Posted by Jay Gaines on Fri, Mar 05, 2010 @ 09:49 AM
What B2B company doesn’t want a powerful brand that draws customers and makes the competition green with envy? After all, a compelling brand can influence buying decisions, justify higher prices, transcend cultural barriers, and create deep and lasting loyalty among customers. But in the quest to find and project the perfect brand, many b-to-b leaders risk aligning their businesses with misleading and even false brand promises that simply don’t reflect their customers’ experience or the core competencies of the organization.
Marketers have experienced increased demand to deliver a continuous stream of highly qualified leads to a sales force under tremendous pressure. The inevitable result has been an intense focus on short-term revenue supporting efforts while longer-term strategies have taken a back seat. This shift from long-term growth strategies to short-term revenue generation means that many B2B CMOs have turned their focus away from (among other things) customer experience management at critical touch points, including products/services, customer service and web sites. While short-term cash flow remains critical, leading B2B organizations understand that ignoring customer experience management could be a recipe for disaster.
This decline in attending to customer experience can lay the foundation for negative perceptions that will last long after the economy picks up and spending increases. As much as B2B marketing is about doing what is necessary to achieve near-term financial goals, an equally important responsibility is creating and maintaining a lasting, powerful (and positive) perception of the company. That’s exactly where brand comes into play. It’s through the lens of brand and its associated promise that buyers measure their experiences with the company; therefore, brands that don’t align with the typical customer experience are doing far more harm than good.
Also, due to the explosion of social media, B2B customers and buyers have very visible channels for expressing their opinions, as well as increased access to the opinions of others — and as we all know, this new customer empowerment has changed the B2B world forever. For example, a Google search for virtually any company won’t just reveal links to the company website and relevant information pages; customer reviews, raves and rants will often pop up within the first page of Google results. It is increasingly clear that customers who have been given a voice through social media now have as much influence over how a company is perceived as marketers at the company.
While astute B2B companies can play this magnified customer voice to their advantage by identifying and closing gaps between their brand promise and customer reality, businesses that don’t take action are putting themselves at serious risk. The new transparency that exists in the typical business/customer relationship means that businesses with customer experience management strategies that aren’t aligned with their brand message risk damaging their reputation, their relationships with customers and their future sales.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Feb 26, 2010 @ 01:12 PM
According to our research, vendors are the least trusted source for information when it comes to B2B buying, while industry analysts are one of the most trusted, making it more critical than ever that your AR function is able to communicate messaging and positioning to the analyst community effectively. The collective experience of SiriusDecisions has sat through thousands of vendor briefings across every industry. Based on this understanding we’ve identified four areas where AR can optimize their activities to influence the way the analyst community perceives you and impact the way they communicate about your organization:
- Know your target. Executing AR is really no different marketing your products; just as you target your messages to different audiences, make sure that you communicate with the right analyst firm as well as individual analysts.
- Analysts aren’t PR. While AR should do their best to make sure an analyst has all the content and collateral needed to influence their positions, it’s not an analysts job to do your PR and marketing for you. Few (if any) analysts will take your messaging and simply communicate them out to their customer base; they must analyze competing solutions to help them identify the the most appropriate matches based on a customer’s requirements.
- Empty claims. Many vendors tout claims that rival the statements made by politicians in an election year. You can say that none of your customers have any serious support issues, that your customers achieve ROI quicker than with a competing solution, or that you had the best quarter ever but don’t expect an analyst to be convinced or repeat that assertion without proof.
- Prepare adequately. Too often analyst relations doesn’t adequately prepare the staff who are going to give a briefing. It is the job of AR to make sure that the most appropriate resources are used in a briefing and that these resources are adequately prepared.
Beyond these first steps, AR needs to ultimately to evolve to influencer relations, a topic we'll cover in a future post.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Feb 19, 2010 @ 09:16 AM
Instead of focusing exclusively on generating yet more new leads that may or may not qualify, an effective way for marketing to impact the elongated B2B sales cycle is to help move deals that (for whatever reason) have stalled in the pipeline, an activity we call pipeline acceleration. While marketers have many tools to help prospects buy, and sales sell, there are two ways that marketing can drive late-stage pipeline: stimulus offers (specific programs extended to a prospect to increase the velocity of customer buying processes) and enablement/knowledge (internal programs designed to help sales build competence and neutralize roadblocks when dealing with stalled selling opportunities).
Social media can play a key role in stimulus offers. Giving a prospect controlled access to your online customer community shows that prospect the experience of what it would be like to be a customer. This lets the prospect see how customers interact with each other and your company; select prospects can browse and search community discussions to match their interests or concerns. Having the prospect see how issues and negative experiences with the company are resolved goes a long way in giving prospects evidence of how you treat customers. Also on the stimulus front, tap your subject matter experts to focus the critical content already available in whitepapers and other collateral into concise, customized podcast, blogs or tweets that align your message directly to known prospect pains. Podcasts can also be effective in distilling down case studies that can have direct relevance to prospect needs.
On the enablement/knowledge side, the inclusion of social media features within sales enablement platforms continues to gain steam as a more organizations leverage internal communities built around knowledge sharing and best practices; this is especially valuable for leveraging the group experience of not only other sales reps but also subject matter experts that reside in other parts of the organization. The use of podcasting as an internal training and communications tool continues to grow and is a proactive way in helping arm reps with the talk tracks and selling points to help accelerate prospects, particularly if they include the experiences of reps that have success accelerating their deals.
Remember, marketing is not just about new leads. You already have prospects in the pipeline that have a strong interest, now do what you can to help them close.
Posted by Megan Heuer on Fri, Feb 12, 2010 @ 08:58 AM
I am about to reveal the number-one, top-secret tip for successful marketing reports and dashboards. The one CMOs ask for every time. This is the big one. I mean it.
Here it is...
Include a summary at the Beginning.
Feeling let down? Saying “duh” out loud? Sure you are. Now take a look at your report. What’s the first thing you see? It’s data in charts, isn’t it? Most marketers, in their quest to deliver credible performance numbers, go right for the charts. But what most dashboards skip is what marketers should be best at: telling a story. When numbers are all that is shown, the report makes it too easy to focus on minutiae and not the bigger picture of what happened and why. Worse still, when too many numbers are shown without context, it is impossible to tell what matters and what’s really happening. The numbers and charts become an end in themselves and not a diagnostic tool.
Why is this a problem? Because lack of context for numbers results in unconstructive dialog about the numbers themselves, and not about what’s being done to improve them. The numbers-only approach leaves senior managers frustrated that they don’t know what marketing delivers, despite so much data. It leaves marketers wondering why no one uses the report when they provide such detailed numbers. The fix is simple: Senior marketing leaders tell us that, while they appreciate and need numbers, what they really want is a summary upfront that simply tells them what it all means.
Here’s the action item: Before you get to the numbers, add a summary. Put numbers into perspective so the rest of the report backs up the headlines. Include what happened, why, and what is being done to fix the bad and do more of the good. Caution: A summary will not fix bad data, or cure the fact that a report has the wrong metrics, or too many metrics, in it. A summary will require careful thought about what the numbers mean, and which ones are most valuable to determine past performance and future requirements. Marketing reporting should be more than a litany of available facts. It serves to illuminate facts with diagnosis and insights that support better decision making.
What’s in your dashboard?
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Feb 05, 2010 @ 10:07 AM
Laz Gonzalez (Research Director) and Jonathan Block (Vice President) discuss our recent channel survey findings around channel incentives (10.2MB, 7:25).
To listen to this podcast, please Click Here.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Jan 29, 2010 @ 10:31 AM
While more and more companies understand that a response to a campaign or program is not in itself a lead, the question still remains: when is a lead a lead? Marketing often interprets a prospect’s characteristics and actions as those of an ideal buyer, but sales refuses to act, believing the prospect requires more nurturing. In the end, the only way to view reality through a common lens is to develop a language that defines a “lead’s” place along a continuum.
Developing this language can be achieved when sales and marketing begin to understand and speak each other’s language, and build a common taxonomy that describes the state of a prospect. One way is to agree to gather necessary information about a prospect’s attributes. As a group, you must agree whether the information can be collected, and whether specific pieces truly contribute to lead definition (or are just nice-to-knows). This information can then be used to build a scorecard to help determine whether a lead is qualified or not based on a threshold of criteria that must be met. This needed information will be different by product or solution, but often contains the following:
- Demographics: Not only company data such as revenue size, industry, sub-industry, geographical region and employees, but also the prospect’s individual demographics, including title, function, power level and buying role.
- Attributes: What helps to determine the viability of one lead vs. another, such as functional budget allocations, parent vs. subsidiary or competitive situation.
- Activity: Specific activities that a prospect engages in, such as downloading of a white paper, attending a live or online event, or submitting a survey.
- Buying Status: This may include BANT (budget, authority, need, timeline) characteristics, but a critical consideration is agreeing what (if any) of this information can be reliably collected by marketing, and what needs to wait for interactions from either inside or field sales.
Even though sales and marketing often hear each other, that doesn’t mean they’re listening to what the other is saying. In the case of demand creation, without a jointly developed lead taxonomy, good opportunities (and revenue) will almost certainly be lost. Don’t lose ground to your competitors because you find your sales and marketing functions in a war of words; get working on your own lead taxonomy today.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Wed, Jan 20, 2010 @ 09:22 AM
Social media monitoring is a popular topic these day, and deservedly so. From our perspective monitoring is one of the four cornerstones of an effective social media strategy, which consists of Monitoring, Engagement, Awareness and Demand Creation. But where vendor functionality regularly outpaced a B2B organization's skills and process capabilities, users are finding such monitoring tools lacking in some key areas. This is not unlike the the marketing automation platforms (MAP) space; it's only in the last couple of years that B2B marketers have evolved to the point where they can take full advantage of MAP capabilities.
Let's look at what we're hearing from clients on two fronts:
- Integration: Again, not unlike MAPs, ease of integration of social monitoring platforms with other enterprise systems will become a differentiator for many customers. And we mean true integration, not just importing and exporting data. If you're only interested in tracking mentions, keywords and sentiment, as well as some indication of your level of engagement, then a standalone monitoring tool will be sufficient. But most B2B organizations look beyond communication goals to social media marketing, which requires tracking all customer and prospect interactions (what we call "following the social media breadcrumbs"), and integrating this data into MAP and CRM systems is critical. This explains why social tools are finding their way into such systems, either through partnering, acquisition, or the vendors building such functionality themselves.
- From reporting to analytics: Most clients tell us that social media monitoring platforms are good at reporting what people are talking about, where they're doing that talking, and offering some indication of sentiment, but many B2B marketers are disappointed at the lack of analysis they get. To be fair, agencies are still a significant user base of monitoring tools and many provide this analysis as a value-add to their customers, but more and more marketers are interested in leveraging these tools themselves. If monitoring solutions don't provide the analysis customers need, they'll need to integrate with systems that can such as a web analytics or business intelligence solution.
Social media monitoring is a still a relatively new market and growing pains are to be expected. While some users complain about usability issues (whither the concept of robust online help?), B2B organizations realize they must continue to evolve from a skills and process perspective to best take advantage of social monitoring tools. But these solutions also need to evolve from data aggregation to a solution for insight and action, providing not just activity information (read: who, what and where) but some indication of the impact these activities.
How would you like to see social media monitoring evolve?
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Jan 15, 2010 @ 09:55 AM
More and more B2B organizations recognize the value of having a clear strategy when it comes to social media to optimize returns and resources. According to our research data, over 60 percent of B2B organizations are doing something with social media (if only a blog) but of those only 30 percent have a documented strategy that seeks to interlock these activities with other marketing efforts. Given this reality, B2B organizations are looking to their peers but aren’t necessarily finding the answers they need. But there’s a good reason for that; most of the well-publicized success stories regarding social media are clearly in the B2C space. This really isn’t surprising since with such short sales cycles (i.e., transactional sales) it doesn’t take long to develop a critical mass of success stories and best practices. What becomes a stumbling block is when B2B organizations expect such quick hits. Well, sorry to say, it’s not going to happen. With the longer and more complex sales cycles that typify B2B, it takes a fair amount of time to be able to gauge the influence that social media is having on the business.
But this shouldn’t be an excuse to do nothing. Most likely your customers and prospects are already participating in social media (whether in online communities or Twitter) and may even be talking about you and your market. So even if you have no great social media aspirations at this time, or it’s not the way your target market consumes content, you should be monitoring to find out if people are talking about you, your competitors and market, and where these conversations are taking place. If you’re already participating you should be tracking all of these interactions. Without collecting such data you’ll never be able to determine what part social media plays among the series of interactions that typify the b-to-b buying process.
At the same time we regularly tell our customers not to ignore the internal value that social media can bring to the organization from a collaboration and best practices sharing perspective. Such internal uses, particularly between marketing and sales, can provide the quick hits you need to justify further investments that both internal and external uses of social media require. But remember that while social media may be inexpensive from a money perspective, it will require a large investment in time and money.
Posted by Megan Heuer on Mon, Dec 28, 2009 @ 05:08 PM
What is it about the December holidays that causes fits of nostalgia and list making? No analyst is immune, so cliché as it may be, here’s my addition to the 2009 retrospective: A list of five things that surprised me in the world of b-to-b marketing, and what can be done about them.
- Too many marketers still treat a “response” like it’s a lead. The simple act of responding to a marketing offer is just that: a response. An inquiry. In and of itself, the act of responding does not signal readiness to move into an active buying process. It never has. If you’re still sending raw inquiries to sales and partners, make 2010 the year you fix that. Our benchmark data proves you will be happy you did.
- The gap between marketing planning and buyer preferences is huge. It’s a buyer’s world, baby, and we marketers must embrace it. Trouble is, so much marketing activity is driven by siloed tactic planning and generating one-time inquiries (see number 1, above) that we lose sight of what prospects and customers need and want over the course of a long-term buying process. Embracing buyer focus is even harder when tactic-oriented myopia is institutionalized in the marketing planning process. Remember what assuming does to you and me when we fail to use what we know about the people with whom we want to build relationships. It’s time to change marketing planning to map to the buying cycle, not how we want to sell.
- Twitter is really, really useful. What a great tool for marketers to learn from each other and share ideas. But you can’t win if you don’t play, so if you aren’t convinced about the merits of social media in general and Twitter in particular, I challenge you to follow the #b2b tweet stream for one day. Let me know if you can end that day without learning at least a little something.
- Bad data is the root of most marketing evil. So maybe this isn’t a surprise so much as an inconvenient truth growing more obvious. Data quality, once a frightfully dull topic to most marketers, is now the one I can’t go a day without talking about. The curse of past poor data management is its impact on nearly everything marketers want to implement right now, from marketing automation and lead nurturing to better dashboards. Focusing on data as a strategic asset must become a central marketing effort.
- Marketers want definitive, hard-dollar metrics. It’s the rise of the left brain in marketing these days. So many companies I speak to are looking for more accurate ways to measure the impact of marketing, but they’re frustrated by a lack of quality data and the time and complexity involved in doing that. If 2009 was the year marketers got serious about defining measurement shortcomings, then 2010 should see great progress on fixing them because marketers are determined to make this happen. Not coincidentally, reporting tools are getting better and better to keep up with the demand. My hope is that the biggest surprise of 2010 will be how quickly marketers embrace quantitative analytics as key to improving program performance, not just tracking results.
Posted by Laz Gonzalez on Fri, Dec 18, 2009 @ 08:33 AM
Recently, I read a headline indicating a major hardware manufacturer was concluding its try-and-buy program, which included a full line of servers ranging from $8,000 to $80,000. The article went on to say one reason for ending the program was that some partners indicated it wasn’t performing because end users were reluctant to enter a free trial without having budget.
However, having presented at this specific vendor’s partner conference earlier in the year, I can say partners believed the program was doing extremely well and generating leads for them, albeit with a few glitches. One minor issue was that no one was telling them when the equipment was being shipped to the customer. That was a minor issue that was readily addressed by a company official by means of simply including the partner’s e-mail in the shipment records.
Try and Buy programs in the channel can be very successful; however, companies looking to adopt this tactic should take the following best practices into account:
- Factor in the channel partner. Whether simply notifying them that equipment has been shipped or using the partner’s facilities to conduct pilots, channel resellers can provide the missing ingredient in helping customers through a pilot process where bandwidth is limited and time is in short supply.
- Consider a multi-faceted offer vs. simply shipping equipment to a customer and expecting something to happen. One of the main benefits of a try-and-by offer is that it compresses sales cycles by offering the customer a shortened trial period. However, shrewd manufacturers should also provide a financial stimulus offer at the conclusion of the try-and-buy period so that customers are motivated to act at the end of the trial.
- Recognize that the trial is just part of the process, not the end. Many partners indicate that such a program provides a “door knocker” for them that wasn’t there had the prospect not reacted to the pilot. In times when “no budget” was a line used to keep VARs at bay, try-and-buy programs offered resellers the opportunity to engage with minimal customer commitment. As they nurtured the opportunity and provided value, things quickly changed as budget was freed up for a tested solution.
- Utilize marketing dollars to fund not-for-resale units and let partners support the program through MDF funds. This is a smart use of incentive dollars as it ensures resellers can apply their vendor-supplied resources toward a specific, lead generating campaigns.
While not a panacea, try-and-buy programs have worked in the past and will continue to do so as long as buyers making technology investments insist on seeing technology work with their own eyes rather than believing everything they hear from vendors and channel partners.