What 'Dr Bob' taught me about Marketing for startups

One of my closest friends is a Doctor, someone I often visit for advice. He also has a medical PhD from one of the world's pre-eminent medical schools. 

I've learned much from 'Dr Bob' about being ethical, patient, rational, objective, and compassionate. 

Bob and I have a dark sense of humour, which helps us cope with life's difficulties. The more I've gotten to know Bob, the more I've learned to respect his outlook on life. 

What is his life philosophy? He is a stoic. He once told me that he didn't like the word 'happiness' and preferred the Greek term eudaimonia.

In the works of Aristotle, eudaimonia was the term for the highest human good in the older Greek tradition. It is a central concept in Aristotelian ethics.

Throughout my 15-year marketing career, I've worked with numerous tech startups. My role often feels like being a doctor. Of course, the stakes are lower; money may be lost, but no one will die if I fail. 

But I have been lucky to have worked at companies where the patients have thrived and become world-record-beating athletes! – When you've seen those 'patients' struggling, on their knees at times, it's wonderful to be part of that transformation!

Despite my education and training, I've made mistakes earlier in my career; Once, I was involved in a mismanaged website rebrand.

Our leadership had yet to realise that changing the website would crash all our search and SEO traffic. 

Another time, I made some errors with our database and email campaigns that got our Marketing automation software shut down. I was forced into negotiations to get it back up and running (luckily, it only went down for two days).

No talent, intelligence or education will help you entirely avoid mistakes – only experience will. Fortunately, it's been many years since I made such professional blunders. Over time, you build up the wisdom to make the right judgment calls.

Co-workers at Startups, like patients, can be rude, disrespectful, and dismissive of your experience and training at times. But when this happens to me now, I act like a doctor.

– Why is this or that person at that company so rude? Is it because they are bad people? No, of course not - In my experience, at least not in nine times out of ten cases. Often, they are stressed out and not thinking straight. 

I'm human, and using my valuable skills to help when they are not appreciated sometimes feels bad. But I've become much more empathetic over the years. 

The world of VC-backed startups can be a harsh environment. Your targets - from lead numbers to sales revenue - can vary from aggressively ambitious to almost impossible. So, even if you have growth rates that would be considered stellar in the regular business world, more is often needed.

Sometimes, no matter how much effort or results you achieve, they will not satisfy your private equity investors. But they risk their money, so fair enough!

I'm fortunate to love my work, which helps me stay calm and reasonable in most challenging situations. I know how lucky I am to do what I enjoy  - many people don't have that luxury!

One part of the job I absolutely adore is working with data. I enjoy discussing data science and analytics with Dr 'Bob'; Our outlooks are rational, ethical and scientific.

If your business-to-business technology startup is struggling with its Sales and Marketing, why not take a look at some of my work and see what you think?

The most common marketing analytics mistakes (and how to avoid them)

When you've been around the b2b marketing block as long as I have, you start to spot common errors in marketing analytics. I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to pursue a two-year MBA, which provided a solid foundation in analytics that I've continued to build upon through online studies. 

Hence, I'm well placed to write this article. So here goes, the most common errors and/or challenges I've spotted in my now rather long marketing career:

I could write this entire blog post on one topic alone - Probability. It is constantly misunderstood. Even well-known publications like The London Times, or CNN, often make errors. The most common one is confusing correlation with causation; Just because two things happen regularly at the same time, it does not prove that there is a causal connection. Here are some funny examples to demonstrate my point. 

The second most common mistake I've seen in my career regards A/B testing, and Statistical Significance. It's amazing how often this type of evidence goes unquestioned, even in big rooms of senior executives.

Let's say we are testing out two images in an email we send out, which we send to 20,000 contacts. 

• Image A: 71 clicks
• Image B: 87 clicks

Clearly, image B is 'the winner', right? But hold up just one minute. Have you tested this experiment for statistical significance? To what degree are you certain that this test is conclusive? 

This is where the concept of Confidence Intervals is invaluable. I can go into the equations on how you calculate this number, as I had to do in my first year MBA Statistics basics class (thank you Raj, my stats tutor, who helped me after hours to get through this tough class with a good grade!).

But fortunately, understanding the math is not critical to running a good A/B test. In fact, Hubspot has a handy AB testing kit, that contains the formulas you need, so you can simply plug in your numbers, and get your answer! 

Here you can see that I've done this myself. And look at the results! 

As you can see, it has failed both the standard, 90% confidence interval, and the more rigorous, 95% confidence interval tests.

In fact, we are only 22.5% confident that this data is conclusive. In other words, Clicks went up, but not by enough to confidently say it wasn’t just randomness.

Here's what those confidence intervals look like on a probability bell curve

The 'Moneyball' problem

So if you're a bit of a statistics fan like me, you may well have read a few books by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, like 'Fooled by randomness' and 'The Black Swan' - in my case, after learning all about statistics at business school, he brilliantly debunked some common statistical errors for me.

And I'm sure you will have either read the book 'Moneyball' or seen the excellent movie.

The Moneyball problem is when everyone in your company, and perhaps even everyone in your industry, is measuring the wrong things. Moneyball is often summarised as 'use data to win'. But the deeper lesson is harsher: you can measure brilliantly and still lose if you’re measuring the wrong thing. 

In the movie, Baseball didn’t suffer from a lack of stats, it suffered from mispriced stats. Batting average and RBIs looked like performance, but they weren’t the most reliable predictors of wins. Oakland’s edge came from shifting attention to what compounded: getting on base, over and over, from undervalued players.

You could perhaps compare this to marketing that measures 'last click' attribution, when marketing mix modelling is the real driver of success - the combination of all channels that produces the win. You are focusing on the metrics, not because they are the best, but because a) either those are the only ones you have, or b) because your company, or industry are all measuring these things - 'everyone is doing it!' It is the industry standard.

“The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.”

― W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

Another good lesson from 'Moneyball' is that it's more about systems than people. And if you can improve systems, methodology, and measurement by just 1% a week, by the end of the year you'll have a significant gain. 

I would just like to add that I hope everyone reading this takes it in the right spirit. Just because I've mastered some of these subjects, does not mean I consider myself particularly smart, or even an 'expert' - it's simply that I've been lucky to have had the opportunity to study these concepts, to devote a lot of time to them, and that I'm genuinely interested in them.

I don't believe understanding these concepts makes me more of a professional, or even a better marketer. Others have many insights into this topic, or other directions, which could be equally, or indeed, far more cogent and useful. More than anything I hope that my posts provoke a useful discussion. Maybe it can help you, or your business?

"To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge." 

- Plato