I was just a few years into my career, selling a brand new solution with a partner known for wanting to control deals.   This solution (“Widget”) cost the company a lot of money to acquire and develop, and everyone at the company (as well as partners like us) had been through endless training about how to position and sell it.

At the time, I was known as “the smart girl SE” as in, “Can the smart girl SE come onsite with us for this one?”

The smart girl SE came onsite with James* to meet a new customer.  James was a boisterious, friendly salesperson who called everyone “buddy”, punched them in the upper arm, and talked a lot about beahs (beers), the Sox, and his good old days on a college hockey team.  After a lot of chatter, we starting talking through the customer’s environment, their concerns, and needs. A few minutes of discussion and it was obvious that they were a candidate for this new solution.

“You may want to look at this new Widget,” I said.  “It is great for environments like yours that have qualities A, B, and C.”

And then I made an error in judgement.

In an effort to cede the conversation to the partner salesperson, thinking I was being a good partner by doing so, I said, “James, why don’t you tell them some more about Widget.”

I knew immediately it was a mistake.  James got a quintessential “deer in the headlights” look in his eye.  He started sweating.  He looked at his fingernails, at his shoes, and at his watch.  Finally, with everyone’s eyes on him, he stammered,

“It’s just bettah.”  (That’s how we say “better” in Boston.)

And that was the entirety of his sales pitch.

Relationships are important. Nobody wins deals by being the smartest person in the room – people win deals because they understand the customer’s environment, their concerns, and in cases of extremely good salespersonship, even act as an extension of the customer’s team.  But relationships are not everything.

Every person in an organization needs to be able to speak about their product and their value proposition.  Customers are looking for guidance, for honesty, and for advice.  But they are also looking for information about a specific solution, about a specific product.  Sure, they may be 57% of the way through the sales process by the time they approach the vendor directly, but that means the other 43% is still in our hands.

And just saying that the product is “better” isn’t going to cut it.

*name has been changed to protect the….

There is an episode in the West Wing (“Separation of Powers”) where Josh Lyman, top legislative negotiator for the president, is “benched” because of personal problems. In his stead, a woman named Angela Blake is sent in to negotiate.  Josh is deflated, and angry. He feels like this is his role being taken away; he barely holds it together when he hears the news.

Negotiations go poorly.  Josh is frustrated, as is the rest of the staff.  However, when the president asks Josh his opinion of how Blake is doing, Josh says, “You gotta trust the person in the room.”

I think about that moment a lot, because it’s true – you do have to trust the person in the room. You have to trust that the salesperson is doing her best to close the deal, that your boss is doing his best to advocate for you, that product management is doing their best to prioritize features accurately.  And all of this happens when you’re not in the room.

This is where a lot of people get crazy.  Take the salesperson example – sure you might send the salesperson in to close the deal on their own, but if they don’t close it, then suddenly the sales manager is all over them asking if they did this, or did that, and can they get another meeting, and try this other strategy.  Or how many times has someone’s manager committed to trying to get them a raise or promotion, only to come back empty-handed; the employee often feels betrayed, or let down, or feels as if the manager had a lot of things to negotiate and his or her salary fell off the list at some point.

So the key is to find an organization, and a leadership team that you can trust in the room.  And the leadership has to trickle down to everyone – because the product management example above isn’t about a manager of yours going to do something, it’s about a peer organization trying to get things done. To me, that’s probably one of my top few yardsticks for assessing how I feel about an organization – do I trust these people in a room without me?

The key is also to remember that sometimes you are the person in the room.  You are the one negotiating and speaking for someone else.  And as such, you carry a burden of doing your best for them – of being worthy of their letting go of the opportunity to advocate for themselves, as they are not the person in the room.

A few weeks ago I caught up with a former colleague who, like me, finds himself in a leadership role at a startup.  His role is different from mine, but we find ourselves in some similar situations.  For example, we have both had the experience of off-handedly suggesting something and having it executed, almost accidentally. We both marvel at how much decision-making gets done in a startup, and what we get to contribute to.

And then he was explaining to me how there will come a time at his startup when his specific role in the company will need to be formalized and its scope determined.  He took the job with a few conditions, one being that he get to be part of that conversation when it occurred.

“You want to be in the room for those conversations,” I said.

“Exactly.  I get to be in the room.”

When I think about good leadership, often I think about big, bold leadership.  People like Marissa Mayer or Elon Musk – big risk takers who make bold moves.  Sure, they are inspiring and there is value in my business education to following them, but it’s hard to consider them role models. Aspiring to be “like Marissa Mayer” or “like Elan Musk” is not helpful to me on a daily basis.

Yesterday, I watched a very small activity that I’m not sure anyone else noticed, and it hit me hard that *this* is what good, everyday leadership looks like.  Here’s what happened.

Our CTO was giving a technical talk, occurring in Cambridge with our Nashua team joining via Google Hangouts.  We do this kind of broadcast bi-weekly for our engineering iteration meetings, and they are riddled with issues: bad audio, screens that don’t share, wifi problems, and any number of other similar problems.

I watched as our SVP of Engineering – an executive who has arguably one of the most important roles in executing our strategy – log in to the Hangout from Cambridge to see the version of the screen his team in Nashua is seeing. He had the CTO correct his screen sharing and camera a few times.  Then I watched as he ran over to his desk and grabbed his headset to hear the audio as it was being heard in Nashua.  He attended the entire talk this way.

It’s a minor thing, right?  But it’s great leadership – it’s leadership that shows a complete lack of ego, and a desire to be inclusive to team members, and a commitment to getting done what has to get done.

The opportunities for these sorts of things are probably more likely in a startup where there isn’t really administrative support staff, and where everyone pitches in, but I also know of startups where the SVP of Engineering wouldn’t deign to do something so mundane.

My lesson of the day: good leadership isn’t only big, bold leadership.

Last week at Infinio we added a few members to the sales and marketing teams.

I’m not sure I could have predicted it, but it was enough people to suddenly feel like there is critical mass on the sales and marketing floor.  There’s now a constant buzz of noise, someone is always on the phone with a customer, and our Friday afternoon sports/movies/music debates just got a lot more lively.  Another indicator?  There’s more than one destination for lunch each day.

When I was at Dell there was a time when my team grew from 3 people to 7, inorganically. Suddenly one person’s dental appointment or sick kid no longer cancelled the team meeting; my team 1x1s took nearly an entire day.

As a manager, having a team grow like that added immeasurable complexity, but it also added immeasurable value.  When it came to brainstorming, or allocating projects to people, or even sending someone to get something proofread or looked at, there were options.  Delegating became something other than zero-sum.

It’s exciting to see this happen at Infinio.  To have responsibilities that were held by one person grow large enough that they split into a few people’s domains, to have a few people performing the same function rather than just one person in each role, and to feel like when something comes up, there’s a particular person to go to for assistance – these are all exciting signs of growth.

I’ve heard early members of startups talk about the good old days when they were small and agile and knew everyone.  We’re still in that phase, I think.  But, delightfully, a little bigger.

The other day I was in a meeting looking at sales numbers.  We were comparing performance of two different queues of leads, and someone said something like “Clearly, Queue A is giving us a better yield.”

The numbers were pretty small and we only had a week’s worth of data.  “I don’t know,” I said, “is that difference really statistically significant?”

“Of course it is.  It’s twice as big”

In the moment I let it go, but I knew that it wasn’t a true assessment of statistical significance. Let’s say there were only 4 names in each queue.  If Queue A gave us 1 lead and Queue B gave us 2 leads, then “twice as many” wouldn’t feel like a conclusion.  Conversely, if there 1000 names in each queue, and one gave us 400 leads while the other gave us 800 leads, then we could comfortably draw the conclusion.  But what about all the in-betweens?

All of this drove me to do some research on what “statistical significance” really means.  As I’ve been learning, much of marketing is actually pretty numbers-driven, so knowing what numbers “matter” is important to making good decisions.

Here’s the first definition that came up, from Wikihow.  “Statistical significance is the number, called a p-value, that tells you the probability of your result being observed, given that a certain statement (the null hypothesis) is true. If this p-value is sufficiently small, the experimenter can safely assume that the null hypothesis is false.”

Huh?

OK, first I teased out what “null hypothesis” means – it’s the baseline that assumes that there is no impact of the variable, or no difference in two populations.  In my example, the null hypothesis would be that the yield of Queue A is the same as the yield of Queue B.  Any difference in their yields is based purely on randomness.

As I read more, there seem to be three interrelated concepts that feed into whether something is significant:

Sample Size: How many activities are we looking at?

How big are each of the queues?

Confidence Range: How precisely honed in on the conclusion are we?

We’re comfortable saying that if the yields are within 5% of each other then they are, for practical purposes, the same.

Confidence Level: How sure are we about our conclusion?

We’re 90% sure that the yields being different means that in the larger population they will be different (and thus we should/shouldn’t make a decision based on this)

So the way these interact is: If you want a higher confidence level (i.e., to be more sure of your conclusion) then you have to accept a larger confidence interval (i.e., accept a greater range, like 8% rather than 5%).  To make that interval lower, then you need a larger sample size.

Statistical significance means that we are at least 95% that the results are due to the nature of the different populations, not to randomness.

Getting back to our example, then the thing we’d be testing is “Is the yield from Queue A greater than that of Queue B.”  We’d define “greater than” as calculating the interval of both results and checking that they don’t overlap.  And we’d need a big enough sample size to be 95% sure that these results were repeatable.

One thing that helped me understand this more concretely is this calculator provided by KISSMetrics.

Let’s say I have a sample size of 100.

If Queue A yields 90 and Queue B yields 80, then with 98% certainty we can say Queue A is better.

But let’s say Queue A yields 40 and Queue B yields 50.  Then the certainty is only 92%, which is not considered “statistically significant.”  We’re only 92% sure that this is not due to randomness.

This video is a great resource specifically about marketing, as is this page from UT, which is a little more formal mathematically.

My take-home conclusion is that of where I started: it’s not always obvious whether something is “statistically significant” without doing some serious math.

In college, one of the courses I enjoyed the most was Operations Research.  There were two versions of this course, a deterministic one and a probabilistic one.  I always regret only having taken the former.

The deterministic course taught you to solve problems like this, “If it costs $X to make metal widgets over 3 weeks with a profit of $A, and $Y to make wooden widgets over 5 weeks with a profit of $B, what is the optimal mix of metal and wooden widgets to make to maximize profit?”

The probabilistic course taught you to solve problems like this, “If 75% of widgets with a Flaw X fail, and only 2% of those without Flaw X fail, and 15% of widgets have Flaw X, what is the chance of any new widget failing?”

This all came to mind because a few days ago a colleague and I were discussing how marketing is totally probabilistic.  There’s no set of events, materials, and interactions that will guarantee a certain outcome.  Everything we’re doing in marketing is to increase probabilities.

Marketing (I’m talking about demand generation / marketing communications marketing, not product marketing) is all about reaching a large audience and successively focusing in on the people in that audience who are most open to learning more, then have the specific pain we’re solving, then are making a decision about how to solve the problem in the near-term.

(If you need a crash course on this, Atlassian did a series of blog posts on it a few years back.)

Optimizing marketing is about (a) increasing the size of the total audience, and (b) increasing the conversion rate for each phase of the funnel.  That is, how can we go to the right events/write the write whitepapers/invite people to the right webinars so that more of the people looking for a solution know about us, and more of the ones who know about us see us as a solution for their shortlist.

But that’s what’s kind of crazy about marketing: It’s always “how can we find more” but there’s no concept of “how can we find all.”  Sure, there are industry benchmarks (things like X% of visitors to your website should visit at least Y pages, and Y% of people who attend a webinar are likely to buy in Z months), but those are merely goals, not guarantees.

In short, there’s no formula that says “Go to VMworld, send these two whitepapers, have these three conversations, and then invite the customer to this private event, then they will buy your product.”

Marketing gets a bad rap – but it shouldn’t.  It’s a key function in a company, and is a lot harder than just writing some press releases and choosing booth graphics for an event.  But thinking through this leads me to wonder if its lack of respect is rooted in its probabilistic – rather than deterministic – nature.

In the past 16 hours, I’ve checked into not one, but (due to a wee snowstorm in Boston) two hotels.  One was mid-range, and one slightly higher-end.  Neither one had toothpaste in the bathroom.

In fact, I can’t remember checking into any hotels ever – anywhere – that had toothpaste in the bathroom.  Mouthwash, very, very occasionally.  But not toothpaste.

Lest you think this is a Seinfeld-esque meditation on “What’s the deal with hotels and toothpaste”, read on. There’s a marketing lesson here.

A few years ago, Slate had a comprehensive article on why there isn’t toothpaste in hotel rooms.  The author interviews several people in the industry, then offers several theories, none of which he really seems to like: toiletries are refilled from a big vat, and toothpaste can’t be refilled; it’s too expensive; it’s not an aspirational cosmetic; it’s a conspiracy to tip bellman who have to bring it up.

Whether it’s a conspiracy, an economic decision, or something else, what I see is an interesting marketing opportunity – at least an opportunity for analysis.

One of the things marketers do is create “awareness” around a brand.  This isn’t the kind of marketing that helps someone who is down to deciding between Toyota and Honda, this is the kind of marketing that Mercury did a few years ago with “You’ve got to put Mercury on your list.”  It’s making sure that people are aware that the brand exists, so that when it’s time to make the “shortlist” (in this case, cruise through the CVS toothpaste aisle and choose one) the brand is top of mind.

I don’t know a lot about how consumers choose to purchase products, (although I can tell you a whole lot about how IT buyers do it) but I’ve got to believe that there is a value to someone’s using a toothpaste they haven’t used before, in their likelihood to buy it in the future.  Right now I think that toiletries in hotels are funded by the hotels as an amenity.  Some of the higher-end hotels have higher-end brands like Bliss or L’Occitane.

But what if Colgate (or Crest or Aquafresh or AIM) paid for their toothpaste to go into hotels? Couldn’t that help the toothpaste companies?  Let’s say I always just buy what’s on sale; or perhaps I always buy Colgate because that is what I grew up brushing with.  Wouldn’t this be one of the only chances to have me try something different?  And couldn’t it be at least as effective per marketing $ as telling me that 9 out of 10 dentists recommend something?

It seems like that would be something worth piloting, although measuring the efficacy could be difficult.  If you picked just one city, you’d have no way to track the impact on everyone’s buying habits when they went home and bought Brand X at their local pharmacy.  Unless you gave them a coupon, which tracked their purchase.  Or chose a destination where you know where the guests are from (e.g. Disney during NJ’s school vacation time).

In any case – I can’t tell you how often I’ve forgotten toothpaste and yearned for it in my hotel room at 11pm.  I’d be a fan of the first brand to help me out.

It’s been about two years since I last hired someone, but I can feel the muscle memory kicking in.  That delicate balance of both buying and selling at the same time; the drive past where the candidate starts towards what I need to know about what they’ve done and how they’ve done it; the explanations of what the role, team, product, and company are like.

The first time I was involved in hiring people it was at a small reseller and I interviewed all our potential college hires.  I learned how to disarm people to get to the meat of their accomplishments.  My favorite example was of someone who leaned back in his chair and proudly told me that he didn’t buy any of his textbooks in college.  I also learned how accurate first impressions usually are in the long term.  It wasn’t solely up to me whether someone got the job or not, but I often was the gate through which candidates had to pass.

When I hired at Dell, it was for my own team that I was building, somewhat from scratch.  I learned that people usually forgot to ask about what the role entailed day-to-day, and that was a major source of issues down the road.  “Solutions Marketing Manager”, as it turned out, could mean a lot of things, and not all of them had to do with what I was hiring for.  I learned that finding things people were proud of was the best way to learn who they really were and what they really wanted.

Maybe most importantly, I learned that a former manager of mine was right in valuing a diversity of skills on a team over any one top contributor, although I probably didn’t appreciate that until far after the interviewing part was over.  Hiring a team from scratch really forced me to think through what I saw the team as growing into.  Handling people’s questions about culture and career path and priorities forced me into forming opinions about those things in a way no other exercise would have.

Now I’m hiring again for my own team, from scratch.  What I’m learning is not really about the process or the hiring per se, but about how to describe the job to someone.  Startup jobs by their nature are less well-defined than jobs at larger, more established companies, and yet someone has to decide to take a job doing something.  I’ve been breaking it down for candidates as I mentioned earlier: role, team, product, company, which seems to work for most people.

What’s also been really interesting this time around is that I am working on our company and product messaging at the same time as I’m recruiting people.  So each interview or phone screen is also an opportunity to hone our messaging, to practice explaining what we do to someone who is smart but not familiar with us, and see if it works.  I’m not hiring IT professionals (our target audience) but people who professionally market and sell to IT professionals are a good proxy.

Hiring: it’s one of the most important things I will do in the first half of this year.

When I was growing up (in the ’80’s) phones were definitely associated with girls. I can remember spending hours on the phone with my girlfriends, talking about who-knows-what because usually I had spent the entire day with them.  We called boys – sometimes – but those were quick, awkward conversations. Girls were on the phone with girls.

In fact, we all talked on the phone so much that many of our parents set limits to how much we could be on the phone – 30 minutes or an hour on a school night, for example.

Fast forward to today, and everyone I know is on their phone – constantly.  In bed, while watching TV, on the train, in the bathroom, at work, at dinner, at social events. Constant compulsive checking phones and texting and opening up Facebook and Twitter because you.can’t.stop.

At my house, we’ve tried to set some limits on phone use for us adults, but with little success – we’re tethered.

There have been only three situations in the past year where I found myself in environments without compulsive phone checking, and both have been all-women’s events.  Coincidence?

Once was at the Massachusetts Women’s Conference.  With 10,000 women in the general sessions, of course there were people checking phones in the audience, but nowhere near as much as you see at a typical conference.  In the smaller sessions, I hardly saw any phones come out.

The second places was at an alumni mentoring event that was half recent college grads and half those of us in our 30’s and 40’s.  I am pretty sure that I was the only person who took out her phone at all during the 2-hour event, and I did it with a degree of shame!  (In my defense, my husband was traveling and I wanted to make sure the babysitter didn’t have any questions.)

The third is at my monthly professional lunch meeting.  8-10 women around the table, and phones usually don’t come out for 90 minutes until we need to talk scheduling.

So the interesting question here is “why”.  Why are women’s-only events places where we check our phones less?   Here are some hypotheses:

1. Some number of women, for whatever reason, are less inclined to compulsively check their phones.  As such, the phenomenon of contagious phone checking is less impactful.  (Maybe. Not sure how to figure this one out.)

2. Women care less about their jobs, so they’re less invested in checking email when they’re out of the office.  (Just kidding, want to make sure you’re still reading.)

3. Women consider these networking events crucial to their success and don’t want anything interrupting them.  (A good hypothesis.  Especially in male-dominated fields like mine, I’m not running into people in the men’s room or the golf course – so these events are my chance to forge those bonds.)

I think that last hypothesis is the most likely – and I’ll take it even a step further.  I consider the time I spend doing these things “my” time in a way that almost nothing else I do belongs to me.  I’m not saying I have no downtime – I do.  But I might spend it watching TV (with my husband) or shopping (usually for babyDiva) or cooking (which I love, but it’s for the family). And going to professional development events is something that is really, truly, just for me.

Maybe this is how other people feel about the gym.  But that’s another post for another time.

After watching too much NFL this weekend, I skipped watching the Golden Globes. But I like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, so I watched their opening monologue (dualogue?) on Monday morning.  You can watch it here.

I found parts of it funny, but a few parts of nagged at me as not funny – not only not funny, but offensive.  Then I read this commentary on how they made this the first feminist film awards ceremony.

And I thought, “wow – that’s exactly NOT how I felt about it.”

The two items I was most uncomfortable about were mentioned in this article: one was the “game” they played of which of two actors they preferred physically, and one was their set of jokes about Bill Cosby.

If we look at their “game” my immediate thought was – wow – if two guys were hosting the Globes, and started comparing which of two actresses they found more attractive, we’d probably be disgusted.  Where is our disgust for the converse?

And regarding Bill Cosby, I was deeply offended that women would make jokes around someone accused of a lifetime of sexual assault and abuse.  Is there any way that his alleged victims would have found that funny?

This all reminded me of a discussion that my professional networking group had last week. We were talking about the things we do as women to fit into men’s cultural dominance in our industries.  I gave the example of becoming an NFL fan because if I didn’t follow football I couldn’t talk to my sales guys or customers for 7 months a year.

We didn’t come to a great conclusion.  I mean, we all kind of agreed that if it didn’t offend your “self” (watching football vs going to a strip club) that it was probably good and maybe even necessary.  But I’m not sure any of us walked away satisfied or comfortable with that answer.

In this excellent post about women in Silicon Valley, Nancy Householder Hauge takes Sheryl’s Sandberg’s style of assimilating into the Temple of Male Behavior to task directly.  She writes, “Until people who have created their success by worshipping at the temple of male behavior, like Sheryl Sandberg, learn to value alternate behaviors, the working world will remain a foreign and hostile culture to women.”

As will, likely, Hollywood.  Brava to Charlize Theron for going after the $10M Sony should have offered her, but she had to go get it.

Anyway, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have done a lot for women in entertainment.  Along with other leaders in women’s comedy like Julia Louise-Dreyfus, Rosanne Barr, Ellen Degeneres, and Rhea Perlman, they have demonstrated that women can be funny on the big screen and the small, as actors and producers, and succeed at the highest levels.

So isn’t it time Tina and Amy do it on terms that are comfortable for women?