responds to the rise and fall and on the peak of a wave then you can ride it out and even harden up late if the waves dictate this as a safer option than risking a broach or drive-down onto the mark itself- worse, boats ahead.
Gybing should be done under kite to maintain balance and in stronger winds the kite is made and flying on the new side, ddw, before the main is gybed.
Relative Character, Performance and Enjoyment
Compared to cruiser racers, you are likely to be mixing it on the water with 28 to 36 footers. You will go up wind at 6knts earlier than they do and achieve speed for hardeing up higher at a lower wind speed because the weoight, hull and keel allow for it!
Straight said, you will run rings around all the cruiser racers if you get clean off the line or a clean lane up wind and stay there off wind in light airs.
However once the wind is over about 9knts you need to be really slick in your racing abilities to keep up because these larger boats now start to "chonk" at 6.6knts and igh VMG. Despite the Platu, and the other Farr babies of this boom period, being a little faster than it's LWL calculation and faster again than the best VPPs tell you, a combination of bad wind and lower top speed means that you must rely on a great start in your own wind, good choice of side and tacks up wind, super slick manoevres, heavy crew out all the time, and keeping in clear wind. It is wise to either start late behind a big boy at the RHS, boat end, and tack out onto the nice clean RHS or go mid line and rely on a safe transit to come off in your own wind and play the chess moves you need to.
In a hot HC fleet of say IRC 0.930- .980 or even up to 1.000, (or in Lys with a 1.20 to 1.30 , worse 1.35,) then as with OOD, you need to be counting the boat legnths to build those seconds you need to win. And we won on Rebell often by only seconds on corrected. This means top speed on the start, super fast in and out of tacks, picking a duck over a tack, knowing the dogs to roll over and being shit hot at marks with tactics and rule know how.
Although you cannot afford to take flyers upwind you can achieve best clean wind and a good position on the tife or back eddies. Keeping the boat moving is easier, but it won't hold its way so well into those bloody awkward inshore or hole-bound windward marks like say a sigma 38 going 200m on it's owm momentum. Off wind, or with fetches developing on a big beat or distance course, you can take flyers although I find staying with the most wind, most tide and most clean air applies to the Beneteau platu 25 as much as any other boat.
Offwind now, in the light, the boat will run rings around everyone in the cruiser racers, either on distance courses or round the cans by having better acceleration, higher boat speed and better deep VMG, also doing faster gybes with a flying kite. It is worth keeping clear of bigger, slower boats at the bear away hoist because you stand the risk of running them down! Also, always nice, attach on a lift and gybe as the fatty heads up to "take you out" and you duck his stern and head off nearer the mark than his 1 minute escapade.
When the wind is up a bit, as mentioned you will struggle, espeically against IRC goodies like the X332 and corby's. Also off wind pre-planing on W-L courses the boat will not be any quicker in the 6.5-8 knts boat speed area and higher angles are just a kid on with an even wind, even tide and well set course.
However when the wind is up a bit you can now go low and fast up-hill, doing around 7 knts at about 44-46 degrees and actually tracking very well with little leeway and a good course through the wave train or chop if it is inshore a bit. Then Off wind if you can get around 7.8 knts BS, the boat can be worked onto the plane across chop or surfed on the bigger waves for longer. When I say worked, you can go high a little and follow a gust / wave combination onto the plane and bear away on a WL or jsut hang on in their on a reach. Now you will suddenly get 9knts on the clock and a feeling of rushing over the water as the boat losses it's LWL speed limit / speed bump. So in effect you will be mixing it with the very best IRC boats of 25 to 33 ft and actually any 40 footers who you happen to be around.
Compared to Other Sports Boats.
I have the fortune to have sailed the boats closest rivals and against the J80. The rivals being it's predecessor the First Class 8m, and as far as the UK goes, the ubiquitous and tremedous little hunter 707.
The 707 is a terrific little boat which obviously has been developed to be a stable planing platform and a strict one design from outset. The hull has large chined areas aft which are slow upwind and in light airs for LWL, whereas present a concrete like platform when doing double figures off wind! The hunter should need one less crew, but is often sailed with 5 anyway, I don't recall the crew kg limit.
Due to it's modest white sail area and short pole / frac' kite, and fortuity at the conception of SBR, the 707 can excel in SBR racing because it is often slowest boat while still being fast off wind. Also OD racing tends to bring out the best in any sailor so when moving from local fleet on solent or forth to BLSS or Cork Week SBR, the boat's very sturdy, unexciting up wind nature lends itself to secure position off the start and good tactics up wind, whislt more twitchy craft suffer from head in the box syndrome, concentrating on boat set up rather than position.
Given a local OD fleet with wednesday nights in OD too, then the 707, or most any other sports boat or mid twenties racer, beats owning a lonely beneteau 25.
As commented in the very first paragraph the predecessor is not necessarily it's lesser. The FC8m goes very well up wind with a full crew against the 33ft crowd and is a little less twitchy than the 25 off wind. It is capable of big susttained planing and also sleeps 4 of its' crew.
Now compared to the other boats on offer - the Melges, j80 and Cork 1720. Latter dealt with, you sail with six, it doesn't sleep anyone and it is a dog on HC. Also fleets are in a trend downwards in favour of IRC racing or the SB3 needing only two pals for a helm / owner to find. Also outside the british isles, forget it, no one has 1720s and they would need messing about with handicap applications and temporary indicitative perf' related HCs in year one. So the Cork has had it's day as a premier fleet, but will probably come back in numbers when the majority of used boats hit dinghy prices of under GBP 10,000.
The J80 is deceptive because on top it is all sports boat with a huge cockpit, a bowsrpit and a nice white rudder on the transom. However the hull shape is pretty muc run of the mill Johnsons with a lot of dead rise for an 8m boat. True it sleeps maybe 4, but all that sail area and extra LWL doesn't add up in IRC or SBR to beating the bene. On Lys here, it is a bit touch and go but the opposition we had we could beat them if we didn't make mistakes. We could go higher upwind and lower off wind for the same boat speed.
The Melges, or to be correct, the Melges 24, is a more powerful beast than the B25, although has many similarities in hull and white sails. But the big roach on the melges and the huge kite mean that it is a faster, twitchier boat which demands far more of crew and helm. As far as a usual learning curve and crew ability the melges is off the scale. Also it is far dearer a boat.
Decision to Buy a Beneteau 25 / platu 25
1) you want a higher performance day boat y/n ?
2 you want to sail with only two or three crew who are either your core from a bigger boat, or a team you can trust and develop, or a pool of dinghy or SBR sailors?
3) You are coming from medium performance keel boats or symm kite dinghies. If you are coming from HPS dinghies or fast big keel boats then the platu may be a bit slow for you.
4) you have a local fleet of B25s or alternatively, you have a mixed SBR start line at an event you like to do ( BLSS; Scottish, Cowes, Keil, Kings Week Oslo etc etc)and there are some bencmark bene 25 platus there.
5) You may have a couple of crew on a shoestring who want to sleep aboard or you may want to yourself from time to time.
6) Short handing should be an option and competitive at that.
7) you are interested in building up to compete in a big fleet in europe and trailer sailing of easy jetting to a fleet where you keep your boat for a season.
8) you want a reasonable entry cost and predictable running costs with a trailer to garden boat, whilst still enjoying performance and quality in boat and sails. You may be a couple of ex dingy sailors looking to share the boat in a two man syndicate, one being key helm or one doing x the other y.
9) last not least- you want a boat which presents enough challenge to demand a steep learning curve yet a start point on this curve which does not leave you frustrated or actually in danger !( think melges 24!) You want the taste of high performance farr one designs without the budget. You want a boat which is satisfying for the whole team.
If in the positive to the above, espeically if you have other Beneteau 25, platu 25s around your area or better yet, a fleet like in Holland, barcelona, Keil, Portugal o0r easy jet potential for these then hey presto, it beats many other SBRs and has also a good potential to suddenly take off in an area, like in Finnland. This is because the boats are a lot younger than some fleets, a builder be that Bene or not will be continued in Europe or at least delivered here.
OD fleets do indeed suddenly take off and explode because people agree on racing in OD over necessarily which boat that will be. Many OD club or regional or even national fleets are ageing- take all the older hunter boats, the albin boats, the banner 28s, the sigma variants, the FC 8ms, the J 24/27/29/30 and realise that most of the fleet are now soft, worn out and uncompetitive no matter if Dennis Connor and Russel Coutts step on board them. Also times change and the new generation are used to more exposure to speed and spills through all other areas of sport pushing out the boundaries- skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking, kite boarding, paragliding and all the motorbikes and performance cars you can shake a stick at. Not the least that assymetrics have revolutionised dinghy sailing and pushed boats like the 505 to adopt bigger sail plans! THis is a key feeding area and plane at all pints down to crawl around in an old day boat fleet is not appealing to the newly affluent 40 somethings retiring from dinghies and looking to step on board at the marina or boost their egos by having a little on water militia to command. Put simply they want something faster than a soling or a star, a sonata and with less hassle, crew and costs than the likes of an aged sigma 33.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
It is only a minority of positions which are advertised, in fact 60% are not and this is even higher in some business sectors or for certain particular levels in management. Hard to believe isn't it?
Conversely the average strathclyde marketing graduate probably uses about 90% of their energy on advertised positions.
Further to this, if you subtract the public sector positions in marketing, at say assistant level, then you have even fewer. You bet your ass that most of these jobs in the big cities are filled with either the sitting temp or by nepotistic means. I would guess that 70% of entry level marketing jobs are 'secret'.
About a third of positions are filled through recruitment agencies
per se, but this is much lower in terms of entry level jobs and probably they are less advertised by them. As said before, you as the new graduate probably have little or no appeal to a greedy consultant looking to get their 10% on a fatter 30K plus candidate placing. However it is worth using the Michael pages and even some of the better temp agencies like Adecco, as a source of a potential foot in the door, with or without them actually placing you.
Often they will be a barometer of new recruting in a company or whole industry ( remember, coushy jobs like in whisky marketing tend to be in 'dead mens shoes' - you are awaiting a raft of retirals from middle managers who moved into marketing in the 70s and 80s) or the smoke signal that a new department is opening in your chosen field or geographical area. They are of course by this time quite well known to some of the customer managers and the managers they have recently placed and can offer you at a cheap fee, on trial, or just as a favour. So they are a source rather than a means to an end.
It is well worth worming your way into a friendly consultant. I recommend writing to them and then door stepping them! This shows your motivation is really high and often they have a little procedure for doorsteppers which is very positive. You may be asked to come back later but it is a lot pyschologically harder to turn you down. Once you are in a temp job, a first marketing job or a project "you are working in" then they become a little more interested. But only a little and positive attitude and determination counts for more. If they ask you to send your CV in then use that as the excuse to visit them - "can i drop in present it in five minute meeting and come back with any more details you might think relevant?" . Never use e-mail as a first introduction method. If they ask you to register on their web site, print out the on line CV and doorstep them anyway with it in hand.
The non marketing consultants will fight you off with poison tipped umbrellas but the marketing specialist should at least see you after some of the tactics above. Also you have a chance to show your USP and this may be relevant to all sorts of recruitment consultants in terms of their clients.
Finding clients can be the reverse of what you think- often it is best to find a company you want to work for and establish if they use a recruitment firm. Then go both through the firm and the make contact with people at the firm.
At Least a Third of Jobs are Filled Through a Network
This statistic is possibly higher for some grades of marketing jobs in SMEs and fast growing companies. These are both formal networks, and informal. An example of the former would be say the arts marketers association, where the latter would be say a five a side team ladder!
Networking as an exercise has never worked to well for me because I was too upfront and focused on selling myself to the direct person. THis is not how it works as I found out. It is much more subtle. It is actually about just mentioning what you want to work in to all and sundry, or even before that finding out what your cousins boyfriend and his mates do or what your neighbours grown up daughter does for a living and at which company. Network appointments give a little bedrock to recruting a stranger. It is a shoe-horn method where the contact go between is the horn which eases you in. This is especially important in Norway where I live and has got me jobs even by just a vague name drop early in a networking phone call.
Plain old nepotism, old school tie, pals and people who fancy you are all immediate sources in marketing.
Enough on that, suffice to say it is the go-between contact who must know you or be trusted by the potential employer who gets you in there and not much to do with you.
A Surprisingly Large Amount of Jobs are By Open Application
Over half of the non advertised fulfillments remaining, if you like, are by direct contact, including companies own web sites BUT not the on line CV databases which as yet are probably too general and spam filled to elicit general useage.
In the last couple of years the work market in much of the western world has become so tight in some sectors that employers have taken far more proactive methods. Theses include more outward networking but also more non position specific marketing and PR. These lead to direct contact most often.
Like all effective direct marketing of complex products or services, open applications need to be treated with some degree of quality over quanitity- you need to build a good contact list and have a good message, and also follow the 'mailing' up or preceed it with a courtesay call.
On outset you want to establish who you could send your CV to and what they might want to hear. A personnel manager may need more customer service agents or sales people, so talking of your general skills in temping and your interest in the company may get you in the door where after you can establish a route into marketing immediately or thorugh a temp job in another department. Whereas a marketing manager may be looking for extra leg work and may get you a couple of weeks free from the dole or whatever, or they may need someone with your specialist first degree or career experience. You have only really hard work, enthusiasm and knowledge so far to offer, not the industry experience which will make you a good decision maker, project leader and people-manager.
It's a wise move to make up a mini cv which is a sales statement about you with bare details. This will have contact details and i recommend a photo, and a summary to be written in prose about what you are as a person, what you can do and what you are motivated to take on in your next job. No details on your actual experienc or lack there of. I had a terrific response to interview from about 40 e-mails I sent out and just about every single one replied at least with a polite "no thanks", pnly one being an asshole. I got about four interviews, but I had completely oversold myself in my little paragraph! If I had toned down the message or been a little more vague then maybe I would have had even more interviews and a successful blind date.
Advertising as Smoke Signals
So now you can see that advertised positions should only take up about one third of your effort. For public sector marketing jobs at the entry level, do apply by all means, but expect to even get to 'final' interview only to have your hopes dashed by Mary McFinbar the cooncil directors niece getting the job she was promised a year ago.
I'd say spend only about 10% of your time on the actual effective method of successful networking. Shoe horning in on reputation of a go between depends very much on how many good links you have. My seemed terrible at first hand, but it is often the second link in the chain, that cousins boyfriend or neighbours son, who have the foot in the door for you.
You should spend a great deal of your time on quality direct marketing or telemarketing yourself. This would also include the few relevant recruitment agencies you find. You want to be ahead of the qeue when someone decided to appoint a marketing dogs body, sorry, executive or APM.
Preparing a campaign means appreciating you are going to hit the individuals several times and you are going to make many of these contact points in target companies. So researching a list from the web, talking to contacts you find and snowballing out your list is the key. You will also get some good contacts out of the blue on the web these days, aiming at marketing director levels or manager and the odd personnel manager or CEO even.
It is worth doing both quality in terms of totally 'wrap round, follow up, tight targeted' hits and also some quantity from a list of contacts. use the Mail merge fuinction carefully with maybe a line in your excel source for the different companies products or business areas etc which slips in nicely to your mail merge paragraph two. Quanitity in e-mails or letters are quick to execute but spend time on formulating them and cleanign your list and data source so as to personalise each letter autmatically without gramatic mistakes or obvious blah-blah spam terms.
Following up means following up each and every one of your key targets in the telephone. It may just create a snowball to the next person or a polite no thank you. But you will be surprised that some of these will bear fruit and some of the actual contacts will want to interview you.
The key thereafter is getting to the bottom of what they need in terms of entry level marketers or how else you may need to worm your way in. A full Cv at this stage is as I have blogged earlier, the kiss of death. You want to uncover what they are up to now, which positions are at the entry level and how they fill these. Get people talking on more along the lines of what they do at the company and how the department is structured, then quickly go in after their entry level area. People move in and out of this banding very quickly so they may establish in fact a need they didn't know about- to have someone replace jean with the nice tits asap when she gets promoted to group product manager by the MD.
So after som digging about you will probably send a short half page, elevator pitch resume rather than a CV and only send a CV upon getting in on their needs. Out of say 50 such initial, well groomed and followed up open applications you will get about 5 interviews believe me.
Also some of the out of the blue replies asking you to interview from the other trawls will come through with or without a follow up CV.
Be wary. Don't go to an interview without a good idea of what job they want to see you about. Often they will have some crap or a sales job with no "in" to marketing but just call you in anyway. I spent 14 hours on trains to be told I was being interviewed for a bloody sales job post Marketing MSc! Any far flung interviews, which are dubious or don't pay travel by all means agree on the interview and then qaulify what the job actually is. If it is a bit of a 'well maybe as a stepping stone' then do the initial interview on the phone, and keep it short. If it is quite a tasty job in Truro, but you can't afford the 150 quid and they aren't paying, come up with some excuse the night before and change to a telepone interview.
Out of about ten interviews, procured from which ever source, and screened to be bone fide jobs for your career move, you will get one job offer which you should always take "in principle" while then trying hard to push others to interview you again or drop you.
Good luck!
Conversely the average strathclyde marketing graduate probably uses about 90% of their energy on advertised positions.
Further to this, if you subtract the public sector positions in marketing, at say assistant level, then you have even fewer. You bet your ass that most of these jobs in the big cities are filled with either the sitting temp or by nepotistic means. I would guess that 70% of entry level marketing jobs are 'secret'.
About a third of positions are filled through recruitment agencies
per se, but this is much lower in terms of entry level jobs and probably they are less advertised by them. As said before, you as the new graduate probably have little or no appeal to a greedy consultant looking to get their 10% on a fatter 30K plus candidate placing. However it is worth using the Michael pages and even some of the better temp agencies like Adecco, as a source of a potential foot in the door, with or without them actually placing you.
Often they will be a barometer of new recruting in a company or whole industry ( remember, coushy jobs like in whisky marketing tend to be in 'dead mens shoes' - you are awaiting a raft of retirals from middle managers who moved into marketing in the 70s and 80s) or the smoke signal that a new department is opening in your chosen field or geographical area. They are of course by this time quite well known to some of the customer managers and the managers they have recently placed and can offer you at a cheap fee, on trial, or just as a favour. So they are a source rather than a means to an end.
It is well worth worming your way into a friendly consultant. I recommend writing to them and then door stepping them! This shows your motivation is really high and often they have a little procedure for doorsteppers which is very positive. You may be asked to come back later but it is a lot pyschologically harder to turn you down. Once you are in a temp job, a first marketing job or a project "you are working in" then they become a little more interested. But only a little and positive attitude and determination counts for more. If they ask you to send your CV in then use that as the excuse to visit them - "can i drop in present it in five minute meeting and come back with any more details you might think relevant?" . Never use e-mail as a first introduction method. If they ask you to register on their web site, print out the on line CV and doorstep them anyway with it in hand.
The non marketing consultants will fight you off with poison tipped umbrellas but the marketing specialist should at least see you after some of the tactics above. Also you have a chance to show your USP and this may be relevant to all sorts of recruitment consultants in terms of their clients.
Finding clients can be the reverse of what you think- often it is best to find a company you want to work for and establish if they use a recruitment firm. Then go both through the firm and the make contact with people at the firm.
At Least a Third of Jobs are Filled Through a Network
This statistic is possibly higher for some grades of marketing jobs in SMEs and fast growing companies. These are both formal networks, and informal. An example of the former would be say the arts marketers association, where the latter would be say a five a side team ladder!
Networking as an exercise has never worked to well for me because I was too upfront and focused on selling myself to the direct person. THis is not how it works as I found out. It is much more subtle. It is actually about just mentioning what you want to work in to all and sundry, or even before that finding out what your cousins boyfriend and his mates do or what your neighbours grown up daughter does for a living and at which company. Network appointments give a little bedrock to recruting a stranger. It is a shoe-horn method where the contact go between is the horn which eases you in. This is especially important in Norway where I live and has got me jobs even by just a vague name drop early in a networking phone call.
Plain old nepotism, old school tie, pals and people who fancy you are all immediate sources in marketing.
Enough on that, suffice to say it is the go-between contact who must know you or be trusted by the potential employer who gets you in there and not much to do with you.
A Surprisingly Large Amount of Jobs are By Open Application
Over half of the non advertised fulfillments remaining, if you like, are by direct contact, including companies own web sites BUT not the on line CV databases which as yet are probably too general and spam filled to elicit general useage.
In the last couple of years the work market in much of the western world has become so tight in some sectors that employers have taken far more proactive methods. Theses include more outward networking but also more non position specific marketing and PR. These lead to direct contact most often.
Like all effective direct marketing of complex products or services, open applications need to be treated with some degree of quality over quanitity- you need to build a good contact list and have a good message, and also follow the 'mailing' up or preceed it with a courtesay call.
On outset you want to establish who you could send your CV to and what they might want to hear. A personnel manager may need more customer service agents or sales people, so talking of your general skills in temping and your interest in the company may get you in the door where after you can establish a route into marketing immediately or thorugh a temp job in another department. Whereas a marketing manager may be looking for extra leg work and may get you a couple of weeks free from the dole or whatever, or they may need someone with your specialist first degree or career experience. You have only really hard work, enthusiasm and knowledge so far to offer, not the industry experience which will make you a good decision maker, project leader and people-manager.
It's a wise move to make up a mini cv which is a sales statement about you with bare details. This will have contact details and i recommend a photo, and a summary to be written in prose about what you are as a person, what you can do and what you are motivated to take on in your next job. No details on your actual experienc or lack there of. I had a terrific response to interview from about 40 e-mails I sent out and just about every single one replied at least with a polite "no thanks", pnly one being an asshole. I got about four interviews, but I had completely oversold myself in my little paragraph! If I had toned down the message or been a little more vague then maybe I would have had even more interviews and a successful blind date.
Advertising as Smoke Signals
So now you can see that advertised positions should only take up about one third of your effort. For public sector marketing jobs at the entry level, do apply by all means, but expect to even get to 'final' interview only to have your hopes dashed by Mary McFinbar the cooncil directors niece getting the job she was promised a year ago.
I'd say spend only about 10% of your time on the actual effective method of successful networking. Shoe horning in on reputation of a go between depends very much on how many good links you have. My seemed terrible at first hand, but it is often the second link in the chain, that cousins boyfriend or neighbours son, who have the foot in the door for you.
You should spend a great deal of your time on quality direct marketing or telemarketing yourself. This would also include the few relevant recruitment agencies you find. You want to be ahead of the qeue when someone decided to appoint a marketing dogs body, sorry, executive or APM.
Preparing a campaign means appreciating you are going to hit the individuals several times and you are going to make many of these contact points in target companies. So researching a list from the web, talking to contacts you find and snowballing out your list is the key. You will also get some good contacts out of the blue on the web these days, aiming at marketing director levels or manager and the odd personnel manager or CEO even.
It is worth doing both quality in terms of totally 'wrap round, follow up, tight targeted' hits and also some quantity from a list of contacts. use the Mail merge fuinction carefully with maybe a line in your excel source for the different companies products or business areas etc which slips in nicely to your mail merge paragraph two. Quanitity in e-mails or letters are quick to execute but spend time on formulating them and cleanign your list and data source so as to personalise each letter autmatically without gramatic mistakes or obvious blah-blah spam terms.
Following up means following up each and every one of your key targets in the telephone. It may just create a snowball to the next person or a polite no thank you. But you will be surprised that some of these will bear fruit and some of the actual contacts will want to interview you.
The key thereafter is getting to the bottom of what they need in terms of entry level marketers or how else you may need to worm your way in. A full Cv at this stage is as I have blogged earlier, the kiss of death. You want to uncover what they are up to now, which positions are at the entry level and how they fill these. Get people talking on more along the lines of what they do at the company and how the department is structured, then quickly go in after their entry level area. People move in and out of this banding very quickly so they may establish in fact a need they didn't know about- to have someone replace jean with the nice tits asap when she gets promoted to group product manager by the MD.
So after som digging about you will probably send a short half page, elevator pitch resume rather than a CV and only send a CV upon getting in on their needs. Out of say 50 such initial, well groomed and followed up open applications you will get about 5 interviews believe me.
Also some of the out of the blue replies asking you to interview from the other trawls will come through with or without a follow up CV.
Be wary. Don't go to an interview without a good idea of what job they want to see you about. Often they will have some crap or a sales job with no "in" to marketing but just call you in anyway. I spent 14 hours on trains to be told I was being interviewed for a bloody sales job post Marketing MSc! Any far flung interviews, which are dubious or don't pay travel by all means agree on the interview and then qaulify what the job actually is. If it is a bit of a 'well maybe as a stepping stone' then do the initial interview on the phone, and keep it short. If it is quite a tasty job in Truro, but you can't afford the 150 quid and they aren't paying, come up with some excuse the night before and change to a telepone interview.
Out of about ten interviews, procured from which ever source, and screened to be bone fide jobs for your career move, you will get one job offer which you should always take "in principle" while then trying hard to push others to interview you again or drop you.
Good luck!
Friday, February 22, 2008
Sales Route into Marketing?
Just to revisit this topic. It is a very well trodd path into marketing and other strategic management positions as a first step into a blue tooth. Often without the need for actual high sales achievements because an MBA and some smooching up to bosses gets you out of the ford mondeo.
You should be very careful who you choose to work for and who you sell to. They should be selling value added products which necessitates a meaty marketing department. If you want to go down the sales promo % off route then I guess a good discounter/ promo company is great.
Establishing a route into marketing is not necessary - actually, but it helps. The last person to talk to about this is of course your prospective SM. Keep it to personnel and any marketers you meet. Once in a while companies do willingly take people on a tour of duty in sales en route to higher things. Despite there being less graduates in some areas, there are a plenty as stated in the S&M area and others with a technical background alone who can get into the career via sales e.g. the whole food industry, biotech', motor industry, financial products etc.
If you are really impatient to work in marketing and you aren't interested in product management or becoming an S&M director then avoid sales. You are far better off doing some voluntary marketing at a charity or work placement and getting on the ladder through a marketing assistant position IF YOU ARE PREPARED to relocate or work for peanuts in scotland. Temping or considering a job as temp in this area is preferable because in sales you will really need to do 18 months before you can sell yourself into marketing outside the company. Internally, who knows, you may get contacted after a few months to apply or there may be a position for you at HQ.
Geographically you can ID those few sales and marketing operations in Scotland but be prepared to move and get a terratory near to te HQ of your prospective marketing department.
Just to revisit this topic. It is a very well trodd path into marketing and other strategic management positions as a first step into a blue tooth. Often without the need for actual high sales achievements because an MBA and some smooching up to bosses gets you out of the ford mondeo.
You should be very careful who you choose to work for and who you sell to. They should be selling value added products which necessitates a meaty marketing department. If you want to go down the sales promo % off route then I guess a good discounter/ promo company is great.
Establishing a route into marketing is not necessary - actually, but it helps. The last person to talk to about this is of course your prospective SM. Keep it to personnel and any marketers you meet. Once in a while companies do willingly take people on a tour of duty in sales en route to higher things. Despite there being less graduates in some areas, there are a plenty as stated in the S&M area and others with a technical background alone who can get into the career via sales e.g. the whole food industry, biotech', motor industry, financial products etc.
If you are really impatient to work in marketing and you aren't interested in product management or becoming an S&M director then avoid sales. You are far better off doing some voluntary marketing at a charity or work placement and getting on the ladder through a marketing assistant position IF YOU ARE PREPARED to relocate or work for peanuts in scotland. Temping or considering a job as temp in this area is preferable because in sales you will really need to do 18 months before you can sell yourself into marketing outside the company. Internally, who knows, you may get contacted after a few months to apply or there may be a position for you at HQ.
Geographically you can ID those few sales and marketing operations in Scotland but be prepared to move and get a terratory near to te HQ of your prospective marketing department.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
What are actually the key skills and learning needed to be a successful marketing manager?
Well they are by in large nothing to do with what you read at univeristy. However the smart amongst you will pick up many of the key skills while at university.
1) ability to argue objectively
This is pretty key. You are selling your ideas. This is however why marketeers like to use agencies -- they can communicate their ideas through a visual medium third hand. You need to be able to persuade people about concepts and understand you are taking them from where they stand now, to a place where you want them to stand or at least can live with them in that opinion/knowledege position.
At the end of the day, you need to be able to throw your ideeas in the toilet and stand back up with something new, so objectivity is important. Being huffy if the boss doesn't buy your ideas or the sales managers don't want them is just tough. Move along to the next idea.
So at uni this means maybe debating, a lot of GUU debateres used to go work at proctor and gamble, it means being a class rep or politically active.
( as a subnote I would also add to this the ability to crunch numbers and present convicing statistical arguements, objectively. This may be the one area of hard skills you learn at uni, but for many marketing jobs it is not a pre-requisite.)
2) excellent presentation skills
This doesn't go without saying. I lost a job recently partly because I lost control over the strategy for presentations and they just got messy and impossible to do well.
You need to be able to speak clearly, at a good cadence, pause appropriately adn to some extent entertain with your voice and body. Honestly! Content is a mere third fiddle to style and appearance. You need to be able to put together the best you can for your budget, and even divert budget into making presentations. You need to be a consumate improver through rehearsal.
Marketers get all tied up with content. Stuff content, go for a key message, get it signed off by the board of directors and tell em, tell you've told them it, then tell 'em again!
This is the proof-of-the-pudding for many a marketeer. Your ten minutes presenting to VIPs or sales force per month say, is worth hundreds of hours in actual desk work. "if a branch falls in a forrest and no one is there ..." , get the idea? if you are bad and nervous at presenting then you are unlikely to make it in many branches of marketing, so get good.
At uni this means taking all the opportunities to present your work and group work. Leanign from good lectureres and visiting speakers. Looking at what is good to use in speaces. Giving speaches at societies and things like Burns Nights. Using job interviews which often ask for a presentation.
3) motivational skills with people
generally this means being able to hoodwink coworkers who you may or may not have authority over into doing a good job for you. It means patronising the hell out of them and given choice, picking favourites and beggin favours on the back of choice of sweeties. You must at least have a ruling presence with your suppliers.
Often it is just having the gaul to ask someone in an expectant tone of voice to do something.
At uni this means being one of those annoying little leader type brats. But do it anyway. Leading means getting people around you who will do stuff for you, telling/showing them what to do and following them up. It means avoiding people who don't want to do stuff for you. It means out competing other would be leaders. It means finding a niche where you can organise other people to do stuff. Societies, sports clubs and event committees are ideal - even as a subordinate you should get hold of projects and ask to organise some "resources" around them. Best to begin with some big leaders ideas, build up a gang of youse homies and biaches and then keep them or find your own show to run. By all means learn-the-ropes as a subordinate but take responsibility for delegating and motivating people by sheer will power of your own when you can.
4) being highly organised and precise.
Ability to deliver on time, preciesely is more importatn than content once again. Markeign can be landed with a lot of sales conference and training and material logistiks and this means "give a big shit" attitutude to detail.
Also everything you publish can come back and bit you. Putting SOP systems in place for approval rounds and legal sign off is vital. Getting creative approved at board level early is ighly advisable!
Being a good manager means attention to detail - catching out subordinates and agencies is what gains you respect and authority. Other people's mistakes reflect on you and this can be very destructive all round. Some busy managers use the trip wire and "what I see above the water" approach. They spend a little amount of time catching people out on detail so that people get detail oriented. Or they presume what "bads" they see are only 10% of potential bads from a specific employee and either micromanage them a while, or just sideline or fire them. As a junior PM or assistant to such a "good" boss, you will need to jump and keep on impressing with ability to attend details.
It becomes second sense. The drudge of knowing you must go over things several times. That everyone who supplies you can do a better job- more for the money.
A good place would be the student papers or web sites, or a part time or summer job which involves proof reading or attention to detail in some way of orders or customer service or qaulity control. it's more an attitude than anything else. Also combining this with leading/motivating others is a great idea.
Summary
In the lazy marketers career, or the pandered first fewe jobs in a single blue chip boy, at some point you are going to be presented with an up hill struggle to get a marketing department, a campaign, a web site or CRM system back on track from a sloth pool of lack of detail, lack of planning, lack of motivation ..lack of quality in delivery. This will be very uncomfortable for the pampered poodle or the lazy-jack. You may as well learn the whole 'obsession' for detail early.
Well they are by in large nothing to do with what you read at univeristy. However the smart amongst you will pick up many of the key skills while at university.
1) ability to argue objectively
This is pretty key. You are selling your ideas. This is however why marketeers like to use agencies -- they can communicate their ideas through a visual medium third hand. You need to be able to persuade people about concepts and understand you are taking them from where they stand now, to a place where you want them to stand or at least can live with them in that opinion/knowledege position.
At the end of the day, you need to be able to throw your ideeas in the toilet and stand back up with something new, so objectivity is important. Being huffy if the boss doesn't buy your ideas or the sales managers don't want them is just tough. Move along to the next idea.
So at uni this means maybe debating, a lot of GUU debateres used to go work at proctor and gamble, it means being a class rep or politically active.
( as a subnote I would also add to this the ability to crunch numbers and present convicing statistical arguements, objectively. This may be the one area of hard skills you learn at uni, but for many marketing jobs it is not a pre-requisite.)
2) excellent presentation skills
This doesn't go without saying. I lost a job recently partly because I lost control over the strategy for presentations and they just got messy and impossible to do well.
You need to be able to speak clearly, at a good cadence, pause appropriately adn to some extent entertain with your voice and body. Honestly! Content is a mere third fiddle to style and appearance. You need to be able to put together the best you can for your budget, and even divert budget into making presentations. You need to be a consumate improver through rehearsal.
Marketers get all tied up with content. Stuff content, go for a key message, get it signed off by the board of directors and tell em, tell you've told them it, then tell 'em again!
This is the proof-of-the-pudding for many a marketeer. Your ten minutes presenting to VIPs or sales force per month say, is worth hundreds of hours in actual desk work. "if a branch falls in a forrest and no one is there ..." , get the idea? if you are bad and nervous at presenting then you are unlikely to make it in many branches of marketing, so get good.
At uni this means taking all the opportunities to present your work and group work. Leanign from good lectureres and visiting speakers. Looking at what is good to use in speaces. Giving speaches at societies and things like Burns Nights. Using job interviews which often ask for a presentation.
3) motivational skills with people
generally this means being able to hoodwink coworkers who you may or may not have authority over into doing a good job for you. It means patronising the hell out of them and given choice, picking favourites and beggin favours on the back of choice of sweeties. You must at least have a ruling presence with your suppliers.
Often it is just having the gaul to ask someone in an expectant tone of voice to do something.
At uni this means being one of those annoying little leader type brats. But do it anyway. Leading means getting people around you who will do stuff for you, telling/showing them what to do and following them up. It means avoiding people who don't want to do stuff for you. It means out competing other would be leaders. It means finding a niche where you can organise other people to do stuff. Societies, sports clubs and event committees are ideal - even as a subordinate you should get hold of projects and ask to organise some "resources" around them. Best to begin with some big leaders ideas, build up a gang of youse homies and biaches and then keep them or find your own show to run. By all means learn-the-ropes as a subordinate but take responsibility for delegating and motivating people by sheer will power of your own when you can.
4) being highly organised and precise.
Ability to deliver on time, preciesely is more importatn than content once again. Markeign can be landed with a lot of sales conference and training and material logistiks and this means "give a big shit" attitutude to detail.
Also everything you publish can come back and bit you. Putting SOP systems in place for approval rounds and legal sign off is vital. Getting creative approved at board level early is ighly advisable!
Being a good manager means attention to detail - catching out subordinates and agencies is what gains you respect and authority. Other people's mistakes reflect on you and this can be very destructive all round. Some busy managers use the trip wire and "what I see above the water" approach. They spend a little amount of time catching people out on detail so that people get detail oriented. Or they presume what "bads" they see are only 10% of potential bads from a specific employee and either micromanage them a while, or just sideline or fire them. As a junior PM or assistant to such a "good" boss, you will need to jump and keep on impressing with ability to attend details.
It becomes second sense. The drudge of knowing you must go over things several times. That everyone who supplies you can do a better job- more for the money.
A good place would be the student papers or web sites, or a part time or summer job which involves proof reading or attention to detail in some way of orders or customer service or qaulity control. it's more an attitude than anything else. Also combining this with leading/motivating others is a great idea.
Summary
In the lazy marketers career, or the pandered first fewe jobs in a single blue chip boy, at some point you are going to be presented with an up hill struggle to get a marketing department, a campaign, a web site or CRM system back on track from a sloth pool of lack of detail, lack of planning, lack of motivation ..lack of quality in delivery. This will be very uncomfortable for the pampered poodle or the lazy-jack. You may as well learn the whole 'obsession' for detail early.
For the Budding Marketeer from Strath Uni
Managing to at Least Coexist with your Sales Managers
Sales management vary but by in large they are the middle aged overweight, overpaid and over-pushing types. They have a certain personality profile which includes a very high dominace factor, without necessarily the social skills to negotiate with any subtlty.
On the surface and for the new marketing employee they can appear freindly and worth talking to. You will however notice that your elders and betters in marketing talk AT sales managers and avoid them whenever they can.
The easiest way to draw the borderline between sales and marketing is to say that any communication that is published is marketing and anything which is verbal is sales. A one-to-one/one-to-many ruling is too vague on this count.
In a sort of high techish or value added goods sector, or even in some rather dreary sectors, margins can be in excess of 50% and this is all sales managers want to have as a tool. They like nice brochures with a good little story in them, and they love sales leads from DM and web. But the obnly tool they use in winning business is discount. All the personality selling, personal influence, customer loyalty etc etc boils down to " if you can give me te order today, I'll knock 10% off".
So the two sources of conflict between marketing and sales management are
1) maintaining margin ( hence % spent on marketing per product)
2) their need to dominate people
If you have to relinquish price to them, do so and use accounts as the policeman for the more extragavent discounting attempts. Accounts will probably do their best to hide GM actuals from sales, and give them a far tighter discount regime than would be possible of a marketing departements sphere of influence.
If you on the other hand, own price, then you need to send someone senior in against SM to set in tight discoutn guidelines. It may be worth pricing via the web, POA, to be near the actual fighting market price if you control this channel. You can pick up quite a lot of the price oriented buyers and the mid volume deals this way and let sales get on with bigger deals and value added service selling! In fact with older product lines, you may be able to regain complete control and manage to either milk them or establish market share and a given economic scale of production that accounts and manufacturing can agree to.
With value added, highly differentiated products sales are still to be treated wit kid gloves. If they are for example scientific, then they can be either out of date in the lab or actual to clevery-clever to effectively win the personal trust of the customer on these credentials. Better to have them as walking, talking ad' placards giving out a key USP message that is actually unique and holds water against what the competition are up to.
In terms of discount for new and value added products, package it into some form of a basket, in print. This adds value to the sale whilst hiding actual single product level discounts. You probably need to keep something in reserve, like price breaks. Keep this to retro discounts ie. they only get their juicy price as a discount once they make the volume of sale, not on a running price break. Many customers will expect some form of negotiation on a new product and this should be on volume targets. Many won't thereafter take up that volume and so you can earn good GM on a spread of customers who buy actually at full price.
Free samples should be just that- a sample of the product and not free wares. It is worth investing in smaller packaging or some form of demonstration kit. If this is too restrictive, then spend your cash on wonderful freebies and product demo videos. Don't give out free stock if you can possibly avoid it. It completely devalues the product and the first sale. Often it means that your new, gleaming product, sits on a shelf because it has no precvieved value. In organisational buying then something with no cost has no value and therefore no risk in not using. This is why SPIN selling is so effective these days- risk is all that motivates a lot of people to actually change anything or get things done better than before.
Sales managers are usually in the field and too busy to interfere with your plans. Take "running it past sales management" with a pinch of salt- maybe test some ideas with sales people or the more clued up sales manager or two. Otherwise it as to be a fait accomplis. As long as it sales material and advertising etc are within the realms of what has come before, what is not very risky and what is generally done in your industry or comsumer sector then Sales Managers have no bloody right to either complain about it or actually influence how you spend your cash. Remember their key message to customers is "if you buy today...if you do a bigger volume for me I can do something on the price..:" Thatt's it. You have to actually persuade the sales force as an internal audience as to your message and how it is used verbally.
Talk Sectors and Segments and Shares
Sales managers usually have a big blind spot when it relates to actually what size their market is and what share they have. This is becuase for one they don't care and secondly they don't have the information available, collectively as a nation for instance, or the resources to gather it. This is an area you should own. The national market share and te EU or US or Aust' % and the size and growth of the markets, the sectors and the chaning comsumer behaviour and useage patterns.
Also another area you can own, is Mr. Average customer. By the wonders of statistics you can indeed have a nice bell chart with Mr. Average right in there in the middle. He may well for any given product, not actually buy on price but be buiying purely on repeat or from "off sales" contact--- ie. the often sizeable amount of sales driven by marketing, customer services and plain old word of mouth and nothing to do with sales people "influencing" anyone. Mr. Average customer is useful because it tells you what size of organisation buys for instance which makes it easier to target at all points of touch including sending sales in the "SME" market or just corporates. Mr Average customer also tells you how often they buy, which relates to how often they need to be reminded. How much they actually use and how that pattern is changing. How long Mr Average stays a customer, given repeat purchase is likely, is also a telling figure as to the price elasticity of the market or your customer base at least.
your other key ownership is share of voice. Sales care about this in terms of call-rates and numbers of sales people versus the competition. This takes no actual qaulity criteria into account. Some sales forces make a living for themselves "selling" to customers who would have bought "off sales" regardless. How much of this time in front of the happy-to-buy punter is wasted and how muc actually acheives cross sales or what ever is very doubtful. Hot-to-trot customers are what sales reps actually want delivered to them by marketing or customer services. Often they achieve little more than bringing a whole load of stock forward making the deal even borderline profitable. A well known company did enough of this to actaully block the whole market for a production solution. They had been at it bailing out the top line for a wall street giant, for about 2 years and in the end reached their waterloo as all the forward planning and warehouse space that could be taken was actually overbooked. This lead to some very bad quarters and a resulting price war as all suppliers had to fight for te first new orders in the market. Meanwhile NPI and new customers were largely ignored and the base for growth was therefore cut away from under their own feet.
In this case in hand, to some extent the same-old-same-old happened- in bad times sales management blame marketing. In good times, perversely and not conversely, they pat themselves on the back and sneer at marketing. So you can't really win.
However you do have another battle field where you often can win, and we have touched on this already. The one verbal comms you need to make is the one-to-many training and pep speeches to the sales force and other internal workers like customer or tech services. In a sciency company about half the sales force at least will havbe ambition to work in marketing, up with the gods as they believe. They are far more "sold" on what you say than the sweaty visitations and car park harrangings of sales management. The fatty brigade, sales managers, may own their shoe leather but it is quite easy for you to own their soul.
So as far as using them as walking-talking advertising placards, they will bite on your every word.
You are in dangerous water if you tell an experienced sales force how and who to sell to, but then you have anoter area which you own- the competition. You own their NPI, their advertising and their USP messages. You need to listen sharply to sales on these matters but keep feelers out there all the time.
Summary
By in large you can't really win with sales management because as said, they blame you in bad times and ignore you in the good times. You will notice that in terms of exhibitions and sales conferences, experienced PMs and marketing people will tend to get everything set up, do their blurb and then leave the bar bill to sales managers ie. not fraternise very much with the troops and make it a very one way traffic in terms of presentations. Some PMs will even just waft in for a given speech and vapourise away back to HQ meetings.
It is well worth keeping out of the way of regional sales managers at all costs and making clear channels for communications with those internal to HQ. Functioning as a group and letting the senior marketing people handle them is the best way to defend yourself from a marauding sales director. Don't what ever you do let them cut you away from the pack or worse, ambush you in the first place.
If it is a small company and you carry the marketing can, with an unfriendly sales management you are really up shit creek. You have to go in for dirty tactics in avoiding them and any decisions or support they want. You have to fight to keep any of your marketing assistants and own them if they came out of sales. Generally it is best to sound them out and see what they liked and what they felt really worked before from marketing. After that it is all about being positive and managing expectations and not expecting to own as much as you would in a bigger company. With web these days, small company marketing can be very rewarding and you can really own the corporate brand.
The very best type of companies to work for are probably fast growing medium sized anmd innovative businesses who are very marketing oriented. By this I mean most growt is "off sales" and they use a lot of marketing channel and material work. Usually this is now IT heavy, which is a draw back to those of you who like all the briefing ad agencies and repositioning stuff in FMCG ( dream on, you ain't gonna get a job in FMCG PMing if you are from the Tech- don't bleet on to me!) Sales forces hear tend to be very light in management and concentrate on being KAM and also tell-sellers supporting your message in the market.
Managing to at Least Coexist with your Sales Managers
Sales management vary but by in large they are the middle aged overweight, overpaid and over-pushing types. They have a certain personality profile which includes a very high dominace factor, without necessarily the social skills to negotiate with any subtlty.
On the surface and for the new marketing employee they can appear freindly and worth talking to. You will however notice that your elders and betters in marketing talk AT sales managers and avoid them whenever they can.
The easiest way to draw the borderline between sales and marketing is to say that any communication that is published is marketing and anything which is verbal is sales. A one-to-one/one-to-many ruling is too vague on this count.
In a sort of high techish or value added goods sector, or even in some rather dreary sectors, margins can be in excess of 50% and this is all sales managers want to have as a tool. They like nice brochures with a good little story in them, and they love sales leads from DM and web. But the obnly tool they use in winning business is discount. All the personality selling, personal influence, customer loyalty etc etc boils down to " if you can give me te order today, I'll knock 10% off".
So the two sources of conflict between marketing and sales management are
1) maintaining margin ( hence % spent on marketing per product)
2) their need to dominate people
If you have to relinquish price to them, do so and use accounts as the policeman for the more extragavent discounting attempts. Accounts will probably do their best to hide GM actuals from sales, and give them a far tighter discount regime than would be possible of a marketing departements sphere of influence.
If you on the other hand, own price, then you need to send someone senior in against SM to set in tight discoutn guidelines. It may be worth pricing via the web, POA, to be near the actual fighting market price if you control this channel. You can pick up quite a lot of the price oriented buyers and the mid volume deals this way and let sales get on with bigger deals and value added service selling! In fact with older product lines, you may be able to regain complete control and manage to either milk them or establish market share and a given economic scale of production that accounts and manufacturing can agree to.
With value added, highly differentiated products sales are still to be treated wit kid gloves. If they are for example scientific, then they can be either out of date in the lab or actual to clevery-clever to effectively win the personal trust of the customer on these credentials. Better to have them as walking, talking ad' placards giving out a key USP message that is actually unique and holds water against what the competition are up to.
In terms of discount for new and value added products, package it into some form of a basket, in print. This adds value to the sale whilst hiding actual single product level discounts. You probably need to keep something in reserve, like price breaks. Keep this to retro discounts ie. they only get their juicy price as a discount once they make the volume of sale, not on a running price break. Many customers will expect some form of negotiation on a new product and this should be on volume targets. Many won't thereafter take up that volume and so you can earn good GM on a spread of customers who buy actually at full price.
Free samples should be just that- a sample of the product and not free wares. It is worth investing in smaller packaging or some form of demonstration kit. If this is too restrictive, then spend your cash on wonderful freebies and product demo videos. Don't give out free stock if you can possibly avoid it. It completely devalues the product and the first sale. Often it means that your new, gleaming product, sits on a shelf because it has no precvieved value. In organisational buying then something with no cost has no value and therefore no risk in not using. This is why SPIN selling is so effective these days- risk is all that motivates a lot of people to actually change anything or get things done better than before.
Sales managers are usually in the field and too busy to interfere with your plans. Take "running it past sales management" with a pinch of salt- maybe test some ideas with sales people or the more clued up sales manager or two. Otherwise it as to be a fait accomplis. As long as it sales material and advertising etc are within the realms of what has come before, what is not very risky and what is generally done in your industry or comsumer sector then Sales Managers have no bloody right to either complain about it or actually influence how you spend your cash. Remember their key message to customers is "if you buy today...if you do a bigger volume for me I can do something on the price..:" Thatt's it. You have to actually persuade the sales force as an internal audience as to your message and how it is used verbally.
Talk Sectors and Segments and Shares
Sales managers usually have a big blind spot when it relates to actually what size their market is and what share they have. This is becuase for one they don't care and secondly they don't have the information available, collectively as a nation for instance, or the resources to gather it. This is an area you should own. The national market share and te EU or US or Aust' % and the size and growth of the markets, the sectors and the chaning comsumer behaviour and useage patterns.
Also another area you can own, is Mr. Average customer. By the wonders of statistics you can indeed have a nice bell chart with Mr. Average right in there in the middle. He may well for any given product, not actually buy on price but be buiying purely on repeat or from "off sales" contact--- ie. the often sizeable amount of sales driven by marketing, customer services and plain old word of mouth and nothing to do with sales people "influencing" anyone. Mr. Average customer is useful because it tells you what size of organisation buys for instance which makes it easier to target at all points of touch including sending sales in the "SME" market or just corporates. Mr Average customer also tells you how often they buy, which relates to how often they need to be reminded. How much they actually use and how that pattern is changing. How long Mr Average stays a customer, given repeat purchase is likely, is also a telling figure as to the price elasticity of the market or your customer base at least.
your other key ownership is share of voice. Sales care about this in terms of call-rates and numbers of sales people versus the competition. This takes no actual qaulity criteria into account. Some sales forces make a living for themselves "selling" to customers who would have bought "off sales" regardless. How much of this time in front of the happy-to-buy punter is wasted and how muc actually acheives cross sales or what ever is very doubtful. Hot-to-trot customers are what sales reps actually want delivered to them by marketing or customer services. Often they achieve little more than bringing a whole load of stock forward making the deal even borderline profitable. A well known company did enough of this to actaully block the whole market for a production solution. They had been at it bailing out the top line for a wall street giant, for about 2 years and in the end reached their waterloo as all the forward planning and warehouse space that could be taken was actually overbooked. This lead to some very bad quarters and a resulting price war as all suppliers had to fight for te first new orders in the market. Meanwhile NPI and new customers were largely ignored and the base for growth was therefore cut away from under their own feet.
In this case in hand, to some extent the same-old-same-old happened- in bad times sales management blame marketing. In good times, perversely and not conversely, they pat themselves on the back and sneer at marketing. So you can't really win.
However you do have another battle field where you often can win, and we have touched on this already. The one verbal comms you need to make is the one-to-many training and pep speeches to the sales force and other internal workers like customer or tech services. In a sciency company about half the sales force at least will havbe ambition to work in marketing, up with the gods as they believe. They are far more "sold" on what you say than the sweaty visitations and car park harrangings of sales management. The fatty brigade, sales managers, may own their shoe leather but it is quite easy for you to own their soul.
So as far as using them as walking-talking advertising placards, they will bite on your every word.
You are in dangerous water if you tell an experienced sales force how and who to sell to, but then you have anoter area which you own- the competition. You own their NPI, their advertising and their USP messages. You need to listen sharply to sales on these matters but keep feelers out there all the time.
Summary
By in large you can't really win with sales management because as said, they blame you in bad times and ignore you in the good times. You will notice that in terms of exhibitions and sales conferences, experienced PMs and marketing people will tend to get everything set up, do their blurb and then leave the bar bill to sales managers ie. not fraternise very much with the troops and make it a very one way traffic in terms of presentations. Some PMs will even just waft in for a given speech and vapourise away back to HQ meetings.
It is well worth keeping out of the way of regional sales managers at all costs and making clear channels for communications with those internal to HQ. Functioning as a group and letting the senior marketing people handle them is the best way to defend yourself from a marauding sales director. Don't what ever you do let them cut you away from the pack or worse, ambush you in the first place.
If it is a small company and you carry the marketing can, with an unfriendly sales management you are really up shit creek. You have to go in for dirty tactics in avoiding them and any decisions or support they want. You have to fight to keep any of your marketing assistants and own them if they came out of sales. Generally it is best to sound them out and see what they liked and what they felt really worked before from marketing. After that it is all about being positive and managing expectations and not expecting to own as much as you would in a bigger company. With web these days, small company marketing can be very rewarding and you can really own the corporate brand.
The very best type of companies to work for are probably fast growing medium sized anmd innovative businesses who are very marketing oriented. By this I mean most growt is "off sales" and they use a lot of marketing channel and material work. Usually this is now IT heavy, which is a draw back to those of you who like all the briefing ad agencies and repositioning stuff in FMCG ( dream on, you ain't gonna get a job in FMCG PMing if you are from the Tech- don't bleet on to me!) Sales forces hear tend to be very light in management and concentrate on being KAM and also tell-sellers supporting your message in the market.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
More Career Tricks for Marketers from the MSc Marketing, Strathclyde.
Dirty tricks don't just start with your application process- they continue until you have 'made it' in a career shaping job.
Up and until then it is often dog eat dog-marketing jobs are few and far between outside the south east, and even there you will have to fight your way in. People get plum entry level and first move jobs by variously using their old university and family / freinds network, following a boss out to a new job, cheating in the job queu, or actually being in another job and threatening to leave. This last point is very, very often used and I will explain why.
Marketing jobs are very few on the ground compared to all the areas which "feed them" with candidates > sales forces of up to 50 people per marketing position, all the universities, the CRM, etc etc. Mysteriously they are often filled with strange hectic types like Dr. Thomas Klenka, who not only have little marketing savey, but lack interpersonal skills and presentation skills. Klenkatiss managed to blackmail himself three rungs up the ladder from a shitty customer support job to a senior PM role and erm, didn\t do so well so was bunked out into sales, where he vanished from the radar. Each time threats to leave ! The thing is that companies have a pervcieved need to keep people who are ont he learning curve and ahead of it with products, services and customers. It costs a lot to recruit and they @like@ to recruit internally to retain staff and motivate others to work harder. But often they will have no motivation to choose you over a better qualified external candidate if you don\t use the old SPIN and threaten to leave.
You may well have got yourself into a desirable company to work for, as reccommended in my rants, but be stuck in something a little dull like customer services, technical services, or a sales job you don't really like. I have seen this approach work, but in a company where in a few 'klenka' types have done it before, the bosses get tired of it and call bluff- so that is to say it is still a high risk strategy and you should have a back up plan. Looking on the positive side - you have a lot to offer by now, even after just six months in sales or customer services...,and the company has a lot ot lose esspecially if you have been through an expensive sales training programme. If there is a clear vacancy or person leaving / going on maternity then sieze it- work the positive with the marketing managers and threaten to leave with personnel and eventually your own manager.
In a sales job you can always turn round and say " it isn't really for me being out in the field every day charming people, I'd rather be in what I'm educated in' -just please, please don't say this to your sales bosses- reserve it for personnel (who have invested money in your training and time in hiring you and have retention goals !!) or marketing.
Don't what ever you do, say anything to your customer services manager or worse if you work in a sales job, your sales line managers > They will ear mark you for pressure to "perform or leave", or work out an exit strategy which will involve closing deals, closing any potential towards a tender and booking appointments. After all that effort to keep your job, supposedly, they will often fire you! There must be many a person having spent ages in uni or via the CIM sitting in a sales job who played their cards all wrong by "crying mummy" to their sales bosses. This british "need to confess" to your enemy is pathetic.
I've seen very bloody minded types just pull all the stops out tin threatening to leave, without any back up plan I knew of. Klenka! But you should have your CV in at competitors, suppliers, customers (and all the agencies once you have over a year) and be using friday morning to send out job applications, even before work. As a territory rep in Scotland, you could probably hand deliver it on the next day or the monday. Agencies (recrutiment consutlants I mean) probably don't want to touch you until you have their idea of a magic year, but given special fiorst education - a huge plus of doign the MSc after your first "life" - they will at least consider you and also if you work in a high demand industry like telecoms/ ICT, then they will have a bit more frequent marketing assistant jobs which are poorly paid. Now it is likely that given the offer you would rather stay where you are, but this is a fall back and a lever to get you into marketing.
Changing Companies
There comes a point when you either blow out in your persuit within your company or you just realise that maybe there are more interesting & glamerous & fun marketing departments in this world. Quite likely, for instance with medical sales, a marekting job will mean a move to the SE and all that comes with that rat race * although it can be ok, as long as you get a place to live and they don\t work loony hours.
Now you may have identified some key companies you want to work for or a key job descritption which takes you forward. You may even stumble on an employer like Adobe or Invitroegn who throw training at you and are worth getting in just for that (* both of these hav kind of second hand EU marketing departments*) . Also by now you have probably sat over a year or two in sales, or a marketing assistant job or the like and are much more sellable as far as those once evil recruitment consultants are concerened. Now after say two years, they are your best pal all of a sudden. More on them soon.
The key dilema is that you don't want to lose your job and also you don\t actaully have a lot of time to look for jobs and apply for other jobs. So it is going to be quality over quantity and you should be thinking of jobs in terms of a few processes only each quarter. usually interviews go in a round of three with a telephone offer. Now just think, that is a lot of time away from work! There are of course "blocks" of percieved active time in the year,, but just treat it as taking a quarter of a year to either close something or walk away fronm those threads and start again. Howwever run up days before holidays are very fruitful times to apply as the numbers are down!
These days quality over quantity means the following:
Identifying all the "marketing" employers in your industry or supply chain
Identifying those in acceptabel geoegraphic areas to relocate to
Identifying their mehtods of advertising jobs
Identifying their recruitment agencies
Screening advertised jobs/ calling up for all relevatn jobs
Being fussy with adverts and expecially recrutiment c'unts.
Doing some open applications directed to people in marketing
Tayloring your CV for every job or company
Really expressing your interest, motivation and research for a company
Sorting out a personal branding which is targeted for your next job
Identifying quality contacts at rec'unts and working them up
Using Interviews to Your Advantage
You are in a strong position, sitting in a job, so use it. Often in my experience, employers interveiw many and decide to go with an internal candidate or someone who sent a very motivated open application. So interviews can be a waste of time and they are often just that. Interview times are not cast in stone, but quibbling there and then down the phone over a date and time you get given is a very neagtive thing to do. You should sound deligthed! However It is far better to do the following tricks.
1) For jobs which are a bit, well ok, maybe yeah, make it very clear that you are limited in availability and prefer an early evening or an 8am interview. If you have felixtime, firday Pm can be quite nice because most people are running down. It is probably better to take it on the phone / see below on canceling/postponing
2) do go and see recruitment consultants in person. Get your personal branding across and be very very clear on the type of job area your want to work in : marketing!! But But but!! Before you see the consultatn make sure they recruit in this area themselves, personnaly, and try to find out which clients they have. Most work on an account management basis, so explore several contacts in 'working' your way into a consultants to get what YOU want.
Don't bend to what they suggest or let them decide about you. Don't send your CV until you establish who is the best contact(s) for you. Quality, preparation. Speak to them/ send it and immediately follow it up. They will skim read your letter so it can just be blah blah, but you should repeat your 'career goals' etc on the CV and if you are currently in sales, make this lower on the list.,Otherwise you will get endless calls from them about sales jobs. The first 15 second should reek marketing ability and motivation!
3) be fussy about what jobs they will send you forward for. If it is a non key consultant trying to shoe horn you into some rubbishy job, at a non branded company, then palm them off with that you are too busy today and tonight so best not to follow it up. Get them to send details to your hotmail and think up questions on the job. Don't let them bully you with 'so you aren't actually actively seeking work' / just say you can't talk right now. Remember, they need maybe 20 CVs and 6 people for interview who are in jobs most likely and that is a hardf job for them to do. Maybe if you really have a rapport with one you can do a deal whereby you play ball on a few shitty interviews, whilst they know the score and help yuou on a biggy. But mosty likely they are cunts to whom you are just a number or a pawn towards helping them make money off a more experienced candidate - they usually have an ideal candidate and usually won't tell you that it's just a jumping hoops exercise as far as you are concerned.
4) reschedule all direct employer interviews the day before. why ? While in a job You have very linmited time and you need to know that you use this effectively. Understand the stregnths of your CV and experience whilst admitting your weaknesses in relation to the job ad'. Try to get a fuller job spec/desc. from personnel in advance. What you need to know is how keen they are on you versus the whole numbers and screening that some company's SOPs demand. They will be coy on how good a candidate you are, but
Be a litte arrogant. Don't be shy- this is situatiion normal for interwierers - sickness, sudden meetings, no shows....
In advance find out the names of the key person(s) interviewing you and try to talk to them direct, apologising and sayin you were really intereested. See if they know about you /give a shit. Refer to personnel for an actual reascheduling. Offer to take it on the phone. Cancel the day before for that time, no matter when it is. Ask if it can be rescheduled because you have a meeting. If they say it is going on over a few days then maybe ask how many they are seeing. 20 +?? Try to find out just how much they care about your application. If all else fails and it sounds like a great job with a good shout for you, then try and reschedule til later or earlier that day or the next. In probing like this you will have uncovered how interested they are in you!
I reckon on average it takes me about five interviews at employers to scrabble out one job, which may be just the best I coudl get at that time. If I knew in advance then okay, I\d still go to five interviews but those would all be high quality with me as a good candidate and NOT AN ALSO RAN!! I've never been good at looking for jobs within jobs because it is hard and also you can loose motivation and patience with recruitment consultants and inflexible @ must see 20 mailto:candidate@.
5) Try and do any dodgey or long distance first interviews with employers on the phone or outside working hours /flexitime friendly. Use the above or just say it is too hard to work in your schedule. The number of first interviews I travelled 500 miles for just to find out it was cr5ap or a salesy job or make a booboo in is just unbelievable.
6) leave a business card and pick up business cards. You may have a university business card from networking days or just your company's with your mobile on it. A business card is a little bit of gold dust whilst CVs are wieghty private documents. This is especially the case when goign through recruitment consultants. Many, many employers run around recrutiment consutlants when padding out recruitment later/ so they may interview you for a sales job and call you back for a marketing job some months later. I\ve had my two besty career making jobs this way!!
5) get some form of continuation. This could be a delviery of some more details on your background, examples of your work etc. Something which is either an excuse for you to call up and be nice to them or to be called back to 2nbd interview.
6) Before you accept a job, get it all in writing and get your references accepted. This is a real warning and in fact has probably caught out most job moving marketers like myself. go so far as to Find an internal chum who can give the reference when you leave.
Also understand all that comes with the new job in terms of relocation and logistics. At this stage you want to avoid exposing yourself to a lot of risk, and given a substantial move across the land then negoitate relocation. Even accept lower pay for the first six months, just get them to cover the cost of a hotel or decent B^B or a serviced appartment. As with organon in Bucks, there was nowehere affordable in the area unless it was "rent a room out". Get them to pay and make sure it is unconditional i.e. if you hate the job or perform badly then you don\t pay it back.
I have been eally financially stung two times with moves / the one very uncofomfortable recently where I moved my whole family and the bosses diodn\t like me!! They agreed to a loan and I got the dole to pay the lorry over here, but shit! Previoulsy though I did take my career making job in manchester and it worked out a good investment. I did get a over a month in b&B but had to buy a reasonably reliable car amongst other things.
7)Stall the new employer within reason > a few days to organise references (wait if you can to disclose who they are as it buys time and secures the most relevant persons) >a week to discuss it with your spouse or just think about it over the weekend after the reference check > need to see it in writing, maybe questiona few things <>For example you may be a field product specialist while they have no internal product managers and use marketign comms people with no technical background. This is a good lever to come in as a newly created PM/ APM
9) , when you sign up and resign , and you are about to start in the new job, come into a pre/emptive meeting, as above, and discuss or rather thrash out what you will actually be doing and any training you will need. In the run up to a new emnployee starting there is usually a meeting the week just before where the boss discusses what the newbei will actually do and of course announces their arrival. This is where, especially for the would be marketing assisant or APM, the monkeys get cast oiff other peoples backs. Now there is a certain amount of being nice and mucking in with the team, but a lot more plain piss taking goes on at this stage. A pre/emptive strike where you outline the type of things you want, what they expect, the projects and on goign routines etc and you can make it clear that you didnn't do an MSc to make tea and clean the database.
What I am trying to say is be very aware that marketing departments or ad agencies are a tangle of conflicting interests, ambitions, egos and changing situations. The whole thing is very dynamic and you can put a very positive spin when you come in, especially as you have an MSc. If however this is your first job, then I am afraid you will need to most likely suck on the mouldy cock of the shitty stick/. In the context of it being your 2nd or later , career making job, then get as much agreed in forehand.
In an ad' agency there will be a variety of clients you could maybe work with, so getting an idea of which in advance is vital otherwise you will be in shitty end of the stick land. Be positive here, find out who they work for and try to show your highest interest in one, not to the detriment of another. There are always a loty of politics in marketing and precious little mary's not actually performing, so if you show interest and motivation, the monkey can be dumped on someone elses back. So for example, the GUS catalogue or web site gets dumped on competant but unimaginative and dull Debra while you get to work on the Porsche account!
.......and finally .......
Given a minimum legal resignation period you can even accept a new job then tell them it is all goign terribly wrong and stay on in your current work with the employer oblivious to it all.
Dirty tricks don't just start with your application process- they continue until you have 'made it' in a career shaping job.
Up and until then it is often dog eat dog-marketing jobs are few and far between outside the south east, and even there you will have to fight your way in. People get plum entry level and first move jobs by variously using their old university and family / freinds network, following a boss out to a new job, cheating in the job queu, or actually being in another job and threatening to leave. This last point is very, very often used and I will explain why.
Marketing jobs are very few on the ground compared to all the areas which "feed them" with candidates > sales forces of up to 50 people per marketing position, all the universities, the CRM, etc etc. Mysteriously they are often filled with strange hectic types like Dr. Thomas Klenka, who not only have little marketing savey, but lack interpersonal skills and presentation skills. Klenkatiss managed to blackmail himself three rungs up the ladder from a shitty customer support job to a senior PM role and erm, didn\t do so well so was bunked out into sales, where he vanished from the radar. Each time threats to leave ! The thing is that companies have a pervcieved need to keep people who are ont he learning curve and ahead of it with products, services and customers. It costs a lot to recruit and they @like@ to recruit internally to retain staff and motivate others to work harder. But often they will have no motivation to choose you over a better qualified external candidate if you don\t use the old SPIN and threaten to leave.
You may well have got yourself into a desirable company to work for, as reccommended in my rants, but be stuck in something a little dull like customer services, technical services, or a sales job you don't really like. I have seen this approach work, but in a company where in a few 'klenka' types have done it before, the bosses get tired of it and call bluff- so that is to say it is still a high risk strategy and you should have a back up plan. Looking on the positive side - you have a lot to offer by now, even after just six months in sales or customer services...,and the company has a lot ot lose esspecially if you have been through an expensive sales training programme. If there is a clear vacancy or person leaving / going on maternity then sieze it- work the positive with the marketing managers and threaten to leave with personnel and eventually your own manager.
In a sales job you can always turn round and say " it isn't really for me being out in the field every day charming people, I'd rather be in what I'm educated in' -just please, please don't say this to your sales bosses- reserve it for personnel (who have invested money in your training and time in hiring you and have retention goals !!) or marketing.
Don't what ever you do, say anything to your customer services manager or worse if you work in a sales job, your sales line managers > They will ear mark you for pressure to "perform or leave", or work out an exit strategy which will involve closing deals, closing any potential towards a tender and booking appointments. After all that effort to keep your job, supposedly, they will often fire you! There must be many a person having spent ages in uni or via the CIM sitting in a sales job who played their cards all wrong by "crying mummy" to their sales bosses. This british "need to confess" to your enemy is pathetic.
I've seen very bloody minded types just pull all the stops out tin threatening to leave, without any back up plan I knew of. Klenka! But you should have your CV in at competitors, suppliers, customers (and all the agencies once you have over a year) and be using friday morning to send out job applications, even before work. As a territory rep in Scotland, you could probably hand deliver it on the next day or the monday. Agencies (recrutiment consutlants I mean) probably don't want to touch you until you have their idea of a magic year, but given special fiorst education - a huge plus of doign the MSc after your first "life" - they will at least consider you and also if you work in a high demand industry like telecoms/ ICT, then they will have a bit more frequent marketing assistant jobs which are poorly paid. Now it is likely that given the offer you would rather stay where you are, but this is a fall back and a lever to get you into marketing.
Changing Companies
There comes a point when you either blow out in your persuit within your company or you just realise that maybe there are more interesting & glamerous & fun marketing departments in this world. Quite likely, for instance with medical sales, a marekting job will mean a move to the SE and all that comes with that rat race * although it can be ok, as long as you get a place to live and they don\t work loony hours.
Now you may have identified some key companies you want to work for or a key job descritption which takes you forward. You may even stumble on an employer like Adobe or Invitroegn who throw training at you and are worth getting in just for that (* both of these hav kind of second hand EU marketing departments*) . Also by now you have probably sat over a year or two in sales, or a marketing assistant job or the like and are much more sellable as far as those once evil recruitment consultants are concerened. Now after say two years, they are your best pal all of a sudden. More on them soon.
The key dilema is that you don't want to lose your job and also you don\t actaully have a lot of time to look for jobs and apply for other jobs. So it is going to be quality over quantity and you should be thinking of jobs in terms of a few processes only each quarter. usually interviews go in a round of three with a telephone offer. Now just think, that is a lot of time away from work! There are of course "blocks" of percieved active time in the year,, but just treat it as taking a quarter of a year to either close something or walk away fronm those threads and start again. Howwever run up days before holidays are very fruitful times to apply as the numbers are down!
These days quality over quantity means the following:
Identifying all the "marketing" employers in your industry or supply chain
Identifying those in acceptabel geoegraphic areas to relocate to
Identifying their mehtods of advertising jobs
Identifying their recruitment agencies
Screening advertised jobs/ calling up for all relevatn jobs
Being fussy with adverts and expecially recrutiment c'unts.
Doing some open applications directed to people in marketing
Tayloring your CV for every job or company
Really expressing your interest, motivation and research for a company
Sorting out a personal branding which is targeted for your next job
Identifying quality contacts at rec'unts and working them up
Using Interviews to Your Advantage
You are in a strong position, sitting in a job, so use it. Often in my experience, employers interveiw many and decide to go with an internal candidate or someone who sent a very motivated open application. So interviews can be a waste of time and they are often just that. Interview times are not cast in stone, but quibbling there and then down the phone over a date and time you get given is a very neagtive thing to do. You should sound deligthed! However It is far better to do the following tricks.
1) For jobs which are a bit, well ok, maybe yeah, make it very clear that you are limited in availability and prefer an early evening or an 8am interview. If you have felixtime, firday Pm can be quite nice because most people are running down. It is probably better to take it on the phone / see below on canceling/postponing
2) do go and see recruitment consultants in person. Get your personal branding across and be very very clear on the type of job area your want to work in : marketing!! But But but!! Before you see the consultatn make sure they recruit in this area themselves, personnaly, and try to find out which clients they have. Most work on an account management basis, so explore several contacts in 'working' your way into a consultants to get what YOU want.
Don't bend to what they suggest or let them decide about you. Don't send your CV until you establish who is the best contact(s) for you. Quality, preparation. Speak to them/ send it and immediately follow it up. They will skim read your letter so it can just be blah blah, but you should repeat your 'career goals' etc on the CV and if you are currently in sales, make this lower on the list.,Otherwise you will get endless calls from them about sales jobs. The first 15 second should reek marketing ability and motivation!
3) be fussy about what jobs they will send you forward for. If it is a non key consultant trying to shoe horn you into some rubbishy job, at a non branded company, then palm them off with that you are too busy today and tonight so best not to follow it up. Get them to send details to your hotmail and think up questions on the job. Don't let them bully you with 'so you aren't actually actively seeking work' / just say you can't talk right now. Remember, they need maybe 20 CVs and 6 people for interview who are in jobs most likely and that is a hardf job for them to do. Maybe if you really have a rapport with one you can do a deal whereby you play ball on a few shitty interviews, whilst they know the score and help yuou on a biggy. But mosty likely they are cunts to whom you are just a number or a pawn towards helping them make money off a more experienced candidate - they usually have an ideal candidate and usually won't tell you that it's just a jumping hoops exercise as far as you are concerned.
4) reschedule all direct employer interviews the day before. why ? While in a job You have very linmited time and you need to know that you use this effectively. Understand the stregnths of your CV and experience whilst admitting your weaknesses in relation to the job ad'. Try to get a fuller job spec/desc. from personnel in advance. What you need to know is how keen they are on you versus the whole numbers and screening that some company's SOPs demand. They will be coy on how good a candidate you are, but
Be a litte arrogant. Don't be shy- this is situatiion normal for interwierers - sickness, sudden meetings, no shows....
In advance find out the names of the key person(s) interviewing you and try to talk to them direct, apologising and sayin you were really intereested. See if they know about you /give a shit. Refer to personnel for an actual reascheduling. Offer to take it on the phone. Cancel the day before for that time, no matter when it is. Ask if it can be rescheduled because you have a meeting. If they say it is going on over a few days then maybe ask how many they are seeing. 20 +?? Try to find out just how much they care about your application. If all else fails and it sounds like a great job with a good shout for you, then try and reschedule til later or earlier that day or the next. In probing like this you will have uncovered how interested they are in you!
I reckon on average it takes me about five interviews at employers to scrabble out one job, which may be just the best I coudl get at that time. If I knew in advance then okay, I\d still go to five interviews but those would all be high quality with me as a good candidate and NOT AN ALSO RAN!! I've never been good at looking for jobs within jobs because it is hard and also you can loose motivation and patience with recruitment consultants and inflexible @ must see 20 mailto:candidate@.
5) Try and do any dodgey or long distance first interviews with employers on the phone or outside working hours /flexitime friendly. Use the above or just say it is too hard to work in your schedule. The number of first interviews I travelled 500 miles for just to find out it was cr5ap or a salesy job or make a booboo in is just unbelievable.
5)b) don\t travel to far flung interviews, or even over 50 miles each way, who don't pay travel expenses. It is just mean. As a graduate you will need to do this and get the dole to pay for you to go to selection days in the home counties, but sod it once you have your first step job. Red carpet should atleast be in the cupboard!
6) leave a business card and pick up business cards. You may have a university business card from networking days or just your company's with your mobile on it. A business card is a little bit of gold dust whilst CVs are wieghty private documents. This is especially the case when goign through recruitment consultants. Many, many employers run around recrutiment consutlants when padding out recruitment later/ so they may interview you for a sales job and call you back for a marketing job some months later. I\ve had my two besty career making jobs this way!!
5) get some form of continuation. This could be a delviery of some more details on your background, examples of your work etc. Something which is either an excuse for you to call up and be nice to them or to be called back to 2nbd interview.
6) Before you accept a job, get it all in writing and get your references accepted. This is a real warning and in fact has probably caught out most job moving marketers like myself. go so far as to Find an internal chum who can give the reference when you leave.
Also understand all that comes with the new job in terms of relocation and logistics. At this stage you want to avoid exposing yourself to a lot of risk, and given a substantial move across the land then negoitate relocation. Even accept lower pay for the first six months, just get them to cover the cost of a hotel or decent B^B or a serviced appartment. As with organon in Bucks, there was nowehere affordable in the area unless it was "rent a room out". Get them to pay and make sure it is unconditional i.e. if you hate the job or perform badly then you don\t pay it back.
I have been eally financially stung two times with moves / the one very uncofomfortable recently where I moved my whole family and the bosses diodn\t like me!! They agreed to a loan and I got the dole to pay the lorry over here, but shit! Previoulsy though I did take my career making job in manchester and it worked out a good investment. I did get a over a month in b&B but had to buy a reasonably reliable car amongst other things.
7)Stall the new employer within reason > a few days to organise references (wait if you can to disclose who they are as it buys time and secures the most relevant persons) >a week to discuss it with your spouse or just think about it over the weekend after the reference check > need to see it in writing, maybe questiona few things <>For example you may be a field product specialist while they have no internal product managers and use marketign comms people with no technical background. This is a good lever to come in as a newly created PM/ APM
9) , when you sign up and resign , and you are about to start in the new job, come into a pre/emptive meeting, as above, and discuss or rather thrash out what you will actually be doing and any training you will need. In the run up to a new emnployee starting there is usually a meeting the week just before where the boss discusses what the newbei will actually do and of course announces their arrival. This is where, especially for the would be marketing assisant or APM, the monkeys get cast oiff other peoples backs. Now there is a certain amount of being nice and mucking in with the team, but a lot more plain piss taking goes on at this stage. A pre/emptive strike where you outline the type of things you want, what they expect, the projects and on goign routines etc and you can make it clear that you didnn't do an MSc to make tea and clean the database.
What I am trying to say is be very aware that marketing departments or ad agencies are a tangle of conflicting interests, ambitions, egos and changing situations. The whole thing is very dynamic and you can put a very positive spin when you come in, especially as you have an MSc. If however this is your first job, then I am afraid you will need to most likely suck on the mouldy cock of the shitty stick/. In the context of it being your 2nd or later , career making job, then get as much agreed in forehand.
In an ad' agency there will be a variety of clients you could maybe work with, so getting an idea of which in advance is vital otherwise you will be in shitty end of the stick land. Be positive here, find out who they work for and try to show your highest interest in one, not to the detriment of another. There are always a loty of politics in marketing and precious little mary's not actually performing, so if you show interest and motivation, the monkey can be dumped on someone elses back. So for example, the GUS catalogue or web site gets dumped on competant but unimaginative and dull Debra while you get to work on the Porsche account!
.......and finally .......
Given a minimum legal resignation period you can even accept a new job then tell them it is all goign terribly wrong and stay on in your current work with the employer oblivious to it all.
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