Posted by Megan Heuer on Fri, Jul 30, 2010 @ 09:00 AM
Are your marketing programs attracting the right kinds of prospects? Only your data can tell you. While it’s tempting to stop at reviewing email response rate, opt-out percentages or unique visitor growth on the website, understanding and optimizing B2B marketing tactic effectiveness requires a little more digging. You need to look into the details behind those numbers and how tactics impact the overall health of the contact database. Here are some guidelines for using the contact database to shed light on what works and what doesn’t.
Define Who You Need to Attract. It’s hard to know if a tactic is encouraging interactions with the right contacts if a clear goal has not been set as to who the desired audience is. Who exactly is your desired audience for the tactic and what goal are you supporting with them? One this is defined, if you are pursuing an outbound tactic, take a look in your database to see how many of these individuals you already know. If the universe in there is smaller than you know it to be, consider targeted contact acquisition. If the tactic is inbound (meaning not sent out to specific names but positioned where the right kinds of contacts go to encourage them to respond and identify themselves), then define the baseline of contacts that meet your criteria so you know when additions are made. The initial goal is to estimate a rough size for the segment you want to reach and what percentage of it you already know so it’s clear when gains or losses happen in the database.
Build a Segment Data Snapshot. For your target segments, track overall contact gains and losses monthly to see what the net impact of marketing programs is on building the contact database. As part of your normal database reporting, compare the number of names and the percent of total database added each month (de-duped from existing contacts) to the number of contacts lost or no longer usable. This not only shows whether the database is growing or shrinking, but at how rapid a pace movement is taking place. The calculation also can be used to determine incremental return on investment for specific addition efforts; for example, a demand creation program might contribute 100 leads, but if it also added 500 new names to the database and helped with the completion of 250 more records as well, there is incremental value that should be identified and reported.
Put together, these elements provide a warning system for changes that could hurt down the road. They’re also a way to identify highly successful approaches that should be shared and emulated to boost others’ contact acquisition results.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Jul 23, 2010 @ 10:52 AM
Research analyst Jim Ninivaggi joins Jonathan Block for a podcast on the benefits of applying a time and motion study to B2B field sales (14.7 MB; 16:00).
To listen to this podcast, Click Here.
Posted by Tony Jaros on Fri, Jul 16, 2010 @ 09:47 AM
One of the most common inquiries analysts within our Demand Creation Strategies (DCS) service conduct is to evaluate — and troubleshoot — lead scoring schematics being used by B2B organizations to “improve” the quality of leads fed to sales. We put the word improve in quotations because it often only takes a few minutes to see that the manner in which these schematics have been created not only won’t help lead quality, it will hurt it.
Mathematical errors. Overweighting individual demographic characteristics at the expense of the organization the individual represents. Scoring scales that barely differentiate prospects with vastly different characteristics. Ignoring activity-based scoring. Straight, linear scoring vs. taking a more curvilinear approach. Relying too much on BANT (budget-authority-need-timeframe) attributes when it’s inappropriate to do so. These are just a handful of the types of fundamental errors in schematics that we’re seeing virtually every week.
When marketing works with sales to score leads, it is implying that it will be able to deliver better leads at a more reliable rate. When a scoring model is broken, marketing will almost certainly break this implied promise, and disappoint sales (yet again, in the perception of many sales leaders).
A large number of B2B organizations that have purchased a marketing automation platform (MAP) over the last several years have yet to score leads in any meaningful way; perhaps they’ve heard some of the horror stories, or the lack of experience with scoring has made them hesitate. There’s nothing wrong with this hesitation, but it shouldn’t devolve into fear and inaction.
Your organization’s first forays into lead scoring will certainly be works-in-progress, and mistakes will be made. That’s OK, as long as the organization commits to evolving the way it scores leads over time, and vigorously pursues best practices.
As planning season arrives for many of you, now is a good time to either evaluate scoring schematics already in place, or to start to draw up prototypes for testing. Either way, we’d love to help.
Posted by John Neeson on Wed, Jul 14, 2010 @ 10:06 AM
Well it's that time of year again. Many of you will begin your annual planning for 2011 or are well on your way to creating your budgets. This is the time of year where we do many budget benchmarks to show you trends in marketing spend that are often used to support the changes you are looking for. As we consider the improvements we have observed in sales and marketing alignment, here are three best practices to consider in your plans:
- Create a “menu” of programs sales is requesting. Very often marketing focuses on the top-line programs but not what they manifest into at the sales level. Build out the programs you will need in a menu model for sales. Include a description for each program showing what sales problem is solved with program and written in sales language not marketing. Show what will be on the menu for lead generation for new accounts, existing accounts, for sales enablement, and what will be done for targeting. Also show how the menu might be different by sales channel.
- Reverse the waterfall. Now with your menu created, determine the marketing requirements needed to achieve these sales programs. Establish what the number of leads will be, what marketing will source and what they will influence.
- Brand to demand ratio. Finally, determine what has been the ratio of awareness required to create demand. Look at what you've spent in years past on communications and advertising and see what the ratio has been for every dollar spent on demand generation, what has been spent in driving awareness.
Active dialogue is at the heart of B2B marketing and sales alignment, and fostering this dialogue should be a part of every planning process. Without using such a planning model as we've presented here, marketing is often left with assuming the impact that it can have on sales and, subsequently, the business.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Jul 09, 2010 @ 09:36 AM
In a previous post, I discussed our B2B buying cycle framework and the roles within it; in this post, I'll cover how these buying cycle phases should influence your B2B social media efforts. Given the importance of buying cycles, better alignment of key social media activities with these cycles will result in more targeted, measurable results. Let's look at it via the three macros buying cycle phases.
Education. Most organizations don't have a lack of content; rather too much content is locked into specific pieces of collateral and never reused. Go through a whitepaper and highlight content that can be leveraged as tweets or posts within your Facebook and LinkedIn groups to drive more awareness about who you are and what you do. Also, the work that goes into securing quotes and data points for press releases and testimonials can be used to reinforce the connection between a specific offering and core business issues within a vertical (or sub-vertical) market.
Active Buying. The active buying stage finds buyers looking for solutions to problems they have decided are a priority, matching solution types to their specific needs and uncovering vendors that offer their solution of choice. Your social efforts should drive focused awareness and engagement not around your brand, but around specific decisions made by current customers that drove them to choose the solution you offer and, subsequently, your organization in particular. In addition to leveraging subject matter expertise for posts, content that was created to make key influencers aware of emerging issues can be recast to drive home the importance of problem solving at the beginning of buying cycles.
Closing. The closing phase includes activities such as negotiations and terms/conditions creation required to seal a deal. While there may be less social media potential here because prospects have much of the information they need, late-stage buyers often turn to their online social networks for validation, and the social reputation (or lack of) you've built through engagement will have a huge impact. Tracking and addressing any issues that a prospect may have about your organization could help tip a decision in your favor. Facilitating connections to stakeholders and influencers within your online network will help as well.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Jul 02, 2010 @ 09:02 AM
I've created a four component framework for developing and executing a robust B2B social media strategy that has resonated well with our clients, whether they're just starting out in social media or are looking to optimize their continuing efforts. The four components are: Monitor, Engagement, Awareness and Demand Creation. I've presented this model in-depth to our clients through a number of presentations and webcasts but would like to share a little more about the first component, monitoring, with a wider audience.
Monitoring forms the foundation of any B2B social media strategy, and is not only effective for knowing where you should be now; it’s extremely useful to identify where your organization may need to go in the future. It is critical to break down your monitoring strategy into six categories, including:
- Customers. Leverage monitoring to determine reach and sentiment; track both over time and then correlate changing data to internal (e.g. new product launches or other major announcements) and external (e.g. economic) factors.
- Prospects. Discover where and how prospect segments use social media, which is helpful for improving social media marketing efforts. Identify the types of content that prospects prefer to help prioritize your content development efforts.
- Influencers. Determine how much impact new influencers are having on buying decisions and how the role they play is different from traditional analysts. Large numbers of followers/fans doesn't always translate into true influence.
- Competitors. Track how established competitors are using social media in their core markets as well as new markets they enter, and put together a watch list of emerging competitors to be tracked as well.
- Future Markets. Monitoring trends and issues within industries and target markets that your organization doesn’t currently serve can help yield critical intelligence.
- Employees. While the thought of monitoring employees’ online behavior may prompt big brother and privacy concerns, doing so enables companies to feel more comfortable encouraging broad social media participation.
Whether you leverage a technology vendor or an agency, ensure they can provide you more than just a brand monitoring solution. While share of voice and sentiment trends are useful, B2B organizations need more insight into how social media is used across a long buying cycle.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Jun 18, 2010 @ 09:31 AM
Research analyst Jim Ninivaggi joins Jonathan Block for a podcast on tips for selling to senior-level B2B executives (11.2MB; 9:45).
To listen to this podcast, please Click Here.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Jun 11, 2010 @ 08:58 AM
While methodologies and approaches abound for understanding where customers or prospects are in the social channel and how they use it, we've found no better guide than our buying cycle. I'll use this post to cover our buying cycle concept and the roles within it, while a future post will discuss how these notions should play a key role in your social strategy and execution.
If an organization doesn't understand — even at a basic level — the way prospects buy what it sells, it will never be able to use social media outlets and marketing to facilitate these decisions. This is due to the fact that as prospects move toward a purchase, the tone, message, offer and even communicator for a specific marketing effort should be altered.
Buyers don’t go through a straight-line process of getting information through the Web or social outlets, weighing one solution against another and finally making a decision. Instead, a typical B2B buying process comprises a series of smaller decisions involving a variety of audiences that move into and out of the buying process.
SiriusDecisions has created a model that describes six macro stages that B2B organizations typically go through (see diagram, below). These six stages can be rolled up into three higher-level phases: education, active buying and closing.
As you are identifying the distinct activity phases within a buying cycle, you should also be uncovering who the key “actors” are in each phase and the specific roles they play. Typical actors include champions, CXOs, influencers (can be external or internal to the company), users and ratifiers (usually purchasing, procurement or negotiations). It is common for groups to enter and leave regularly, and to play multiple — and very different — roles depending on the type of product or service being sold. While a CTO might play a significant role during the Exploring Possible Solutions stage in one case, he or she will wait for the Justifying the Decision stage in another. Users may be brought in early or late, while other executive groups play no role whatsoever.
An understanding of actors and roles by stage is a tremendous advantage to your sales and marketing teams; not only will they know whom to target (and who to ignore) and what channels (social or otherwise) to use, but messaging, programs and specific content can be developed and delivered at the right time. You also will avoid common mistakes such as targeting the CXO level with Loosening of the Status Quo and Committing to Change messages and demand creation efforts when these executives do not play any role at the beginning of the buying process.
Posted by Megan Heuer on Fri, Jun 04, 2010 @ 08:39 AM
Actually, I could have titled this post “so what” instead because that can be the sad fate of some marketing reporting. We’re seeing so many clients invest in improving their marketing reporting and analytics, and that is one of the most important steps to reaching high performance. Trouble is, sometimes all that hard work takes awhile to have the intended impact. Naturally this is frustrating to those who spend the time and invest the resources, but what’s a marketing operations team to do in the face of skeptics and inertia? Plenty! Read on.
Unlike sales, which has to live and die (and get paid) based on its numbers, marketing reporting is still developing as a management tool in many B2B organizations. It’s a fact that despite good intentions of marketing teams to improve reporting and dashboards, the gap remains wide between desire for better reports and the execution that delivers them — not to mention the skills to take that data and turn it into actionable advice. It’s even wider from execution to support for, and adoption by, marketing and senior management as the source of the truth, trusted as accurately showing marketing’s contribution to the business. It’s not hopeless, of course, and to help folks on the journey, here are three practices that stand out as the drivers of adoption for marketing reporting.
Lesson 1: Dashboard Adoption Takes Time. Our research shows that it takes up to 18 months for new reporting to be implemented and fully adopted in an organization. It’s taken a long time to build up the status quo, and it’s not going down overnight. Have a plan to communicate change and why it matters and how it will benefit the marketing function and the business, as well as to help people understand how you got to the numbers. Embed the dashboard where it can be used in daily workflow. Next, work the plan and be patient.
Lesson 2: Dashboard Trust Demands Management Support. New reporting that improves the ability to make fact-based decisions regarding what needs improvement and why will not be adopted unless it has support from the top. Ensure senior leadership within marketing (and sales) supports the effort for better reporting, or be ready for a long slog.
Lesson 3: Dashboard Adoption Requires Delivery of Value and Insight. It may be the case that senior management and the rest of marketing need to be shown exactly how better reporting can help. Use examples and internal success stories to showcase where quality insights delivered better outcomes. This can range from email deliverability diagnosis, to leads left in purgatory nurtured to become found wins, to identifying where sales tools will have the most impact on stalled opportunities. The key is to choose a visible action that will showcase how knowledge becomes power and delivers results.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Wed, May 26, 2010 @ 08:58 AM
Oracle announced this week that it has purchased the intellectual property assets of marketing automation platform (MAP) vendor Market2Lead.
We've been predicting the consolidation of the MAP market for a number of years and, after the 2007 acquisition of Vtrenz by Silverpop, expected there would have been more closer to that time. On the other hand, even with growth in the market, none of the MAP vendors has yet reached high enough annual revenue to entice a major buying spree. Due to that, we're not sure the Oracle acquisition will be enough to bring the other CRM players (such as Salesforce or Microsoft) to the buying table in the immediate term. In the longer term, however, we fully expect most of the current players we consider a MAP to be acquired eventually.
A few market signs suggest that Market2Lead has been on the market for a while. For example, the list of customer shown on their website remained unchanged for well over a year. In addition, while we believe their marketing efforts often appeared inconsistent, from our viewpoint they've also been out of the collective MAP buyer's consciousness. It's been some time since we since we heard form a client who told us they were seriously evaluating Market2Lead.
But having said that, we've always been very positive in regard to Market2Lead's technology. On the data management side, they're particularly strong. We believe Oracle made a wise decision in buying the technology, not only because of its strength in data management, but also because it will help elevate Oracle's own marketing offerings. Finally, and importantly, Oracle states that it plans to integrate the Market2Lead technology into its CRM products. This is good news for marketers: Siebel Marketing has been a weaker offering for B2B marketers compared to functionality in competing products, but it is the mandated marketing automation tool for many companies. This move is great news for those marketing teams.