QUESTION & ANSWERS: An Interview with James Connor, author of The Perfection of Marketing

October 23, 2008

1. James, what did you set out to accomplish with this book and do you feel you’ve done it?
I wanted to do two things.

• Take something as mysterious and unpredictable as marketing and clarify it into simple repeatable steps that every company should follow to create predictable marketing results
• After testing and perfecting the process over 12 years, I wanted to pass the process on to others to help their businesses grow more effectively. Everyone will benefit when companies can tell their story more effectively and stop wasting marketing dollars

2. The book is a narrative between you and a CEO, VP of Marketing, and CFO. Is this based on an actual client or are the characters fictional?

I wanted to create a marketing book that was a page-turner. Story and plot makes it fun to read. The characters are composites of the over 200 CEOs, VP’s of Marketing, and CFOs I’ve advised over 12 years. There isn’t a single word said in the book that someone didn’t say to me many times. So people will find the concerns and marketing advice ring true. Each of my clients thinks the characters are really them, but in truth, they are composites.

3. You say that your process is based on best practices. Can you explain how you arrived at them?

Sure. Working backwards. The Perfection of Marketing is the detailed playbook run by my branding and advertising agency, The James Group, that has made more money for 95% of our clients over 12 years. We failed when we skipped one of these steps. So we know now what not to leave out. The best practices were arrived at by studying the marketing of successful companies; meditating on them to create the most efficient processes; then testing them again and again.

4. Does this process only apply to midsized companies? And can you define what constitutes a midsized business?

The Perfection of Marketing processes would be true for any company. However, the book has been tailored to small and midsized companies as 99.9% of businesses in America are under 500 employees.

The James Group specializes in businesses that are $5-100 million in sales. This is typically what we think of as a midsized business. However, we have taken on the occasional start-up company and The Perfection of Marketing worked for them as well. For example, we worked on a start-up, TransparentValue, that went on to form a robust partnership with Dow Jones and recently received $500M from Guggenheim Partners.

5. You have coined the term Sales Moment. Can you tell us how you arrived at it and how knowing the Sales Moment can make these companies more money?

There are 100 things that you can say about any company or product, but only one of them makes the sale. I’ve seen this from meditating for over 10 years. The mind thinks in pictures. Before making any choice, a little movie or story plays in your mind about what result will come from that choice. We always choose the image that we believe will bring us the most happiness. We are bliss seekers; pain avoiders. The string of mental images isn’t important. What’s important, is that last mental image that spurs you to act. If a company can understand what their Sales Moment is, they can discard all the noise. Simply focus on conveying that Sales Moment in all marketing to dramatically increase sales.

6. What are the big ideas in this book?

There are three big ideas.

• Rolling out the brand by seeing everything from your customer’s perspective
• How to do return on investment marketing using the lifetime value of a customer, which is applying the classic NPV formula (Net Present Value) to marketing

7. What is unique about your process and do you think that the CEO’s of these businesses can do it on their own after reading your book?

The Perfection of Marketing is the first book to consolidate all the best practices of marketing into three simple steps that any CEO can implement to build their company’s brand and drive sales. My father and grandfather were West Point graduates and career Army officers. From the time I was able to walk, they drilled into me, you are either trained or not trained. Anyone who studies The Perfection of Marketing can consider themselves trained. They will know what to give up and what to take up in their marketing.

8. From your experience, what is the biggest mistake that midsized businesses make?

They don’t understand the lifetime value of their customer, so they can’t do consistent return on investment marketing. They usually undervalue their customer significantly, which means they underspend on their marketing, stunting growth and leaving huge amounts of money on the table.

9. What is the most important thing you’ve learned from running your company for the last 12 years?

Every mistake in business, every mistake in marketing, boils down to one. Seeing the world from your perspective and not from the customers. There’s a beautiful teaching from the Buddhist Master Shantideva, who’s name means Angel of Peace. He says: “All the suffering in the world comes from taking care of yourself. All the happiness in world comes from taking care of others.” I’ve seen and experienced the truth of this again and again. Companies need to market from their customer’s perspective not their own. I applied this principle to every technique in The Perfection of Marketing. It’s the wisdom and only reason that these techniques consistently work.

10. You talk about the three engines of a business, can you explain them briefly and discuss why the third one often goes uncultivated?

Any business whether it’s business to consumer, business to business, business to government, or even a non-profit, has three engines of business. There’s Operations, Finance, and Brand Marketing. Businesses exist because someone had a vision for how to provide a product or service in a unique unmet way to others. That’s Operations.

Then, they discover they can’t be in business very long unless they understand Finance. So they bring in someone or acquire the skills to learn the true costs of goods sold and how to make a profit. They dabble a little in Marketing, lose money, and conclude that Marketing doesn’t work for their business. They just go back to doing what they are good at, perfecting Operations. This is human nature: we do what we are good at and avoid what we are bad at.

Most businesses are limping along on only two engines: Operations and Finance. Good businesses don’t become great businesses until they kick in that third engine of business, Brand Marketing, which is what The Perfection of Marketing is all about.

To schedule a time to speak with James Connor, author of The Perfection of Marketing contact jamesconnor@thejamesgroup.com