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Note from Regis: This is Part III of a three-part interview with Mark Stevens, best-selling author of Your Marketing Sucks, Your Management Sucks, and God is a Salesman. Mark is also CEO of MSCO, a results-driven management and marketing firm.  This is the second interview in Dot Connector’s Leadership Skills interview series.  Read Part I here. Read Part II here.

Regis: Why is it so difficult for many marketers to understand that advertising and marketing is suppose to drive sales?

Mark Stevens: A lot of people just don’t “do marketing.” First of all, a lot of them don’t know what marketing means unless they go into advertising.  They go into it because they think it’s creative.  Finance is ugly, marketing is creative.  That is what they think.  Actually finance is extremely creative i.e. the mortgage, the lease, etc.

Regis: Exactly! I have a finance degree so I couldn’t agree more (laughs).

Mark Stevens: But there tends to be the feeling that marketing is creative, so “creative” means: “I should be able to do creative things. What does that have to do with commerce?”

It’s really amazing – you get people who think a marketer can be a creative person, yet most people who go into marketing really don’t like business.

That is the thing: they really don’t like business.  They don’t consider themselves business people, they consider themselves creative people.  They say “don’t weigh me down with those financials, I don’t want to see a spreadsheet.  I don’t want to know about it.  And, I don’t ever want to talk to a sales person because a sales person is a low life.”

They think a sales person is a low life.  I mean that is what they think!  That is so obnoxious to me.

- Mark Stevens

You get CMOs who have no connection to the sales force.  “We’re the Marketing Department.   The sales morons go out there and sell the shit and we tell them how to sell it.”  It’s terrible!

Great sales forces – and there have been some in this country’s history – founded the great companies:

• When IBM was in the early days of selling hardware, it had an amazing sales force.
• When Xerox was a truly great company, they required that its sales people fly first class, because they called them the “Princes of the company.”  It was a rule.  It was a rule!  Why? Because they’re the “Princes of the company.”

So that is what I think it is Regis. They say “I am not in business! Don’t bother me with finance guys like Regis, because he is an ugly finance guy.  He is not ‘creative.’ Why would I need to know anything else as long as I am creating cute campaigns?”

Regis: It’s interesting to go back to what you were saying earlier about business school.  Do you think that maybe the way business schools segment paths for being in “business” is the tipping point (for this thinking)?  Because you have to pick:  Accounting? “Oh no, that’s really dry I don’t want to do that.”  Finance? “No that is scary and ugly.”  Management? “Well, I am not really sure what that means.”  Marketing? “Oh, that’s creative and cool, I will do that!”

Mark Stevens: Absolutely. I think that is a big part of it.  Unless you came to school with a mindset that told you you wanted to be an engineer, or doctor, or in finance.  The menu of choices if, you came (to college) uncertain, drives you towards the less, it drives you toward what people can view as “gut” (must-have) courses and those with more “creative elbow room” etc.

I just think that business school, for the most part, is counterproductive for most people.  It just keeps you out of the workplace longer…where you really learn.  You know you learned a lot more when you started working than you ever learned in school.

Regis: Oh, absolutely.

Mark Stevens: Now in finance, you certainly have to have the building blocks.  But then again, Carl Ichan never took a business class in his life.  One of the first things he did when he got out of undergraduate school was to create the first options exchange.  There was no options exchange and he did it by himself.

I am a big believer in — and you do it through your blog and your relationships and your thinking about unconventional stuff — the idea that people of like minds are continuing through a liberal arts education their whole life.  And in a liberal arts education, you are exposed to Newton and Niche, to the Rolling Stones, and to every possible piece of information.

You never know where your idea will come from that will be the thing that will drive you.

- Mark Stevens

I am writing music right now, popular music. I am working with a composer. It’s amazing to be doing this now because when you write music, you have to be in absolute tandem with the person who is writing the music.  You have to weave and knead your art together.  I write lyrics and he writes the music. But they can’t sit apart, they have to be making love at every single moment.

Yesterday, I had a song that came into my mind.  You see, I write everything out, including my books, in my Blackberry.  So, a flash came to me and I wrote another song.  One [song] I had already written and it was in the can.  The second one is written and being composed now.  But, I had a flash from nowhere and I wrote the third song in ten minutes.  I know it’s a really good song, but I will learn from that song.  I had an idea that “God’s a salesman.” So I write a book.  Where the hell did that come from?  It’s a complete learning process.

The great things come to you out of nowhere and come to you really fast.

- Mark Stevens

By doing something new, like writing music for me, it opens up a whole new card of thought or action that I know I will apply on many different ways beyond just music.

Now, the proudest moment I have in my life is when I was in a restaurant in Greenwich, CT.  I asked if they would play my song while everyone was eating.  They played it, and I watched people listen to my music.  It was just…I can’t explain the joy of that.  You have to do it.  You never can hear people reading your books, although I love to hear people who have read the books and are using it in their companies.  Watching people listen to you music, and not even knowing you’re there…god it’s great!

Regis: That’s fantastic.  One question about social media.  In general, social media or social networking is in its infancy.  A lot of companies are trying to figure social networking/social media out as a marketing channel.  Some companies are “touching the stove” and getting burned.  Some are figuring out how to leverage it successfully.  Do you think social networking is at the point that it can be a profitable marketing channel in an integrated plan (like a “Your Marketing Sucks”-style plan) or do you feel like it’s something that is still too unproven?

Mark Stevens: No, I think you can definitely look at it as a profitable channel.  A successful social network that gets enough of a following is an extremely viable business model because of two things: traffic, but more important than traffic, intimacy.

So in a social network, if it is a successful one, you belong to something.  It’s almost like an affinity group.  The two largest affinity groups in the United States are AARP and the Catholic Church.  A social network will come along that will be bigger than both of them.  One of them may be already [bigger], I don’t know what the numbers are now.  So I think that absolutely can be [a viable marketing channel], it’s just a new way.

You told me you reached for questions for this interview on LinkedIn.  What social media does is so interesting because it takes a lot of the old behavior models and makes them unnecessary.  A lot of people never wanted to network, because they would have to show up and talk to people.  Now, you don’t have to be outgoing; you don’t have to work a room. So the people who used to be successful in networking, the guys that could “work a room” probably aren’t successful in working LinkedIn.  It’s a different mindset. It just changes everything.

From a financial perspective I think that the true profitability is yet to come but God, they are just like gigantic networks with intimacy.  Nobody feels intimate with NBC.  But people feel intimate with their various circles in Myspace, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.  So I think that adds a very important component to the equation and that can be leveraged.

This concludes the interview with Mark Stevens.  If you haven’t already, be sure to check out Part I and Part II.

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Note from Regis: This is Part II of a three-part interview with Mark Stevens, best-selling author of Your Marketing Sucks, Your Management Sucks, and God is a Salesman. Mark is also CEO of MSCO, a results-driven management and marketing firm.  This is the second interview in Dot Connector’s Leadership Skills interview series.  Read Part I here.

Regis: Are there two or three leaders who have consistently challenged you and your thinking?

Mark Stevens:

My Dad. He was a salesman.  He always told me not to believe anything anybody tells me, just because they are telling me.  And, [he taught me] to stop and say “well now, is that actually true?”

He taught me that the higher up the totem pole the person is, in terms of power and authority, the more likely we are to believe at face value what they have to say.

- Mark Stevens

That is really where he would turn on the skepticism jets: he’d say “wait a minute, you are believing that person simply because they have the titled of Senior Vice President or Czar of the Americas?” Ask yourself Mark, “does that really make sense to you? And, what is his or her reason for saying it?”  He taught me that.

Carl Icahn. I’ve spent a lot of time with Carl Icahn.  He never took a business course in his life, and yet he is the smartest guy I have ever met.  I have met a lot of really smart, successful people that we have worked with at MSCO.  Carl was the smartest.

Instead of looking at business through the eyes of famous business leaders – Carl was a chess champion at Princeton and a Philosophy major – he looks at business through the eyes of a chess player, and through the eyes of the great philosophers. We would be talking, and I would ask him a question about some deal he was working on, and he would say, “this is what Socrates would say in this case.”  He never said, “this is what Alfred Sloan would say.”

So, I learned and understood that greatness often comes from looking at things through a prism, your own kind of prism.  Carl looks at life through the chess / philosophy prism.

- Mark Stevens

I think the reason that Carl wins so often is because he was used to making eleven moves in advance.  The average CEO he goes after now, even somebody as smart as Jerry Yang [CEO of Yahoo!], thinks two or three moves ahead, four maybe.  When you are a competitor, Carl is thinking eleven moves ahead.  He is always going to win.

I gave a speech in Berlin this past October.  Every year, Siemens invites 180 of the most important CEOs in the world to Berlin for something they call Ascent, which is the premiere CEO conference in the world.  After I spoke, we all went on a boat ride and to dinner at this unusual warehouse that was turned into a restaurant.  The former world chess champion, Vladimir Kramnik, was talking and he said “You know, when I was going up the ranks of Grand Master, in the middle of a match I used to – and I would plan this – I would make a really stupid move on purpose, and it would completely throw off my opponent.  I had to already have my plan for extracting myself from the problem I created for myself, but the [opponent] would be so stunned, that it would throw him back on his heels.”  He used this as his strategy for becoming the champion of the world.  I found that to be fascinating.

So, Carl taught me that look at things through the prism that you really find helpful, not the common one, necessarily.

Sir Issac Newton. There are two things that Newton taught me.  He didn’t mean it for business, but he said, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction [and a body in motion stays in motion].

For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction.

You know,  on your job Reg – and anybody else that reads this interview – someone is going to have a great day, one day next week, or the week after.  They are going to sign a big deal, they are going to have a promotion, something is going to be great.  I always say to my clients, my team members at MSCO, and my sons.  Watch out for Newton!  I don’t want to damper your spirits today, but Newton’s coming.

A body in motion stays in motion.

Leaders are driven.  They don’t look for balance.  They stay in motion.  They are not liked by the lowest common denominator.  You can’t stop them.  You can’t pin them down.  You can chop their legs off, and they will crawl through the ground.  They are not stopping.

A body at rest, does it stay at rest?  You know some people like that in your job, and I know them too.  You can’t rouse them.  Nothing will rouse them because they don’t have the drive.  You can’t rely on them to forge any of your projects, because they won’t carry the ball.  I don’t wish them ill will.  But, you have know that as you figure out your own success equations and who will actually support you in any project, or dream, or passion that you have.

We only have one life Reg, one life, one life – and we should strive to achieve something significant in it.  We should have somebody look back and say, “I learned something from that guy or that women.”  He or she left a stamp – something that changed people’s thinking.  Something that changed the way they do business.  Something that changed the way they do parenting.  Something!

Just don’t go through this life from cradle to grave going to work, going through the motions, watching television, eating a piece of pie, and going to sleep.

- Mark Stevens

And that is what most people do.  Sorry to say, but that is what it is.

Regis: I couldn’t agree more.  And I think that drive is what separates leaders from people who do not want to lead.  Do you feel like there are ways to bring people across that gap?  Can that be learned?

Mark Stevens: No, you can’t learn passion.  It’s impossible.  There is a way to bring them across the gap, and that is a leader.  A leader inspires.  People who do not have the DNA to be driven will ‘take the hill’ when inspired by a leader. They will never do it on their own.  They will say “that’s a nice hill.”  They will never do it on their own.  That’s exactly what a leader does, that’s a great question, because our whole conversation boils down to that.

A great leader, without threats and without bribes, gets people who are not driven on their own to effectively accomplish a mission.

- Mark Stevens

That is what a leader does, and [the people being lead] feel good about because they did it effectively.  They never would have taken the hill on their own.  They would have looked at the hill.  They would have sat on the bench, with a sandwich, looking at the hill.  But the leader is so dynamic, and because he or she wants to take the hill, that they want to go take it.

Great leaders don’t have to pay people lots of money.  People should be rewarded for what they do, but when you are working with a poor leader, you want to get paid a lot because it’s the only reward you have.  When you are in the company of somebody amazing, the amount of pay you get becomes minimally important.

You see great actors and actresses that want to work in Woody Allen movies and Robert Altman movies – and they’ll take tiny paychecks – because they want to be with a leader.

- Mark Stevens

If they are making some dumb-ass movie, the check can’t be big enough.  You do not have to bribe people or threaten people if you are a leader.  If you bribe or threaten them, It doesn’t really work anyway.

It’s so magically wonderful to watch a leader work.  I believe in things that are greater than some of their parts, so you start to go into another dimension when somebody is a great leader.  And people want to – for some mystical, chemical, magical reason – want to do something with that person, and that’s extraordinary.

Stay tuned for more from Mark Stevens: In Part III, you’ll learn why there is a disconnect between Marketing and Sales, and Mark’s thoughts on Social Media Marketing.

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