DM Specialists are in Danger of Loosing Their 360% View

Written By Ted Grigg

There is a tendency for non-direct marketers to break out online marketing as something other than a new medium made to order for professional direct marketers. They treat it as a new business genre that highly experienced direct marketers cannot support or contribute to in some significant way.

Another inappropriate segmentation in my mind is that CRM professionals are somehow not direct marketing professionals who happen to specialize in a specific activity. Knowing several CRM practitioners, I do not believe that they view their chosen area of specialization as an industry that is separate from direct marketing. But business leaders often structure it that way within their companies.

These niche segmentation schemes hurt the future of all direct marketers because they artificially limit the scope of the discipline. It just reinforces the perception that direct marketing consists of a set of tactics rather than an over arching strategy.

This professional segmentation has already evolved in the medical and legal fields. Some in those professions suggest that this overspecialization encourages surgeons to cut and the Internist to medicate for the same problem. As with all specialists, they recommend what they know and not necessarily the best solution.

I don’t know about you, but I think there exists an important role for the referring physician to look at the problem holistically in order to refer to the specialists he or she believes will solve the medical problem with a balanced perspective.

If you are a CRM specialist, would you consider yourself a weak customer acquisition strategist? If you have a history of beating controls in the direct mail arena, would you comfortably tackle a DRTV control? The list goes on.

We often talk of the lack of industry cross-pollenization. What about the need to take specialties out of their silos to make them accounting for results of multi-channel marketing efforts?

Ted Grigg
What Ted does best is increase response by beating controls, applying multiple channels to target markets, profiling customer databases and generally improving sales results using deep direct marketing principles. Regard Ted as your personal “think-tank” for your direct marketing planning and strategy development. After analyzing several hundred million dollars of direct response testing in all channels, he brings with him the knowledge accumulated from seeing what tends to work and what does not. Having worked on both the agency and client side of direct marketing, Ted understands the unique challenges faced by agencies and their clients. Agencies need to sell themselves and deliver sales results. And clients not only require results, but need ideas they can implement while focusing on tracking response using a relational database. If Ted brings nothing else to the table, by profiling customer databases and creating response propensity models, he quickly becomes the clients’ expert on their own customers. His formal training includes a BA from Abilene Christian University and two years of graduate work at Texas Tech University. For a national direct-to-consumer insurance company, Ted developed a revolutionary direct mail format that beat most standing direct mail controls for this company. He also generated more profitable business for this firm by expanding compiled list circulation of less than 10% to more than 30% of total direct mail circulation within a year. (Insurance business generated by direct mail demonstrated higher persistency than customers coming from other media such as print and DRTV.) Ted’s plan and implementation of Medicare lead generation campaigns for over 60 regional and national HMO/PPO organizations combined multiple channels that surpassed some sales projections by as much as 60%. Additional industry experience over the last 30 years includes B2B or B2C for finance, securities, home security, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, government, technology, nonprofit, retail, transportation, communications, and multiple categories in the services industry. As the founder of Wyse Direct (a division for Wyse Advertising in Cleveland, OH), he successfully launched and branded a new technology product for Seiko-Mead by supporting a nationwide sales team with a predictable flow of qualified sales leads. While a VP of new business development for the Grizzard Agency, Ted acted as the direct marketing strategist who refocused the agency’s culture to attract new commercial and fundraising accounts. At the time, Grizzard was essentially a direct mail fund raising production operation. His leadership and team building effectiveness prepared Grizzard for the eventual Omnicom acquisition and Grizzard’s successful integration into Omnicom’s large group of advertising agencies. An independent DM consultant, Ted continues to write numerous articles and conduct webinars on direct marketing techniques. He also wrote The HMO/PPO Marketing Plan — A Step-by-Step Guide publishing it through Executive Enterprises in New York City. During his youth, Ted was raised in Lille, France with his missionary family attending French schools becoming fluent in reading and writing French. Away from the job, Ted is a computer geek, blogger and science fiction buff!
http://www.dmcgresults.com
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