Winning the Customer: Turn Consumers into Fans and Get Them to Spend More

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INTRODUCTION

When I decided to leave my position as chief marketing officer for the world champion New England Patriots, I was thinking of my family. My kids were getting older, and my workday and travel schedule weren’t leaving me much time to experience the kids growing up. I was out the door before 7 a.m. each day and home after 7 at night. We traveled with the team and hosted at home games. I knew that something had to give, and I decided my children were first priority.

This came at a time when I realized something else on the business end: most of the other teams in the league were missing part of the marketing and revenue-generating puzzle. It was clear that they believed that generating revenue was all about sponsorship sales, and while sponsorship is certainly a part of it, we had discovered that it’s only a piece of the equation. We were successful at the Patriots because we had structured the organization so that we could build both our existing relationships and new business. We had long since abandoned the idea of just pouring more resources into new business and skimping on maintaining current business.

Knowing that other clubs and stadiums could use assistance with structuring and execution to maximize their revenues, I launched TrinityOne. Once TrinityOne was up and running, we began to notice that our methods were relevant not only to sports, but also across other industries; the principles that we had learned at the Patriots and throughout my career in sports made sense for other companies, large or small, private or public. We knew small businesses were struggling with how to put it all together, especially with limited funding and staffing.

I teach a sports marketing course at Boston College. As I created the curriculum and began to outline my thoughts and philosophies, Winning the Customer started to come together. Writing is a totally different animal from my normal day-to-day activities, so I knew it would be smart to have a coauthor. I talked to a few writers, but nothing seemed to click. Then I started following Elizabeth King on Twitter and noticed that she was extremely bright, funny, and a little edgy. I read her blog, StayOutofSchool.com, and liked her style. One day we were engaging in a 140-character discussion on Twitter, and I Direct Messaged her about whether she would ever consider cowriting a book. I convinced her to have a talk to chat about it. In that one phone call, I laid out my thoughts, she talked through the concept with me, and bam, just like that, we agreed to cowrite the book. Pretty cool story in itself.

Having worked in radio, in television, and for an NFL and MLS club, I had learned a particular overall approach to generating revenue: you have to first think of the listener, viewer, and fan, all of whom are consumers. The approach on which I’ve built my career stems from a unique philosophy that can work for any business. In broadcasting and team sports, we do not call our consumers customers; we hold them up to a higher level. It may seem like only a slight nuance, but it changes the dynamic drastically. At the radio station, listeners were all we could think of. We programmed every show for the listeners.

It’s a bit different in other industries. Products are supposedly created to solve problems and provide people with solutions, but I sometimes wonder, Did they really create that product with the consumer in mind, or did they just think it was a cool idea? This difference in perspective also got me scratching my head about how consumer product companies provide customer service. There’s a huge gap in customer relations in many industries because companies think it’s all about the product rather than the customer.

In my first discussion with Andy Wasynczuk, the COO of the Patriots at the time, he told me that the Krafts thought I could create new mechanisms to bring new fans and customers to the team, but it was just as important to them that my group maintain and grow the relationships they had started building. That stuck with me for my entire time at the team. Everything we did always took both maintenance and growth into consideration.

Winning the Customer is all about how to maintain and grow relationships to maximize revenue. We’ll talk about three key areas: (1) organizational structure and systems (The Marketing Playbook), (2) relationship building (Relationship Architecture), and (3) closing business (The Revenue Game). In order to ensure that your company maximizes revenue, all three areas must work harmoniously together.

As I love to joke, none of this is business brain surgery, but we believe that when these three areas of importance come together, you will agree that this is the best way to run your business and win the customer.

WINNING THE CUSTOMER

PART 1

THE MARKETING PLAYBOOK

MARKETING OPERATIONS ARE YOUR FOUNDATION

OVERVIEW

Watching an NFL game on a Sunday afternoon is one of America’s ultimate pastimes. We love to grill incredible burgers, put all the kids in jerseys of their favorite players, and assemble our friends in front of the flat screen. Never mind the feeling of actually tailgating all day and witnessing the game firsthand in the stands. We love the camaraderie. We love the excitement. We love feeling that sense of identity and purpose.

But whether you’re popping Doritos or on your feet yelling at the refs, it’s easy to forget that you’re watching a carefully choreographed marketing machine that’s specifically designed to capture your imagination—and your wallet.

In fact, when it’s done right, it’s designed to tap into as much of your discretionary cash as possible and make you want to spend even more. How do I know? During my nine seasons at the Patriots, we transformed some basic marketing efforts into a revenue-generating engine, which is exactly what anyone in business and marketing should be attempting to do.

The beautiful thing about marketing a football team is that every single thing we did to generate revenue can be replicated—whether you’re Johnson & Johnson or you own the Johnson Family Restaurant in a small resort town.

The challenging thing about marketing is that while it can be replicated, not very many people do so successfully.

In this section, we’re going to look at an organization that’s primed for generating revenue and show you how to make sure your company—whether you have a thousand employees or one—is in position to do the same. A lot of what we’ll be talking about will seem obvious on the surface, but you’ll probably find that what you think this advice means and what it really means can be totally different. We’re going to show you those differences.

Some of what we’ll tell you might seem counterintuitive, and that’s fair—most people don’t work this way. It may trouble you to be told that a real understanding of teamwork means not perpetually covering for people who are blowing it. It may seem unwise to treat people who are less committed to your brand better than those who are sold on it. You may find, as we did, that you have been looking for big spenders in all the wrong places.

The next three chapters will help you set up your organization to win and help you identify and understand who’s already a fan of your product—and who can become one. It will also guide you toward finding those people who are absolutely dying to spend their money with you. It all starts with transferring your business from a transactional to a relationship-oriented marketing model.

Let’s get started.

CHAPTER 1

TRANSACTIONAL VERSUS RELATIONSHIP MARKETING MODEL

For most of the team’s early existence, the New England Patriots brand was widely considered all-around flimsy: a marginal team on the playing field and a mediocre, middle-of-the-pack business organization. Everything about the organization reeked of poor business planning and knee-jerk decision making. Games were rarely sold out, and I remember as a kid following the news to see if the coming Sunday’s home game was going to be blacked out on TV because of the lack of interest in attending games at Foxboro Stadium. The stadium was built on the cheap and was outdated as soon as it opened. When it rained, the concourses flooded. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you there was not one true fan amenity in that building; its most egregious flaw was posing as an NFL stadium while offering only cold aluminum benches instead of seats. Those metal benches epitomized price-driven decision making and made it blatantly clear that no thought had been given to the fans.

Today, just about anyone who is familiar with the team, fan or not, views the organization as a model franchise—both on the field and in its business structure and execution—and it has the Forbes magazine cover story to prove it. As with the vast majority of successful businesses, transforming it from so-so to a powerhouse did not occur overnight; it took years of careful reorganization from the ground up (and the top down) to reinvent both the brand and the business model to the level of excellence it now enjoys.

When I joined the New England Patriots back in 1997, the transformation had already been set in motion. The rebuilding of the organization had begun, initiated shortly after the Kraft family purchased the team and grounded in the family’s clear vision of the team’s future. Because the Krafts had owned Foxboro Stadium prior to buying the team, they enjoyed an inside position; they were primed to apply their business success in other industries to the team, and they had a real understanding of how to turn the franchise around. When the Kraft family bought the team, it focused on cleaning up the image and experience of going to games at Foxboro Stadium. That transition was going to require migrating the team’s business practices from a transactional to a relationship-oriented model.

Whether you realize it or not, you’re already deeply familiar with transactional business models. Those folks selling bouquets of flowers on the street at stoplights are the simplest example. As you slow down to stop at the red light, they come to your window, hoping you will buy a bunch for $10. If you do, they grab the ten-spot, hand you your flowers, and you’re off. They are, too—in hopes of landing their next sucker. This is a purely transactional sale. It’s not quite so cut-and-dried in the context of an enormous organization like the Patriots, but the model is transactional just the same. Let’s look at one specific area of the organization so you can get a better idea of what I mean: sponsorship.

The reason companies sponsor the team is to use the Patriots’ identity and assets for their own branding and marketing initiatives. Before the rebuilding of the organization, selling a sponsorship package would go something like this: the sponsorship sales reps would get a meeting with a company they felt would buy in, show up at the meeting, and plunk down a package of team and stadium assets like signs, media, and logo rights. The sales team’s approach was to always focus on selling the inventory that it had in stock, so if it hadn’t sold enough, say, signs for the year, that would be the first thing on the table for sale to a potential sponsor—whether or not it was relevant to that company. The ways in which the company could use the inventory were not an important part of the equation. The team just wanted to sell its inventory and was focused on getting the sale.

Once the transaction was complete, the sales reps were off to the next sale. It was almost like, Thanks for signing the contract. See you in three years! (at the deal’s expiration date). The process was all about closing business and not about producing results for the customers, which, at the time, was a typical way of doing business in the NFL and other leagues. Unfortunately, some teams still operate this way, not recognizing that transactional business is built around short-term gain and sacrifices long-term vision and sustainability.

The biggest issue with this approach was that when the contract expired, evaluating whether the inventory had helped the sponsor see a return on its investment was about as reliable as flipping a coin. Let’s face it: it is pretty difficult to determine whether a sign in a stadium actually drove business to your company. Come budget evaluation time, things that aren’t easily quantified are easier to do without. If the added value couldn’t be proven, sponsors might not renew, which further forced the staff to operate in a reactionary, year-to-year selling method. They continuously worked to replace lost sponsors, each rep a hamster running on its wheel—there was plenty of motion, but no progress.

A cycle like this obviously hampers revenue growth; it’s a struggle just to keep up with the status quo. At a football team, revenue-generation plans like this are disastrous for the team because the marketing group ends up being dependent on wins to fuel the team’s financial advances—when the team wins, it makes money selling more merchandise, tickets, and sponsorship. The problem is that a sports team’s winning is unpredictable, and the folks in marketing have zero control over the performance of the team. Having a marketing plan based on wins and losses will cause you to lose revenue. It’s a stupid plan.

Dependence on the team’s win record is not a great strategy for generating recurring revenue, and the same is true for any other business. You sell a product or service, but no organization should rely purely on the validity of the product to generate revenue. No matter how significant the brand, it’s the relationship that the organization forms with its consumers to cause continued revenue growth that drives revenue. We’re going to get into how to generate revenue beyond your product in great detail in this book, but implementing a business structure that supports relational business is the first step in getting there.

DESIGNING A BUSINESS OPERATIONS MODEL BUILT FOR REVENUE

A product alone does not create fans of a brand; it’s the harmonious dance between the product and its positioning that does so. The teamwork between product design and marketing is crucial to ensure maximum growth. While the owners of the Patriots were working to rebuild the product, the team, and the stadium, our group was charged with developing a marketing structure that would win customers, regardless of the team’s wins and losses.

I want to pause here because I realize that it’s easy to believe that winning on the field solves everything. Yes, winning on the field is awesome, but without the right structure and plan in place, it’s impossible to capitalize on those wins. Similarly, you may have the best product for sale, a product that’s far better than your closest competitor’s, but if your business structure isn’t built to support it efficiently, you are not marketing it properly, and you’re neglecting to create relationships with your consumer, you will never maximize your revenue opportunity. Always remember, revenue begins with the product; it doesn’t end there.

It was clear from the outset at the Patriots that we had to build a different model to secure financial sustainability—we had to become relationship-oriented. Hoping that we’d have enough sponsors at every contract expiration just wasn’t going to work. With the new, relational approach, we still marketed team assets like signs, media, and logo rights, but we sold them just to recognize revenue. The real business deal was to identify the sponsors’ needs and goals and show how we could help accomplish them. Our job became not to sell anything; our primary function became to help our partners do business.

To do this effectively, we first had to change the structure of our department and how we operated to get into position to build strong relationships; everyone’s job description and list of responsibilities changed so that we could invest our efforts in learning about our partners’ businesses and what would help them succeed, which included learning as much as possible about the individuals within the company. We stopped being transactional salespeople and evolved into relationship architects.

Changing How We Thought about Teamwork

Again, the first step was changing our structure, job functions, and protocols, so that’s where we’re beginning in the book. In the mid-1990s, the marketing department of the New England Patriots had around six staff members, and everyone did a little bit of everything, helping one another out. That sounds noble, but it was actually incredibly inefficient. Salespeople would prospect for new business, help coordinate contract execution, and hand out giveaways at the stadium gates. Everyone doing everything prevents an organization from reaching its full potential. If you are a member of the team and you are doing everything, how can you possibly perform your main function properly and consistently? The belief is that the person who has the teamwork gene is always there to help others and make sure the team is successful, regardless of who is doing the work and how it gets done. Folks, it’s time to wake up and smell the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee: that’s not teamwork, that’s disorganization.

Even the cavemen understood this principle: everyone had his own specific skill set and excelled in a specific area. Not to oversimplify, but in caveman days, there were hunters, gatherers/preparers, and cooks. The hunters were the strongest, fastest members of the community, and they would battle every day to bring home enough food to feed everyone in their clan. Hunters would hand off their spoils to the next group, who, while the hunters were out doing their job, gathered all the necessary ingredients, skinned and prepared the fresh meat, and handed it off to those who cooked it and served it to the clan. Everyone had a specific job that allowed the others to accomplish their jobs to the very best of their ability. Imagine if the hunter had had to do everything; the community would probably have starved. Survival was predicated on everyone doing only his own job.

A similarly structured marketing group allows an organization to flourish. The marketing team we were building was focused on everyone doing her own job to the best of her ability and pulling together for a common goal. It was not about encouraging the practice of being the superstar who fills in all the gaps and covers up the deficiencies of an organization. It was designed specifically to allow the salespeople, the hunters, to maximize how much revenue and how many new deals they could bring into the organization. Then, we assembled a marketing ops team to specifically support them.

If a keeper ran all over the pitch trying to make every play, who would protect the net? Can a quarterback throw a pass and then catch it as well? Of course not. Coach Bill Parcells used to make a statement that has stuck with me for many years: Know your role. I’ve heard the stories so many times about Coach Parcells approaching a defensive lineman and saying, Your job this Sunday is to put number 76 on his ass. Forget about the ball. Forget about the quarterback. You will be successful if, on every play, I look over and see number 76 on his ass.

The coach instructed each player in a similar fashion, providing him with his own mission that strategically fit piece by piece with the overall game plan. He knew that if everyone played his role and executed as instructed, the team would win. I never witnessed the pep talk firsthand, but the concept has stuck with me and makes total, logical sense.

The New England Patriots have won three Super Bowls, but that first win was the one that caught people outside the organization off guard. However, I’m positive that Bill Belichick, our coach during those victories, was the least surprised because he knew that the players understood their individual roles and that their collaboration resulted in a powerful team. I remember him being so calm and confident the week prior to that first Super Bowl victory in New Orleans over the St. Louis Rams. Watching him stay so relaxed, I kept thinking, We are going to win this one. The coach knows we are going to win this game. Of course, he didn’t actually know, but a feeling permeated our headquarters at the Fairmount Hotel that he had confidence that his team would perform with the characteristics that embodied teamwork. The St. Louis Rams were the favorites going into the game; heck, their offense was called the Greatest Show on Turf. We supposedly had no right to be in the game; we were lucky and had no chance of winning. Through all the hype and disbelief, Coach was right. He’d organized the team to win.

So teamwork, first and foremost, means knowing your role and executing it to your fullest ability. That was the first philosophy that we brought to the marketing department: you display teamwork when you get your job done the way it was laid out in the planning process. Then, and only then, should you attempt to take on any other duties or assist in any other capacity. In the case of the lineman whose job was to put number 76 on his ass—sure, once number 76 was eighty-sixed, he should pummel the quarterback into the ground if he’s there for the taking. But never, and I must repeat never, avoid your primary responsibility and the reason that you are a part of the team. If your teammate is slacking, you are not helping by doing his job for him and hiding a weakness on the team.

Don’t Cover Up the Weak Spots

In order to coach, lead, or teach effectively, it is imperative to expose the weaknesses in an organization. Covering up deficiencies only disguises areas that need to be improved and fixed. Filling those gaps is not good teamwork if doing so leaves gaps and long-term problems unsolved.

In fact, the consummate team player does not always pick up the slack. I remember always being frustrated when I was in radio because I worked so hard and other folks breezed through, riding on the work that I and others did. At times they were applauded and given opportunities and greater responsibilities simply because they had a knack for catching the eye of the boss. One very smart mentor and friend, John Maguire, GM of Sports Radio WEEI at the time, once told me, Don’t let that make you crazy; sometimes you just have to let things unravel. I always wanted to be Mr. Fix-It because I truly wanted the group to succeed, but assuming that role was only a short-term solution and was not the behavior of a true team player—or a sign of a well-designed team.

Teamwork takes discipline and knowing your role and the roles of the others on the team. Just because you know the other roles, you shouldn’t necessarily fill them. If you do help out, make sure you’ve tended to your own responsibilities first and be sure the deficient group member knows that he needs to step it up, even though you did have his back. Teamwork leads to victories and successes, if you know what it truly takes to be a team.

MANAGEMENT: REINFORCING AND DEFINING ROLES

At this point, it should be clear