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

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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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.

Top Ten B2B Marketing Mistakes and How To Avoid Them

A few months ago I contributed to this crowd sourced effort by Mac McIntosh and Dianna Huff. The ebook is now complete and available for free download. In this ebook ten broad categories of mistakes were identified that B2B marketers commonly make. What do you think? Were the mistakes nailed?

Download Top10MarketingMistakes

 

Nuff said.

More Marketers To Start Blogging

According to recent research by eMarketer more companies will start blogging to support their marketing efforts with 43% of all US companies expected to have some form of blog in use for marketing by 2012.

What’s still amazing to me is the number of B2B companies that do not blog and those who start their foray into social media with Facebook or Twitter as their primary focus/goal.

 

 I have always held that the "blog" is the best form of social media in which to start conversing with your audience, and sharing your ideas. A good company blog gives you immediate SEO and thought leadership awareness and if coordinated within your PR & Communications processes and agency partners you will see your business and vertical media coverage rise significantly.

 

The reason for this is that the model of journalism is basically that of independent blogs by former journalists and analysts. These folks are always looking or for ready-to-wear content, and if you provide them that content at the right time your message will usually be posted verbatim within the context of their article.

Want to enter social media? Start with a great blog. Nuff Said.

Big Ed’s Top 10 B2B Marketing Trends For 2010

 
The great global economic meltdown of 2009 has passed, and we are still here and breathing, mostly a sigh of relief. It’s been a tough year for B2B marketers as many of us had to deal with decreased budgets, staff and a return to basics. Hopefully, we focused on improving our core processes, measures, and databases so we are ready for whatever the economy and market brings our way in 2010. In 2009, I put forth my Big 10 Trends for B2B Marketing, and in keeping with tradition I thought I would do it again for 2010.

1.    Mass Adoption of Social Media in The B2B Marketing Mix

I hope that in 2010 we will finally see an end to the monotonous message of “Why Marketers Should Use Social Media” and hopefully an end to the ubiquitous “5 Ways to Use Twitter to Improve Your Marketing”.  I think we can all say that social media officially jumped the shark when Ashton tweeted all of us a picture of Demi in her underpants.

 To that end there should be only be a few of us left that do not fully understand that social media, must become part of our integrated marketing mix in order to get our message out, and to build a dialogue with our customers. While not in such large numbers yet, marketers are beginning to understand that they have lost control of the brand experience to the customer, and that they must engage if they have any desire to partake in their brand experience. 

Are there any of us left that aren’t using social media in one form or another today? Granted some of us may be using it ineffectively, but we are using it, and therefore we are learning. Unfortunately get ready for the onslaught of the a-typical social media campaign: “take a video of how you use our product and we will show it on You Tube.”

2.    Social Media ROI Remains Confusing and Elusive as Ever

 

 

With the mass adoption of social media we will now be inundated with an ever increasing amount of articles, and blog posts on how to “Increase Leads & SEO with Social Media”. The reality is almost all of us confuse “the media” with “the social” in trying to identify measures that get us to some form of ROI. Today most of us are focused on awareness, and lead generation as noted by this recent research from Sirius Decisions.

I, for one, do not believe that social media will prove an effective lead generation tool as social media is inherently about dialogue, listening and engaging. I don’t think there are too many people, customer or otherwise, that want to be sold to in every dialogue they have with a brand. Someone once said “Social Media Works Best When it is Earned and Not Paid for”.

We will see continued ROI assertions with the “media side” of social media, but I don’t think this is the relevant measure to look at as these measures are usually short-term in their focus. Social media is inherently about value creation and, as a result, much more long-term in its value add that is ultimately reflected in trust, advocacy, and sentiment towards our brands. This is where the true ROI/Value in social media lies, but it will be a long and arduous path for most of us to realize that, let alone convincing our management. In addition we are hampered by a lack of effective and efficient tool sets that can aid our measures on these more subjective value drivers.

 

I think that we must all go through an evolution of social media learning before we can truly be enlightened on the real ROI, or better yet, value generation of social media. In my view this evolutionary curve follows a distinct path of enlightenment for B2B marketers:

· Awareness: The stage where most of us begin our journey. Here the focus is on utilizing social media channels to drive market/brand awareness and SEO. Marketers confuse Social Media ROI with media measures such as page rank, organic vs. paid search, page views, and leads (we also confuse inquires & leads but that is another issue). Social media strategy is often confused with social media tools and channels (i.e. the tactics) at this stage.

· Engagement: After awareness we realize that social media can actually be used to converse in a two-way dialogue with our ecosystem. Metrics get a little more focused and try to relate to other ongoing tactics in order to monetize the value of such efforts and convince management of the need for continued investment. For example, using a blog to gain feedback on a company’s products can be monetized against the ongoing cost of focus groups.

 

 

 

· Listening: Once we are engaged we discover the power of listening. Here we start to use social media to listen to the market, and to what people are saying about our products, brands, and engaging more directly to assist with the service aspects of the company’s offerings. Social media metrics get more sophisticated, and are viewed in a much longer time frame than media measures. This new level of social media measurement is focused more on advocacy, brand sentiment, and service experience. While sentiment and advocacy are difficult to measure, as tool sets are still emerging, advancements will be made on the monetization and measuring the service aspect of social media (i.e reaching out to a compliant heard through twitter and solving the issue via social media channels).  Comcast Cable use of Twitter  is a good example of this stage of evolution.

· Innovation: At this stage we start using social media to crowd-source, and to co-innovate with our ecosystems. This is the most advanced stage of evolution where our products and services actually converge with community and social media capabilities to foster greater and faster co-innovation. At this stage the value derived from social media can be extraordinary as smaller brands can compete effectively with larger brands. SalesForce.com and Starbucks are two companies with examples of community based innovation frameworks in place.

 

3.    Focus On Database Accuracy

Last year I said that database marketing will be a major priority for us as the recession will require us to focus on cross-sell, and to leverage our database for more effective and efficient demand generation. Now we have a new issue at play in our databases, and that is the accuracy of the contacts. While we will always be searching for the holy grail of accuracy in the database, this issue has been exacerbated in 2010 due to the recession that has left many of these databases defunct due to the massive job losses seen. Efforts need to be undertaken to cleanse and update existing data bases this year versus focusing on adding more quantity to the marketing database.

 

4.    B2B Buyers Continued Shift to Online Sources of Information

As I said last year Print is dead. 2009 saw the continued demise of B2B print media and the large industry events have been called into greater question, as their real value became more suspect in an increasingly digital world. Influence of the virtual event and webcasts continues to grow as effective communication and lead generation channels for B2B marketers. Yet there remains a gap in how we, as marketers, view the channels that our prospects are using to conduct their buying research. Here is some recent Tech Target IT buyer research that I found particularly interesting.

When asked how frequently they use the internet to conduct buyer research IT buyers said the following:

 

Note the disconnect between Marketers and the people they are trying to reach. IT Buyers don’t view the Vendor Website in such high esteem as we do (imagine that), nor do they view conferences, trade shows, associations or editorial articles in evaluating technology as highly as we do.

 

 

 

The key point here is that now, more than ever, we truly have to understand our persona’s buying process and how they conduct and consume information in order to optimize our marketing mix across online and off-line channels.

5.    Understanding & Optimizing the Buying & Selling Cycle

While much has been written about how we, as marketers, have lost control of our brand experience, and the need to understand our buyer personas in a way to more effectively deliver content to support the buying process, very little has been written about the impact to the sales cycle. The reality is that sales has lost control over the selling cycle in the context that sales must control relevant information in order to force an engagement with the prospect, and to ensure that the sales is guiding the decision making process of the prospect. While that may have worked 10 years ago, nothing can be further from the truth today. How many times have you heard your sales team say “Don’t put that on the website. They need to come to me for that information”?

In today’s world, our prospects are getting their information including pricing, technical details, etc. from our past customers and, in most cases, now know more about the product, and the business terms than our own sales teams. This puts our sales teams into ever increasing positions of justifying their value add.

Note some recent B2B buyer research from Forrester where 70% of business decision makers prefer to develop their own knowledge online.

In short, they don’t want to engage with you until they are ready (I know. It’s a novel concept). This creates a few challenges for B2B marketers:

1.    Understanding the buyer process and personas of the target audience in order to develop an optimal content model and delivery channels.

2.    Extending Marketing programs to cover the sales process and understanding our sales persona in order to develop an optimal content model for sales that adds value to the customer buying process.

3.    Optimizing a cohesive content model that supports both the buying and selling process.

Ultimately this reinforces the notion that Content Is King, but if we don’t understand both the buying and selling process, as well as our buying and selling personas, we will be producing content for the sake of content and not meeting any of the true requirements of our customers or our sales teams.

6.    Content is King, but Comparative Content is The Kings Ransom

Content may be King but it is comparative content that your buyers want—

Content that compares how your solution stacks up against your competitors. Closely following comparative content is pricing information. These are the two most valued types of information and searches across buyers when using the internet for research, yet these two types of information are most resisted by marketers and sales alike, in an attempt to control information and force engagements with the brand.

 

2010 will see an increase in comparative and pricing content on vendor websites by aggressive marketers who want to define the competitive framework. First movers will gain leverage by introducing this content first. Do the following search:“enter your company/solution name here” vs  “enter your competitor’s company/solution name here” . You may be surprised at what comes up.

 

7.    Segment Based Nurturing

By now we have all learned that it is important to nurture, and most of us have put in place the Ubiquitous Newsletter that touches our base at least a few times a year or month. Some of us have even put into place some automated touches of emails that are sent out at predefined intervals to inquires in an attempt to get them to re-engage or push information to accelerate a buying process. Segment based nurturing is the next stage of this nurturing process where we put into place a very comprehensive communications flow whose message evolves over time based on actions taken.

 

In short, segment based nurturing revolves around the notion that the conversation you have today is different from the one you have next month based on level of interest, need, actions, content taken, etc. To do this well you must have the right tool sets in place (i.e. Eloqua, Marketo, Genius-I’m a customer). The tools sets are rapidly evolving and coming down in cost. If you don’t have this type of capability, you need to make 2010 the year you implement a basic marketing automation platform.

 

As I said last year, many of us that have these platforms in place are still only using them as glorified email engines, but the real power is when we leverage them as segmentation engines that happen to have email as a feature.

 

 

To realize this value we must bring together an enriched and accurate marketing database, a well designed web site, improved understanding of our content model, and its relation to the buying process, and persona requirements.  When this happens very advanced and segmented-automated nurturing can be applied. In 2010 we will see more companies move to this more advanced level of nurturing, along with increased adoption of marketing automation platforms.

 

8.    Operationalizing the Marketing Convergence of Art & Science

Is marketing an art or a science? The answer is yes. When the science meets the art in a more structured way, exciting marketing messages, creative, campaigns can and will result. More companies are realizing this benefit, and are looking to formalize the “marketing gearbox” where art meets science.

 

This may take the form of a dedicated operations role or through process where the analytics works side-by-side with the creative process. Increasingly we will see this convergence become more formalized across more and more companies in 2010.

 

9.    Social CRM Takes Root

 

 

 

The year 2009 saw Social CRM start to hit the main stage with the announcement of twitter integration into

Salesforce, Comcast Cable use of twitter to serve customers, and Best Buy’s Twelp Force. More companies, including my own, are increasingly monitoring social media channels in an effort to support customer issues, both positive and negative.  

 

2010 will see accelerated integration of these channels into CRM and service systems as it represents an ideal way for companies to have an efficient dialogue and improve overall brand and customer experience. This is one area of social media that can be quickly monetized and measured.

10.   Rise of Community Thought Leadership

Thought leadership has been around for some time as an objective for marketers to drive. In most cases thought leadership takes a more strategic approach to a company’s messaging or positioning objectives, such as “trying to educate a market”, “influence opinion makers”, “position the company’s vision as the industry vision”. In my view, thought leadership is an important part of the overall marketing mix and should be invested in.

 

However I do believe that there is a new dimension coming to thought leadership and that is “community thought leadership”. Scott Mersey of Genius.com recently blogged that the difference between Community Thought Leadership & Thought Leadership is:

“The key difference between Community Leadership and Thought Leadership is that this approach means that help and relevant content is provided freely and without strings so that any member of the community - whether or not ever a “prospect” to become a customer - comes away with actionable information and insight into how to solve their problems. It’s leadership that’s vendor agnostic and broader than a piece designed to capture leads.”

Henrik Ibsen once said that “A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.”  This really denotes the difference, in my view, between our traditional approach to marketing thought leadership and community based thought leadership. In the traditional sense we are focused on getting our message out, and not so concerned with dialogue, or as Mersey states “Focused on Monologue”.

 

In community thought leadership we are a member of a relevant community, and focused on influencing and building advocacy for our views across many community members. In doing this we take part in meaningful dialogue, and debate where our initial thought/idea/position is subject to evolution based on input from the community.

Community thought leadership is growing more important to B2B marketers as communities are becoming increasingly important as vehicles where our ecosystem engages, and shares ideas in an increasing manner. So how does one define a successful community thought leadership effort?

1.    Become part of a relevant community.

2.    Share your ideas freely and provide information that is free of vendor speak and requirements such as registration.

3.    Have thoughtful debate and dialogue.

4.    Be willing to evolve your position.

5.    Focus on building advocacy, not monologue.

 

In 2010 we will see more push on community thought leadership as part of a comprehensive thought leadership program.

 

I wish all of you great success in 2010. Nuff Said.

Marketers Wake Up! Google’s Sidewiki Brings New Social Dimensions to Your Company's Digital Doorstep

Last week Google announced on their blog the addition of a new feature called the Google SideWiki. This new feature is being positioned as a feature that allows you to learn and get help from others.

The  Google Sidewiki, allows you to contribute comments, information, point of view directly to any webpage. The Google Sidewiki appears as a browser sidebar, where you can read and write entries along the side of the page. You can then syndicate your posts through other social media channels including Twitter and Facebook.

The ramifications for marketers, I believe, are significant if this takes off, and I have no reason to doubt that it won’t. First it makes every web page on your company web site social. That means that as prospects, customers, partners, media come to your website they can see the comments that others have left, both good and bad and post their own comments. I would imagine competitors can even leave comments now on your website if they would like to.

Why is this important? Word of Mouth is the #1 or 2 (depending on what survey you read) influencing factor on your buying cycles. Through Sidewiki Google has now brought word of mouth right to your companies door step.

This ultimately means that if you aren’t listening or monitoring what’s being said about you that you really need to start, as your website is your company’s primary communication and marketing vehicle today. If you’re not engaging, or conversing through social media channels, than you better start thinking about it.

 

Jeremiah Owyang does a great job of providing some key steps to take to help you formulate your strategy in response to this at his website. I recommend you read them.  After reading those suggestions I recommend you do two things:

1.   Download Sidewiki at google.com/sidewiki  and contribute your own entries alongside some web pages and syndicate out to some social media channels, so you see it and get it

2.   Have a meeting with your team to discuss what this means to website strategy, how you will monitor, and how you will respond to disgruntled customers, employees, and competitors.

  

Let me know your thoughts. Nuff Said…

Twitter Helps Latest LA Food Sensation Gather Its Tribes

 Kogi is the latest phenomenon in LA dining. Chef, at world famous restaurant, decides to forgo glitz and glamour and create a unique fusion of Korean and Mexican food and serves up these delectable concoctions in roving catering vans all over LA.

I’m not making this up folks, and it’s the stuff that Hollywood is made of. I’m sure the food network is already doing a show on it. While I’m a foodie at heart, the real story is one of a relatively unknown (until recently) mobile catering truck that used Twitter and awesome food, to create a following, and help lubricate word of mouth in America’s 2^nd largest city and now the world.

As Kogi is a mobile business, and a small one at that, it needed a way to tap into the following that it had created, and who was already talking about Kogi on Facebook, other social networking sites and blogs. Kogi’s brand director, in a recent Reuters article, stated that they decided to use Twitter as a way to communicate with their “tribe” and facilitate gathering places based on the trucks location. Kogi turned to Twitter. Today you and Kogi’s 23,000 followers can be found on Twitter at twitter.com/kogibbq.

This shows the amazing capability of utilizing a social media tool to facilitate a small business with a large following, and an excellent product. So let’s look at Kogi’s ingredients for success:

1.      Great Product: Kogi obviously has a tremendous product. Social media success and for that matter any business, starts with an amazing product or service.

2.      The Tribe of Kogi: Kogi’s customers wanted to talk about their experience, and in fact had became a tribe. Seth Godin writes that “a tribe is any group of people connected to each other through an idea or experience”. In this case, Kogi’s customers had become a tribe, but we’re missing a leader. When Kogi stepped in, and utilized social tools Kogi become the leader of its own tribe. A place where a brand wants to be at the end of the day.

3.      Honesty: The social community in this case is honest. Kogi delivers an amazing product, people want to talk about, and others want to experience it and Kogi facilitates this. Kogi’s goal is not about selling or hyping, at least not yet, and let’s hopes it stays that way.

4.      Word of Mouth: WOM is the best advertising around. This is as old, as the hills, and still true. Kogi couldn’t buy the brand awareness it has now, and is getting through the facilitation of communication across its tribe. Social Media can help any small business if the intent is to converse with the community of customers and prospects; not sales or advertising.

5.      With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility: Kogi must now realize the importance of its brand experience, and promise that its customers have come to expect. Any degradation in service and experience will travel at the speed of light in Kogi’s social universe.

6.      Innovation: While Kogi’s responsibility to its brand experience is now much greater it has an amazing community of people to listen to, and engage with, and in doing that develop new innovation in its business.

This story shows how small businesses can take advantage of building and tapping into their community. Today, McDonalds and Burger King do not have Twitter accounts and Domino’s only recently started one to help combat the recent wave of bad publicity. Why haven’t the brands, with all the resources in the world, tapped into the tools that help them engage with their customers? Probably because they are still strategizing, and trying to figure out the ROI of a conversation. Nuff said.

Is The Secret To A Great Customer Experience Less And Not More?

I came across a blog post by Matthew E. May this week that really intrigued me. As a marketer I have a keen sense of understanding in how hard it is, or can be, to make the complex simple, and that in many ways is our primary job.

In this age of challenging business times there is no doubt that we will or have already been pulled into multiple meetings to discuss our customer experience and what we can do to make it better. Usually I find these discussions to gravitate towards what more we can do or how much price can be cut or what products can be packaged together(sorry I work with a lot of sales guys).

In Matthew’s blog post he calls out a strategy utilized by Apple. They have a stragey that they call the “Stop Doing Strategy”. In this strategy instead of asking what more you can add, or bundle you would ask some very different questions:

·         What would our customers love for us to eliminate, reduce, or stop adding and doing in our current business model and engagement?

·         What is it that our competitors would struggle with if we were to stop doing several things?

I found that when thinking about my business and customers and prospects in this context that my eyes opened to a much larger landscape potential of what we could do if we could stop doing things.

So maybe the secret to a great customer experience is less and not more. Nuff Said.