Marketing-Gimbal

What’s Old is New Again: The Return of B2B Account Based Marketing and Why You Need It Now Part III

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is not a Tactic nor a Technology.

This cardinal marketing rule goes all the way back to when ABM first appeared on the landscape. It was the undoing of ABM back then, and it will be the undoing of many ABM efforts now.

The goal with ABM is to ultimately deliver more profitable customers that stay with the brand longer. If I have to make additional investments in skill set, human bandwidth, and technology, then I better have a more profitable and happier customer as a result vs my current demand generation efforts. Therefore, if you treat an ABM prospect account in the exact same way that you do managing a general prospect inquiry, you will have the same conversion rate and time-to-value as your current demand management process, but now with greater costs associated with the deal.

 

To ensure ABM success it is best to view the program as a distinct process or framework as it relies on dedicated technology, coordination, and support across the organization in order to make it a success. Equally important is to support that framework with sufficient technology so that efficient scalability can be achieved across the ABM execution effort.

In this installment of the ABM series we will look at key elements of an ABM process and what technology should be considered in supporting this process.

The ABM Process

 While there are many process and framework models associated with ABM most will revolve around these general principles:

 

I. Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)-Your ABM efforts will start with the need to define specific target accounts based on an Ideal Customer Profile: Those accounts that garner key characteristics that yield a higher propensity for to successful engagement outcome. A Successful ABM is all about strategy, and strategy is ultimately about sacrifice. The ICP amounts to your strategic “fishing net” that is cast into a sea of potential target accounts to help find those accounts in which to focus your ABM efforts on.

 

The ICP can be developed through several approaches but it is important that marketing and sales are intimately aligned as to the ICP. Marketing can add significant value in helping to define an ICP, but sales must also be involved as only they can bring other strategic criteria into account which also define the ICP. Your ICP profile should be a strategic document as well and engrained in the sales and marketing culture. ICPs can be defined by the following:

• Account Propensity Criteria-Analysis of What (Accounts) have purchased in the past?
  • Firmographic Data-employee size, revenue, vertical industry, revenue,
  • Deal size
  • Time to sale
• Share of Wallet Expansion Opportunity
• Advocacy Opportunity- Desired marquee brands and the potential of developing brand advocates and references.
• Buyer and Influencer Roles-Who do we need to target within the account?
  • Economic buyer roles and engagement within the buying cycle
  • Technical buyer roles and engagement within the buying cycle
  • User buyer roles and engagement within the buying cycle
  • Influencers roles and engagement within the buying cycle
• Customer Role Personas-Development of detailed insights of key roles related to your buying cycles and the emotional triggers that are impactful in driving effective messaging

II. Insight Driven Engagement-ABM is ultimately outside-in insight driven engagement. To support greater personalization in account communications insights across industry, technology, hot topics/trends, and the account itself will need to be analyzed for potential engagement opportunities and value proposition development. Key areas to focus on include:

• Relevant Context: market trends and, hot topics, technology developments, regulatory and compliance issues
• Account Level Research-Would include financials, annual reports, news releases, organizational structures and developments etc.
• Account-Contact-Engagement- Need to see who at the account has engaged with the brand and how.
• Real-time Account Intelligence-Real-time information and social feeds into your CRM that enable event driven marketing and sales engagements.

III. Buyer Centric Content-Generating the right content at the right time for the right roles.

• Adopting a Buyer Centric Model-A standardized view and understanding of how the prospect buys, and what their information needs are at each stage of the buying process
• Relevant and Contextual Content-Content delivered to prospects with the goal of moving the prospect along to the next stage within their buying process
• Role/industry Enhanced-Content enhanced and differentiated by industry and role based needs

 

IV. Personalized and Timely-Engagement with the brand is personalized and timely

• Coordinated and structured communications-all touches need to be orchestrated from the brand outward and across all internal departments.
• Customized Operating Engagement (sales, marketing, service and support)-What is the unique engagement model with the target account?
• Online & Offline Personalization-From web personalization and pixelation to personal 1-1 relationship building activities.
• Defined and Custom “playbook” Development-What are the relevant sales scenarios that will resonate with the account. 

 

V. Data Driven

• Predictive Analytics-Who else is in a buying process that you may not know about?
• Attribution & Reporting-What contact, at what account, consumed what content, and when.
• Segmentable-Firmographic and buyer centric criteria (in addition to firmographic criteria the ability to segment on buyer roles and stage in the buying process are advantageous)
• Contact enrichment-real time enrichment of account contact level information and account level intelligence

To ensure success It is key that both sales and marketing (and other functions such as customer success, services etc) agree to a specific ABM demand management process and engagement model that will give your organization the prioritized, personalized, and insightful touches it needs to increase conversion close rates with greater velocity.

While this is a relatively basic model more advanced, and developed ABM frameworks exist from the TOPO Sales Consultancy , ITSMA, and Sirius Decisions.

 

 

 

 

 

 The ABM Tech Stack

According to the Sirius Decisions 2016 ABM Study 58% of enterprises report that they are planning to increase their investment in related ABM technology and services. To do ABM efficiently and effectively requires a commitment to infrastructure investment. If your organization is not willing to invest in an ABM centric tech stack for sales and marketing than it may be in your best interest to maintain the status quo. Your competitors selling team (it’s a good chance they are doing ABM as well these days) velocity, fueled by these services, will leave you in the dust frankly. Here are some key areas to consider in regards to building an ABM technology stack.

I do not have any ties to any vendors mentioned, and only mention these vendor solutions as examples of evolving solutions that may be of assistance to your ABM efforts.

Segmentable Database-Strong Segmentable Data Management Processes and Taxonomy

The core of any ABM effort is to define an ideal customer profile, that will have a propensity to buy your goods and services, and then use this insight to target internal and external prospect accounts with your messaging. Therefore, your ability to segment your data across key areas becomes paramount to success (assumes all standard fields in place (address, email etc). Some segmentable criteria would include:

Required Fields

• Account Type (i.e customer, prospect, partner, etc.)
• Account Hierarchy (What is the parent company vs what is a subsidiary)
• Industry (requires a rationalized industry segment model)
• SIC code
• Account Size Criteria (1 or more of the following employee size, revenue, other criteria.
• Role (requires rationalized title-to-role model)
• Stage in Internal Demand Process (i.e Nurture, Inquiry, MQL, SQL,)
• Current Company Products and Services if a customer record
• Lead Sources
• Lead Status

Really Nice to Have

• Persona/Buyer Type (internal rationalized model i.e economic buyer, influencer, user etc)
• Account Level (not contact) Stage in Customer Buying Process (requires an internal buying model rationalized against offers consumed and engagement activity)
• Customer/Prospect Technology Deployed (i.e type of O/S, # Servers, #desktop, Software Applications-SAP ERP, Salesforce CRM)
• Competitive Solutions Deployed
• Account Classification (small, lower mid, mid, upper mid, large, very large-requires a rationalized account-segment model i.e what is small, what is large, etc.)

A successful ABM effort really begins and ends with strong database management, and quality data. To that end documented, standardized and rationalized data fields across sales and financial operations and pertaining to industry, company size, title/role, and account hierarchy are at the core of building a searchable, and segmentable database in support of ABM. In addition, periodic account and contact enrichment processes are vital in keeping data as complete, and as up to date as possible (B2B data decays at about 5%/month). While many of you will take some of these criteria for granted it’s been my experience that there are far more enterprises that lack basic rationalized and standardized data taxonomies and management practices than those that do not.

 

Today many companies provide enrichment support and many even provide an API interface so that you can enrich contact and account details in real time as a prospect converts on your offers. However; without agreed to taxonomies and standardized data classifications with sales and financial operations, efficient efforts to identify potential target lists could be hampered. Contact data that is old or inaccurate will also add to the challenge. When was the last time you cleaned out aging and unengaged prospects from your marketing database?

Often times your tele-vendors (i.e. ReachForce, Catapult, Televerde) are great resources in enriching data, and even in providing API’s for real-time contact-account level enrichment. In addition, there are several resources available for building and expanding target contact lists, not already active in your database (i.e. DemandBase, Kickfire, DiscoverOrg, Rainking, NetProspex, Insideview). These emerging services are now integrating real-time data enrichment and intelligence feeds along with predictive analytics to create “always-on” marketable data.

Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation is still a cornerstone of an efficient ABM infrastructure in order to manage personalized and multiple communication touches across various ABM prospect accounts. Your CRM and MAS should be viewed as your revenue management system holistically as both are required for successful ABM efforts. What is missing from a MAP and CRM is the account-to-contact context needed to drive insights, and personalized communications. Today more communication management and targeting solutions are being developed to support specific ABM processes, and many of these solutions are designed to integrate directly with your MAP (Marketing Automation Platform). Your MAP is also a core element in your personalization strategy and capabilities which is also a critical component of the ABM Tech Stack. 

ABM Engagement & Management Add-Ons (Emerging)

Today we are seeing a rapidly expanding field of specific ABM applications and services designed to enhance your core CRM and MAP systems. These emerging solutions can enable you to automate requirements for increased contextual visibility across accounts and contacts while managing engagement activity and communications across marketing, sales and target account- contacts. For example, Demand Base’s Partnership with Oracle- Eloqua enables its users to accomplish multiple tasks including:

• Eliminating online form fields by dynamically appending records with more accurate and standardize account data
• Appending historical lead and contact data with standardized account data
• Use Demandbase’s Account Score to trigger an ABM campaign workflow at the account level

Enagio’s recently announced integration between its Playmaker application and Salesforce provides for more coordinated and automated communications with contacts, while simultaneously adding visibility across account specific contacts to show additional activity and brand engagement.

The key consideration is to ensure that you have a capability to match lead-contacts with their respective accounts. This will underpin your ability to gain visibility across account-contact engagements and ultimately serve as the platform of being able to measure and optimize channels and offers.

CRM is not inherently designed with marketing in mind, and will often lack key native capabilities to support marketing requirements in a multi-contact, multi-engagement and non-linear buying process, that is our marketing reality today. With the reemergence of ABM there are ever increasing new solutions emerging that can help make overcoming these challenges a little easier, especially if you’re on the Salesforce CRM platform. Notable vendors here would include Engagio, Brightfunnel, and Leandata to name just a few.

Personalization 

Efficient and effective website and email personalization is now at hand thanks to increasing “Marketing-by-IP” capabilities tools, and services now available to marketers. Vendors such as Marketo, Optimizely and Demandbase can help enable you to dynamically provide custom content and messaging to your targeted account contacts as they visit your web properties. Communication channels can be personalized beyond a salutation and include the visiting accounts logo and industry imagery. This level of personalization is vital to ensuring strong conversion effectiveness, and it’s safe to be that your competitors are or have deployed some level of personalization beyond the salutatory email.

 Predictive Analytics

Probably the most exciting capability at hand for marketers is the use of predictive analytics, not only for identifying ideal customer profiles, but also in being able to proactively identify accounts in active buying cycles for your solutions that are not in your demand management process or radar. These new predictive capabilities are true game changers and really underpin your ability to serve right content at the right time. 

Predictive analytics shifts you away from reactive marketing to truly proactive marketing, and is the secret sauce to any successful modern ABM program. The field of vendors and technologies is growing rapidly, and some notable vendors would include 6sense, Bombara, Lattice Engines and Everstring to just name a few.

Retargeting Platform

Retargeting is an essential ingredient in any ABM program as it keeps your brand and messaging in front of your key targeted prospects. 68% of B2B enterprises are dedicating budget to these efforts in 2016-2017. (Sirius Decisions ABM 2016) You can enable retargeting automatically to those prospects that visit your, and your media partner websites as well as enable a proactive outreach to potential accounts based on your ideal account profile. In this effort a relationship with a media agency such as Just Media or direct retargeting platform providers such as Demandbase, and Retargeter are essential.

ABM Reporting and Analytics­­

What Are We Measuring For? Jeffrey Sands, VP Account-Based Marketing Practice ITSMA suggests that “When executed correctly, ABM enables a company to change the perception of the value they can bring to the target account.” Sirius Decision’s Megan Heuer suggests that the true desired outcomes of ABM are target account churn rate, average order size, and cross-sell-up sell.

In short our ABM efforts should deliver a superior brand experience to targeted accounts that result in longer term, more profitable customers, with a greater overall usage of our technology portfolio. This end goal now provides the context of what KPI’s and metrics we should identify to help us measure effectiveness and efficiency of our ABM effort.

Other ABM Technology Support: Social Selling Services

Social Selling is pivotal to ABM sales success as it enhances your ability to find and connect with targeted account prospects much more efficiently and effectively. Sales engagement is driven by insight and in the ability to position the company representative as a subject matter expert by sharing relevant industry content, commenting on breaking news, and of course building brand reputation as 62% of B2B buyers report responding to a sales representative that connects with relevant insights and opportunities (Linked-In). Linked-In also reports that companies with strong social selling capabilities generate 45% more sales opportunities, with more than half hitting sales quotas.

 

As we are in the era of social selling, one would want to make sure that the ABM infrastructure has some sort of real-time social and account intelligence services in place. From social media monitoring, keyword tracking, brand sentiment, and real-time market news will all be key in optimizing your sales and marketing performance. Inputs along these lines enable more personal and real-time communications to fuel that insight driven engagement. Prospects identified by a sales trigger event are 8x more likely to buy.  So think of these services as enabling “sales-by-event” within your ABM program. Examples would be Mention.com, Discover.org, and Avention. Note that many of these solutions also bring database enhancements as well.

In Part IV we will look at the steps required to building an ABM Program, what considerations should be given in determining marketing’s objectives, KPIs and metrics.

 

Nuff Said

What’s Old is New Again: The Return of B2B Account Based Marketing and Why You Need It Now Part II

87% of B2B companies (Sirius Decisions) now say ABM is extremely, or very important to their overall marketing. Why?

Changing Role of B2B Marketing

In times of improving business conditions sales focus will generally shift away from lead volume to lead quality, as a greater optimization of finite sales bandwidth is needed. However; coinciding with the recent economic upswing we have seen a nexus of several key trends converging to create a new B2B marketing environment, and one that I believe has fundamentally changed B2B marketing from here on out.

These trends will firmly cement ABM as a de-facto standard operating procedure for B2B marketing and sales going forward.

 

Marketing by IP

One of the single greatest advancements in the last several years has been the emergence of tools and capabilities that allow B2B marketers to market by company IP (internet protocol) address. While reverse IP lookup has been around almost since the beginning of the internet, it has only been in the last several years that tools designed specifically for marketers to leverage reverse IP look-up for more precise targeting and profiling have emerged. This has fueled the ability of marketers to gain unprecedented access, and visibility into the path that account contacts are taking within their buying cycles, and not just within the confines of the company website, but also across the internet, and other sources of information.

Most of us are now familiar with the main use-case of marketing by IP in utilizing account retargeting activities to place our message in front of a prospect-contact as they travel across the internet in support of their buying cycles.

Buyer Centricity-Marketing as a Revenue Center

While we can debate as to the exact point in time when the buying cycle shifted away from company-controlled to buyer-controlled, we can all agree that buyer-controlled purchasing processes are the dominant reality today. The path a prospect takes, in support of their buying cycle, is now omni-channel (many-routes to information) with the majority of activity taking place across online channels vs offline. In addition, the buying cycle for many B2B decisions is not linear, but consists of many roles (contacts) entering and leaving the buying process, at different times, and with different information needs.  

This shift to buyer centricity, has many questioning and even calling for an end to the traditional funnel view of demand management. What’s underpinning the questioning of the 19^th century funnel construct of demand management is the notion of discrete hand-offs between marketing and sales in a non-liner, and more complex 21^st century buyer-centric model.

 

 

The more accurate view may not be one of discrete handoffs, but rather one of whom has the lead engagement and intrapersonal dialogue with the prospect/customer within a particular stage of the buying process. In a world where +60% of B2B buying cycles begin with the initiation of online activities, the marketing department is actually the number one sales person during the early stages of the buying cycle.  As the prospect moves to later stages of their buying process the primary engagement and intrapersonal dialogue would naturally shift more towards sales.

However, if we look at the buying process in a more holistic way, and from a buyer lifecycle point of view, the “buying process” would actually continue through to after-sale engagements and dialogue.  At these stages, service and customer support, are actually in the lead selling role, in terms of building customer advocacy. So the reality is that we really don’t operate in a linear demand funnel, with a start and stopping point, but rather more of a continuous customer engagement cycle designed to deliver a superior customer experience, and increasing number of customer brand advocates.

 

In this view of demand management, the old saying of “we are all sales people” has never been more relevant. Especially as we move toward a world where differentiation on customer experience becomes the #1 competitive factor, as differentiation based on technical capabilities becomes less and less of a factor. In this world, marketing is no longer a cost center, but a revenue center, and to ignore it as such would be missing an opportunity for optimizing revenue generation. 

 

In the world of competing customer experiences marketing efforts become vital to revenue generation, and in ensuring that the right content, is at the right place and time to meet prospect informational needs and expectations.  

Marketing Science

Technology has certainly made account based marketing more consumable and easier to implement. Most business have now matured their use of CRM and Marketing Automation systems (MA) to a point where new levels of account information and buyer behavior insight can be joined together. In the last few years we have seen the emergence of Predictive Analytics. Traditional friction points to using advanced analytics have usually been due to the lack of ample data sets, along with sufficient and consistent data accuracy and taxonomy. One of the beautiful things about B2B, is that our buyers tend to throw off a tremendous amount of online data, or what some may know as “Digital Body Language”.

By using new tools and services available to marketers, we can make greater use of “Marketing-by-IP” capabilities to quickly amass a tremendous amount of data beyond the confines of our web site to include data from many external sources (media portals, social, email) that shed new light on the digital footprints left behind by potential contacts as they move through their buying cycle. By marrying this new insight together with data from your website, and past sales successes, you can now identify, with a high degree of accuracy, those accounts being actively engaged within a buying cycle.

 

These new analytic capabilities, combined with your CRM and MAP, have what amounts to be a true game changer for B2B marketing, in that we can deliver the right message, to the right contact, at the right time, and tailored for a specific buying stage or persona scenario.

The nexus of these trends truly enables a new degree of personalization to take hold, and as a result, elevate the customer experience to new levels. It will force us to reevaluate traditional processes, and develop new engagements with our customers. For example, imagine sales territories now being predicted, not on geography, but rather on sales people personalities to better match those of buyer contacts, with the goal to elevate the chances of a successful engagement.

In Part III we will look at the “Keys to ABM Success”.

Nuff said

What’s Old is New Again: The Return of B2B Account Based Marketing and Why It’s Here to Stay Part I

Account based marketing (ABM) is nothing new, and anyone that’s been around B2B marketing since the year 2000 knows the term “Account Based Marketing”. ABM reached a pinnacle of buzz around the mid 2000’s as ABM was brought to life by ITSMA in the mid-2000’s. ITSMA provided leadership, and insight to what an Account Based Marketing Program was by defining it as a shared process between sales and marketing. Then ABM somewhat whimpered away, especially as the recession hit, as marketers came under great pressure to focus on top of funnel demand generation. Today we are seeing a great resurgence and renewed interest in ABM.

So is ABM just the latest buzz word for B2B marketers to get all riled up about, and a new way to pitch for more budget? Or is ABM going to become part of the defacto B2B marketing landscape going forward? One thing for certain is that B2B Marketers are placing a greater focus on ABM today:

• 80% report ABM programs deliver greater ROI than other marketing initiatives (ITSMA)
• 300% increase in close rates and 200% increase in revenue (Act-On 2016)
• 70% now have dedicated staff supporting an ABM program (Sirius Decisions 2016)
• 41% have a full ABM program in place vs 20% in 2015 (Sirius Decisions 2016)
• 58% report a pilot program in place vs 20% (Sirius Decisions 2016)

Yet as ABM shines in the spotlight once again only 20% of enterprises say they have a clear understanding of what ABM actually is (Act On ABM Survey 2016). A lack of understanding of what ABM truly is will undoubtedly make your ABM initiative less successful. First and foremost, ABM is not a tactic, but a process. The goal of this blog post will to be to provide a pragmatic background on all things ABM in the hopes of providing you with enough of an understanding to move forward with your own ABM initiative, and ensure the best chance of success. So let’s start at the beginning.

What Is ABM?

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is generally defined as a coordinated effort between sales and marketing that targets a set of accounts with specific, customized engagements, and communications, with the goal of increasing velocity-to-value.

In the early days of ABM efforts mostly consisted of rebranding already existing marketing assets, developing some basic email templates, and if really gung-ho developing an account specific microsite. More advanced efforts would follow a specific process aligned with sales, along with the development of new account specific assets and engagement opportunities.

ABM Friction

There were four big friction points to greater adoption of Account Based Marketing in the early days:

• Lack of Strategy-Every Account is a Priority-ABM was usually initially driven by the marketing department, and generally received a warm welcome when presented to sales. What sales person wouldn’t want a custom marketing program for their accounts? However; when asked to identify their top strategic accounts the resulting answer would inevitably be “all accounts are strategic-let’s do this for everyone”. Lack of specific, and focused ABM target accounts usually set the course for failure right out of the gate.

• Lack of Process-What makes a great ABM program work is the underlying process jointly supported, and aligned to by sales and marketing. So often times, when marketing presented an ABM process (a joint sales and marketing process), it was often tossed aside or had lack luster implementation and support from the sales side. Why would any self-respecting enterprise sales team follow an account management process defined by the marketing guy anyway? Generally speaking, sales executives are not apt to just implement a new account management process willy-nilly, and often look askance when that process was pitched by the marketing department. Yet, in an effort where the first engagement is just the start of the process, and not the end, a lack of integrated and coordinated efforts only cemented lack luster results. 

• Lack of Scalability-A good ABM program relies on some level of personalization to be effective. If you were to make it past the first two friction points you generally ran right into the “scalability wall”, as personalization efforts back then all relied on heavy lifting. As most organizations failed to really limit the focus to the few accounts that really mattered, the marketing team was faced with scaling custom 1-to-1 marketing assets and engagements to a larger set of accounts than they could realistically serve. For those of us old enough to remember, to even do a microsite back then generally required many departments involvement, time, and effort to implement. These custom assets then fully relied on email and/or personal contact by the sales team to inform and drive usage on behalf of the target.

 

 

• Lack of Account-to-Contact Context- One of the underlying reasons for the eternal conflict between sales and marketing is that marketers tend think in terms of contacts, while sales tends to think in terms of accounts. As one sales executive would always remind me “Ed, we need to consummate a marriage, not just go on dates”. ABM creates a natural gearing where accounts meet contacts, and in doing so creates a strong foundation for productive marketing-sales engagements. However; it was often difficult to link multiple contacts to the same account and provide sales with the visibility needed to define the context of further engagements. In the mid-2000s organizations were just getting their arms around CRM, and Marketing Automation was just knocking at the door. So even if you were successful in selling in an ABM initiative, you were generally not in a good position to actually identify the needed account-contact context in such a way as to manage and gain visibility into how well the ABM effort was working. So measuring success proved to be a difficult, if not an impossible task for most marketing departments. Without the ability to measure, one had a difficult time to see if value was actually being created as a result of the ABM effort.

 

And so, ABM for the most part, took a hiatus and faded from the marketing team’s agenda as the recession hit, and focus shifted to developing “always-on” demand capabilities and in keeping the top of the funnel full (lead quantity versus lead quality). Fast forward 8+ years or so and all of sudden ABM is back with a vengeance. 87% of B2B companies now say ABM is extremely or very important to their overall marketing (Sirius Decisions 2016). Why? In Part II we will explore the factors that are leading to a resurgence of ABM in greater detail.

Nuff Said

Infusionsoft: More Than Culture

A few weeks ago Greg Head, the CMO of Infusionsoft, invited me out to visit him, and to take a tour of his company. It’s rare that I ever get to have an opportunity to meet other professional colleagues, and simply spend some time learning more about what, and how they do things so I quickly jumped at the opportunity.

  

Infusionsoft is one of the few Valley (Phoenix, Az Metro) tech companies to hit some serious stride in its growth. Most recently they completed another round of investment, and to date have raised over $125M. Infusionsoft makes, what I would call,  a front office (sales and marketing) platform for small companies.

Now when I say small I’m not referencing the 0-100 employees segment we mostly think of when someone says small business. Infusionsoft is very quick to point out that they focus on the 1-25 employees as their bread and butter market segment. What is particularly amazing is that they seem to have cracked the code of delivering solutions to this segment in a scalable, and efficient way.

A Culture First Company

One of things that the management of Infusionsoft will be quick to speak to is their culture, and how that is the core to their business success. The company’s core mission and values are front and center in the main gathering area, and Infusionsoft is so committed to this core mission that they have started offering education beyond just how to work their software, to that of teaching entrepreneurs how to run their business better. 

Long term plans even call for an entrepreneurial university of sorts, where small business leaders can get coaching on all facets of starting, and growing a business to success.  When one reads about Infusionsoft in the media, the company’s culture and Esprit de corps is usually the lead story. 

  

 

Now we all love reading about companies with strong cultures and morale; however that can sometimes be a problem. The CEO of many companies will read these articles and say “We need to have culture like those guys”, and then proceed to call the marketing team in and start drawing cool poster designs, or ordering scooters, and replacing chairs with rubber bouncy things.

We’ve all been there, and the one thing we all know is that culture is something that cannot be created overnight, and in fact it usually starts with employee #1, and no matter what posters, speeches, or t-shirts are given away you either have it or you don’t.

 

While the majority of us may not ever work in as “vibrant” of a company culture as Infusionsoft, we can still be very successful in our businesses providing we adopt some other key success factors that I saw very much alive during my brief visit.

A Commitment to Strategic Execution

One of the biggest surprises I had was the company’s absolute commitment to strategic planning and the operationalization of these plans. There wasn’t anything fancy or trendy here. It is the simple x’s and o’s of planning and execution. What was different was the transparency and ownership associated with these plans and all were out in the open for everyone to see.

 

In the main gathering area the companies annual and long range plans are emblazoned on the walls. The long-range plan for the company goes by the moniker of “The Everest Mission” and it’s what I would call a long/mid range plan. These are goals needed to be achieved over several years in order to reach a longer-term business objective.

 

What’s nice to see on the “Everest Mission” is that in addition to mission and vision the target market of the company is defined. How many business fail because of a lack of definition as to who the core customer is? We also see brand and positioning appear on the long-range plan, as well as, the most important vital signs that the company will track on its way to goal achievement.

How many companies fail to succeed because they spend or invest foolishly, and fail to track core KPI’s? What’s also nice is that every one knows the core KPI’s, and I like that fact that one of the vitals is a Net Promoter Score (NPS), that reinforces the importance of the customer in this goal attainment.

On either side of the “Everest Mission” the company has its annual priories stated along with that quarters priorities and goals.

 

The annual plan consists of 3-5 key priorities, and each quarter breaks these annual priorities down into several core projects, each with an owner and a sponsor. Evidence of success are identified for each project, and each projects key quarterly milestones are identified, all with an owner and due date.

There is nothing fancy about their planning process as I said before, but strategy is about sacrifice and unfortunately that’s a lesson that the majority of smaller businesses never understand. As a result these businesses will never drive the growth they want as not everything can be a priority when resources are limited. 

 

Your Future is Greater Than Your Past

Aside from culture and planning there is something that I believe is even more core to the Infusionsoft’s success, and that is in how their management team views their business as a way of enriching the lives of their employees, and in helping them to achieve personal goals outside of work. One of the more innovative ways I saw in how the company was embodying this principle was in the creation of a “Dream Library”.

 The space is a quiet, and meditative place for people to come and rest, think, and dream, and where employees are encouraged to write a dream on the wall. The company even maintains a full time employee dedciated to helping people achieve their pursuits outside of work.

This commitment to people is something that all of us can do whether a CEO or a department manager. How much effort does it take to send an employee to a conference, or to get more education and training? Not a lot. This effort builds a stronger bond between company mission and employee that become seeds to building a dynamic culture in the future.

So we can all support our people in many different and fundamental ways, even without having a “Dream Library”. At the end of the day its people that are the differentiating advantage for any business.

Customer Focus

Customer Focus. It’s one of the most overused yet most misunderstood catch phrases there is. How many businesses truly know their customers? Or converse with their customers on topics outside the context of what the company sells? And really gain insight into what the customers core needs are. While many of us say it, few us really internalize and operationalize it.

At Infusionsoft I saw a unique focus on the customer that I believe inherently gives the company a leg up on its competitors while being able to create an emotional bond between the brand, and customer. One of the things I really liked was the major display of customer personas in company that took on the metaphor of cereal boxes, each representing a core persona of the company’s customer segment.

This effort on persona development no doubt helps the companies development stay on track, and ensures delivery of a product that is right for that particular customer segment.

 

 

The other area where I think the company’s customer centricity really manifests itself is in providing education to its customers beyond just showing them how to implement and work Infusionsoft software. This effort, I believe, will strengthen the emotional brand relationship with their customers and in turn fuel a channel of customer driven insights straight into the development team thus sparking a continued innovation engine.

Education after all is core to the mission of helping Infusionsoft customers be successful, and that mission has expanded the headroom managerially to support increased investment in customer education.

Role of Marketing

One of the challenges in marketing to this customer segment is the potential size of the market is overwhelming, and to be successful as a tech company you must find a way to efficiently and effectively scale business operations around service, marketing, and sales. As a result Infusionsoft really views its marketing function as its most successful sales person. Marketing is tasked with delivering 80% of the companies’ revenue targets, and does this efficiently by focusing on a scalable and metrics led online demand generation engine.

In addition to delivering the annual demand plan marketing is tasked with optimizing the other areas such as the churn rate, and in building an ecosystem of channel and development partners. Again there is no fancy secrete sauce other than a focus on metrics, continual optimization of the model and growing and developing the marketing team. What is refreshing is the importance on marketing that the company has in viewing the function as far more than just a cake and cookies role.

So while many of us will envy the culture of Infusionsoft, while others will be wary let us take away some of the core lessons behind this company’s early success. A focus on strategy and execution, a focus on people, and a focus on customers are all things we can do better and deploy with greater vigor tomorrow vs today. In doing so our endeavors in both business, and personal goals will be more successful in the future.

Nuff Said

 

 

 

 

 

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Free Content Creation Tools You Cant Live Without

Interesting read across several compelling resources

 

http://high-impact-prospecting.com/13-free-content-creation-tools-you-cant-or-shouldnt-live-without/

 

Nuff said.

What Does Marketing Do?

Do you ever get the continual question of “What
does marketing do?” I honestly believe its right up there with What
is a lead?” It seems no matter where I have worked, or how large or mighty the organization is, marketing is one of those areas that seem to be an enigma to most people.

I would image that that is even more so today, as marketing
is quickly evolving from the brand guys or as some may say the “cakes
and cookies” function, into a real business driving, value adding, entity
that needs to generate results.

We now live in an era where +80% of your new business finds
you on the web, and when a prospect does decide to engage they are 60% of the
way through the buying process. So when my CEO asked me to put on a companywide
presentation on what marketing does, I wanted to try and show something more
than org charts, power points, brand logos, and leads. I wanted to try, and
show the end to end value chain that our marketing function can provide.

What Does Marketing Do from Lumension on Vimeo.

Nice goal, now the question was how do we that and avoid “power point poison”. We’re a small company, and production budget is limited. However; a burgeoning photography hobby has left me with contacts for cheap studio rentals, and expensive photography equipment. I’m lucky to have a team that while small, is well versed in the use of all digital tools at hand, so we produced our content in house.

I don’t know that we were any more successful than the next
guy in trying to convey the value proposition of marketing, but we gave it a
college try. Let me know how you thought we did. Nuff said.

Target Fails To Connect The Dots With Missoni Launch

What happens when you bring a popular Italian designer (Missoni) to the masses, broadcast your message non-stop with a nationwide TV campaign, and push your social media channels to pump up the hysteria of your target customers?

 
Well, for Target anyway, a business disaster. Target failed to connect the dots and is now dealing with a collapsed ecommerce platform, downed corporate website, and remains stone cold across its social media platforms while its customers howl to the high heavens.

 
The New York Times reported that their website went down in the morning EST, and is still down late this afternoon PST, although there is a lovely dog letting me know that.  Accordingly posters on the company’s Facebook Target Style feed are not at all happy as some were left standing at the virtual cash register after paying for their items, and then having the site go down. The same article reports furious Twitter and Facebook users yet companies’ voice is silent across these channels from what I can see.

You would think this would be the one time you want to keep the lines of communication open and engage with your customers in helping them navigate an unpleasant experience. Turn it into an honest and open dialogue with news updates, and possibly even promotional incentives to rebuild goodwill, although more promotion is not what Target needs now to be sure.

The more pertinent question is how could one of the largest retailers miss the signs? To modify the words of Al Pacino from “Any Given Sunday”: “The signs are all around us”. One would think that Target has a fairly advanced, and sophisticated marketing function. I mean they could certainly sign the check for the production of the TV commercial and buying of media time. They could certainly garner a high volume of “likes”, and showed that were adept at building, that-ohso  trendy marketing term these days,  Buzzzzzzzz” , with an impromptu pop-up shop in New York City the week prior, and a preview just for fashion editors the same week.

So what were some the signs that could have missed? How about over 350K likes just for the Mizzoni page on their Target Style Facebook page. This had more likes than any other item I could find across all their Facebook properties. Perhaps looking at that sign and then correlating the volume and velocity of those “ likes” to their TV campaign, would have made one ponder?

 
Perhaps looking at the growing traffic volume on their site in regards to the upcoming launch or mounting search engine traffic and referral links would have clued one in that perhaps “we have winner” and maybe we need another server.

Or even looking at that cool “buzz” building activity last week that caused frenzy on the streets of New York, and even made once, normally self composed fashion editors, turn into savages and leave the displays and shelves looking like a warzone at their early preview event ,would have made one ponder?

 
Clearly there was a breakdown between marketing, analytics, operations, ecommerce, IT and some good ole business sense that now leaves Target, silent, scrambling to bring up a online store and corporate website, and watching a growing chorus of pissed off customers posting, screaming and fighting, not just on Social Media, but also in the aisles of their stores.

 

While the current misguided marketing fervor is to get a “like”, we can, and do underestimate the signs that are all around us, every day. In this online-offline world we need to ensure that we have the systems, processes, and simple lines of communications that enable us to connect the dots, and give us a heads up so we don’t get blindsided by the next big thing, or lack thereof. Nuff said.

 

The Best Socially Connected Marketing Campaign of 2011: Museum of Me

I recently tried Intel’s interactive brand campaign, in support of launching their Icore5 processors, and was blown away by the creativity, and the personal level of engagement their brand had with me for 2 minuets.

 
 
This is what socially connected marketing is all about, in that you want your brand to have a personal, sustained, and meaningful engagement with the consumer. What’s amazing is that Intel did this in support of a computer chip.

The concept of the Museum of Me is brilliant in my view, in that the application harvests your Facebook information (only after you give it permission, and noting that the data is not shared with anyone else) to create the context of a museum exhibit that showcases the visual aspect of your social life. How much more personal and engaging can a brand be.

 

The visual context is spot on, as the chipset is optimized for visual media, and the brand is positioned as an innovator in the space. Intel was successful in establishing an emotional connection with the viewer due to the personal level of engagement-your visual social life.

Now what’s interesting is the media and pundits have given rise to some more controversial takes on the campaign, and along the lines of data privacy and of course a little narcissism. On some level if you haven’t already realized what information is accessible on Facebook and that you allow to be shared, The Museum of Me certainly does a good job of slapping you back to reality.

 
Data privacy is going to be a huge issue in the coming 10 years as Christina Gagnier of the Huffington Post writes “As the newest evolution in privacy warnings has moved towards icons, such as TRUSTe's "Truth in Privacy" framework, consideration should be given to visualizations that personalize the experience that someone may have on the website they are visiting or the mobile application they are using. If there was a means of prospective visualization, this may be the future of educating users on privacy in a meaningful way.”

Of course I could also look at the side bar on data privacy from the purely capitalistic side. Could Intel be looking to create a parallel discussion on data privacy as a result of this campaign? Why? You ask. Well at some level personal data privacy would need to be protected at the Chip level in our ever growing, always on, and mobile society. Intel has certainly demonstrated its intent to integrate data security at the chip level with its purchase of McAfee, so why not data privacy?

 
While any discussion on data privacy is good, and needed I look at this effort purely from a marketing point of view. In that vein, I think Intel, and their creative partners have done a masterful job at  creating a highly personal and engaging experience between me, and their brand for two minutes. The campaign even reached in at a philosophical level by ending with your visual social graph, and then scaling out to show how your graph is connected to millions of others.

Isn’t this what socially connected marketing is about? Nuff said.

The Coming Future of the Greatest Sponsorhsip Ever Sold

A fantastic TED talk by Morgan Spurlock of "SuperSize Me" about the world of big corporate advertising and  its incestuous relationship with the media channels. Morgan's new movie "POM Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold" The thought of true transparency is still somewhat of a figment of the imagination in these circles. The point this is trying to bring home, in my view, is that we are now being inundated with corporate shill 24x7. The thing that is changing the fastest, in my view, is the way in which the pitch is getting delivered, as the sponsored message is becoming ever more blended in with the content and delivery channels we consume.  

 

Today it could be a tweet or comment on a late night show from a well known celebrity mentioning how great a coke would be, or even a local mom recommending a product to her network on Facebook. Schools are selling advertsing like it nobody’s business as school buses and hallways now market to our youth. As I work in the "biz" so to speak I have a pretty good sense of what is a pitch as I know that there is no relaity in reality TV. Every thing is planned and well coordinated from late night to the fabricated drama on on Dancing With the Stars. 

How long until we see corporate messgaing and sponsorships pervade our professional spots more than what they have already. It's only a matter of time before we see corprate brands on our pro teams uniforms in the US just as they do in Europe. The WNBA has already started selling sponsorships for player’s uniforms, so how much longer before we see the Citibank Mets?  

We all talk how great social media is and how wonderful it is to be connected to one another. While there is a lot of good from that always remember that the social media platform companies need to eat, and feed their kids and that the most valuable commodity they have is your data.

Today we see the emergence of location based services that will serve as the foundation, along with trillions of lines of data about all of us, to facilitate the delivery of targeted and custom sponsored messages 24x7. It’s interesting that one of the big future mega trends will be the sheer growth of ‘screens”. Screens and displays will be all around us, pervading every facet of our lives with the purpose of delivering us commercially sponsored messaging (i.e a pitch).

 
As a smaller marketer I’m not any less guilty. I do conduct custom research with the aim of supporting a position or point of view in the market. I do develop white papers and videos with a pitch that is designed to push a viewpoint that’s favorable to my company and my product. I’m certainly not producing high quality content for humanitarian reasons alone. I do try to keep the pitch to minimum and always try to make the content of high quality, but the end goal is the same in that I’m trying to position a point of view that benefits my interests commercially.

The difference is that it’s pretty apparent when you take content from a corporate website or off a corporate advertisement your going to get some pointed messaging. What's changing is that these commercial messages will be delivered across all channels and packaged within seemingly non commercial messages and this is where we all need to be more aware and do as our parents said:

“Always question who is delivering you the news, and always ask who “they” are”

I worked with Morgan many years back, and during that time we all knew he would be very successful. Congratulations on your new movie and as a marketer I can’t wait to see it. Nuff said.

The New New Marketing Hype: Pink Ponies

In the days of hype, and circumstance there are far too many marketers who jump from one tactic/fad to the next in search of the holy grail, assuming they can even define what the holy grail of marketing is. From driving sales through social media to trying to create the next viral video for $5, the marketing graveyard is littered with these failed attempts.

Few fail to realize that principles of marketing haven’t changed at all, and that knowing your audience, their challengesand needs, ensuring a strong and honest brand experience, and focusing on your solution’s benefits and problem solving ability has far too often been lost in this growing sea of hype that is accelerating at light speed these days.

I came across this promotional video for the John St. agency, that did such a great job of showing how there really is no one magical marketing tactic today. Today we now live in a world of multi-channel communication, and the trick really is to understand how and where our customers/ prospects would like to engage with us and ensure we are in those places.  

 
It really doesn’t matter if it’s social, online, or offline. What matters is that we are where our customers are and engaging with them. A poignant message in today’s faster than light speed changing environment.

Although, I do wish they would have given me some embed code so I could more easily syndicate it.

Nuff said.