Marketing Interactions

Marketing through Stories

There's a great article over at Marketing Profs, Marketing via Story: The Selling Power of Narrative in a Conceptual Age.

"As marketers, we need to present universal truths with which our customers can more easily identify. Sharing the stories of our customers, employees, or related communities (people who benefit from our brand's philanthropy, for example) is how consumers discover those Truths with a capital 'T.'"

The basic gist of the article is that having a list of features and benefits is fine, but the real connection that people will make to your products is by experiencing them vicariously through stories. Stories bring your products to life. They also touch people in a way that messaging does not.

The article lists these five ways that stories can make a difference:

1. Context: Story gives facts context and delivers the whole package with emotional impact (every marketer's dream).
2. Common ground: Stories are slices of life that can subtly reflect bits and pieces of common ground between consumer and brand.
3. Brand intersections: In this more holistically thinking world, a consumer's buying path may be complex. Stories give you a way to show consumers that there are more places than they may have imagined where their lives and your brand intersect.
4. Increased relevance: By paying more attention to the stories surrounding your brand and taking place in the daily lives of your customers, your marketing is naturally more prone to relevance.
5. Future chapters: Start gathering and telling stories now and you will have those initial narrative threads to which you can always refer for continuity in messaging.

For B2B organizations, storytelling is a great way to present your case studies. In fact, if your case studies focus only on the problem/solution, without any context, then they aren't really helpful. How many times have you read a case study only to scratch your head and think, "Yeah, but what did they get out of it?" or "How did they really do that?"

The trick here is to humanize what can often be dry and factual reports/analysis from a B2B perspective and add in the emotion. People buy based on emotion. Just because they're making a purchase for their organization doesn't mean emotions don't come into play. At least subconsciously.

I've written about storytelling with my posts on Collaborative Storytelling and Storytelling and Marketing - in case you're interested in reading more about this subject.

There's another short post worth reading over on Sam Decker's blog, 3 Emotions Drive Execs to Action, where he talks about the properties of Fear, Excitement and Pride. Worth a read.

Problem Avoidance for Consultative Selling

How do your salespeople sell? Do they approach a prospect armed with a list of features and a focus only on closing the deal, or do they provide valuable expertise?

One way marketing can provide value to sales is by providing scenarios for problem avoidance. The purchase of a solution has many considerations. The solution probably impacts more than the immediate problem it's going to solve and there are many considerations peripheral to the sale.

Instead of being the company that returns to save a customer from a disaster AFTER they deploy your product (because they didn't know what could happen), be the company that provides the expertise to make sure they don't have problems from the beginning.

If you're still converting your salespeople from "component" sales to "solution" sales, arming them with the information that enables them to share insights that can reduce add-on issues is often a critical factor in the customer's vendor decision.

For example:

• Are there physical or material things about installing the product/solution that need to be considered?
  • Space
  • Utilities
  • Access
  • Operations
• Are there processes that aren't on the radar that need to be redesigned to accommodate the changes the product/solution will bring?
• What are the outside ramifications that reach beyond the department or problem that may be affected?
• How will the buyer group get buy-in from users?
• What are some of the issues they might face getting buy-in?
• Who will be affected that might not be in the customer's thinking?
• What should they be prepared to produce to make the product/solution sing?
  • Content
  • Schedules
  • Manuals
  • Updates
  • Training
• What's the minimum they'll have to do to get the results you've promised?
• How can they go beyond that to get way more than they think?

I'm not advocating giving away professional services, but I am saying that mentioning things outside your products features and benefits can go a long way in providing value that your customers embrace. Keeping your customers from being blind-sided builds loyalty and a trusted relationship, and will also help salespeople close more sales.

Expanding B2B Brand Strategies

What makes a B2B brand impact your choice of whether or not to do business with a company?

According to Geoffrey Moore, "[brand value] has virtually no relevance to B2B complex systems enterprises." He also says, "Customer intimacy is achieved by face-to-face interactions between representatives of both companies, and buying decisions are made and reviewed by an array of people.  By virtue of these differences the impact of brand is dramatically muted."

I agree that in a B2B sale, the brand may be muted, but I do not agree that brand has no relevance. Before you squawk at me, let me give you something to consider.

B2B buyers are looking to solve problems they cannot solve on their own or, usually, from within their organizations. The solution to the issues they are dealing with often have impact beyond the immediate boundaries of that problem. Additionally, B2B buyers are usually a group of people, not just one person. Each of these people has different wants/needs tied to solving the issue. By the very nature of a brand, it cannot be all things to all people.

So what is more effective to consider is your organization's contribution to strategic thinking, the experience the buyer(group) has with your organization and the quality of those interactions. These need to extend beyond the "solution" your company is offering to consider the points beyond the initial impact. That's what's going to close the deal-- Demonstrating your understanding of the client's unique situation and the roll-out effect of the solution. Showing, clearly, how the impact of the combination of the proposed solution and the thinking that goes to process and people will help them achieve the value/outcome they seek.

A B2B brand comes into play at the beginning and the end of this chain. In the beginning, awareness can help get your company onto the consideration list. In the end the reputation of your brand can be the final swaying factor that helps you beat your competitors. But, in the middle of the process, you need more than brand to pull it off. The complexity alone says that brand has to put its money where its logo is by providing the interactions that deliver on your brand's promise.

Here are some interesting related posts to help extend your thinking:

B2B Branding - Why Branding Matters in B2B Marketing is a post written by Jon Miller. This is part 1 of a series he'll be writing, and takes a good look at B2B buyers as people too. He talks about the avoidance of negative emotions involved and conscious/subconscious reactions. It is worth the read.  (Thanks, Jon, for the link to Geoff Moore)

Another post that relates to the impact of strategic thinking is Adele Revella's post, Persona experts have focus, that's all, which talks about creating internal ad hoc personas within marketing in order to gain "deep insight into the motivations, preferences and influences that drive decisions within your target audiences." Which goes back to the importance of creating customer interactions with impact. If you've considered using personas to ramp the effectiveness of your marketing interactions, make sure to read her insights about taking the sales view as gospel.

To wrap it up, brand is an important component of the sale, but not on its own. A B2B complex sale will require much more than brand to close the deal. It's simply a tool in the marketing and sales arsenal that needs attention. But don't discount experiences that demonstrate the contribution your company makes through strategic thinking, interactions that deliver satisfying knowledge transfer or the benefit of personas.

In fact, those three things should be so well done and pervasive throughout your selling process that they, in fact, become part of your brand.

Content Marketing Strategy

Sales and marketing will achieve greater business results if they work together.

How many times has this been said? Way too many, and with little effect from what I can tell. I talk to marketers who tell me they've asked sales what they want, given it to them and had sales tell them, no, that's not it. Marketing gets frustrated and complains that sales doesn't cooperate. Yada, yada, yada, the BS cycle continues.

What sales really needs is to close more deals, greater sales effectiveness.

What marketing really needs is to tie their efforts to business results (hint: more sales) with metrics that show their contribution to those deals.

What will help both work together toward the same purpose and support each other toward getting those results is a Content Marketing Strategy.

For a content strategy to work, it needs to be based on the entire sales cycle. This means that there should be a clear plan from lead generation through each interaction to the closed deal. Think about what you're trying to accomplish.

Marketing is challenged with:

• generating awareness,
• keeping a lead's interest while expanding their knowledge,
• determining preference for a particular product/solution/service and reinforcing that choice,
  
• providing information for validation that the offering will indeed solve their problem
• transitioning the (now) prospect to sales seamlessly

This is the tricky part: handing the prospect over to sales without faltering in consistency of the conversation. In order to do this well, marketing needs to ensure they've created content and messaging for sales that enables them to pick up the prospect in mid-stream without losing traction.

If the messaging the prospect has been exposed to stops at this point and becomes something different, then the prospect has to regroup. If confusion ensues, or the prospect feels like he's switched companies somewhere, your sales activities will take a big backwards jump and have to painstakingly move forward again.

On the other hand, if marketing has created content and messaging for sales activities that works for salespeople, then sales can step into the process and do what they do best without losing traction.

Did you catch the key to this? "messaging for sales activities that works for salespeople"

It has to work for them. This is why salespeople continually mess with, rewrite and create their own collateral and messaging. They can't work with the stuff marketing gives them. They can't say it naturally or it doesn't fit what they see and deal with out in the field. Or, it doesn't match the challenges that their prospects are trying to solve.

Without collaboration and a fully realized end-to-end content marketing strategy sales will stumble and have to spend time and effort to regain footing. They will be less effective and they will spend way too much time working on content and collateral than they will in closing deals.

Which just refuels the cycle we talked about up at the beginning of this post...

If you're interested in other related thoughts, here are some interesting reads:

Branding is for Cattle - Posted by David Meerman Scott on the Web Ink Now blog

What Sales Really Needs From Marketing - a White Paper by Jill Konrath of Selling to Big Companies

Going Beyond the Sales Lead - Posted by Brian Carroll on the B2B Lead Generation Blog

Why Marketing Needs to Nurture Leads

"Nine out of 10 sales reps reportedly give up on their individual leads after just two calls."

Read that again. I was stunned after reading this in a Marketing Sherpa report on the Email Summit, in a section about B2B . But, I shouldn't be. Salespeople are geared to sell. Non-responding leads mean that a sale isn't going to happen. At least not that day.

However, in B2B marketing, especially for complex sales, it takes many contacts and interactions to get a lead through the cycle to purchase. How many of the leads marketing collects end up tossed aside because they were routed directly to sales without nurturing?

Collecting leads is easy. Buy a list, use OneSource or Hoovers, use subscriptions and inquiries from your website. But then what? If you're selling something complex, you're doing your leads a major disservice if you toss them over the wall to sales without cultivating them by answering their preliminary need for information. Not to mention how sales feels about them.

Think about it. How many times have you inquired about something you're interested in only to be contacted by someone trying to sell you when all you wanted was more information so you could consider your options? Do you ever hear from the company again, or do they give up, never giving you enough information or time to do your considering? Especially if you say your buying window is longer than six months or even a year.

With the tools available today, your marketing website can track an individual lead's behavior and help you focus on how to further expand their interests--related to what they want to know. By knowing their interests, marketing can point them toward other "like" information and invite them to related events or send them tailored, relevant information that expands their knowledge.

Sales should also be able to assign a longer-term lead back to the nurturing process into a campaign related to what the lead is interested in. This way they can process through the cycle at the speed they choose.

Once a lead has reached what your company determines is a triggering action (initiating a predefined interaction that indicates they are ready for a sales conversation), then and only then, should they be handed off to sales. And, during the transition, sales should have access to their activity history and their interest profile, so they can step seamlessly into the conversation with traction.

Yes, there are tools and systems that do this. Shameless self-promotion, but I do want you to know it's possible. Take a look at the Highly Qualified Leads section of the Einsof website to get a quick overview. And the thing is, this shouldn't be difficult. If you're going to embark on a project to expand marketing's lead influence, make sure your vendor is also a trusted advisor who will stick around to make sure you get the value promised by using the system in a way that works for your organization.

If you're interested in reading the Email Summit Report from Marketing Sherpa, you can find it here.

B2B Content Your Prospects WANT To Read

Content, as we all know, is a sales tool. But, do you know what kind of content your B2B prospects want to read?

Luckily, Marketing Sherpa and Knowledge Storm did some research about this. I think this quote sums it up:

“Some B-to-B marketers focused on generating leads don’t fully realize the impact of content when it comes to engaging their audience and reinforcing their marketing message,” says Matt Lohman, Director, Business Development, KnowledgeStorm Inc. “The quality of the leads has everything to do with how the message, positioning and format of the content resonates with their target audience, in addition to when and where marketers engage them.”

Not surprisingly, case studies that show how a customer used a product to achieve business process improvement was at the top of the list. I might even take that further and say that it goes beyond business process improvement to business results - which they may mean by extension.

Industry research, how-to-guides and ways to better leverage a particular process were next. Are you seeing the trend here? It's not about your products as much as it's about what your customers can do with them that brings them closer to their strategic objectives. In a nutshell, it's about them.

It may be your website, but if your content isn't focused on what your customers can accomplish, they aren't interested.

The flip side of this is the look they took at what motivates marketers to update their website's content. Top three reasons were new/updated product or service, new marketing strategies, and new industry trends.

However, when you think about nurturing leads in an online environment, marketing needs to think about what will bring them back repeatedly. In a B2B complex sale, you want them to return continuously to learn more. You want them to transition through the prospect stages and a good way to do that is by feeding their need to know how to solve whatever business issue(s) your products and services excel at transforming.

The report talks about gaining a publisher's mindset and publishing new content frequently to meet the needs of your audience. It also reminds us not to react to only internally driven triggers like new products or marketing strategies. Take a look at your content usage metrics. If content isn't being read, it likely needs to be refreshed or given a more engaging slant. If you see certain kinds of content being read like crazy, take a look and determine what need it's meeting. Then add complementary content extensions  or produce other content that delivers information about what your audience finds useful.

Another interesting factor is that 62% of marketers don't write content specific to stages of the buying cycle. But the needs of each stage are different and worth taking into account. The information a lead needs to put you on their interest radar is quite different than the information a prospect needs to propel them into a sales conversation.

The survey was conducted in February 2007. You can see the Marketing Sherpa article here through March 15th. The full report will be available from Knowledge Storm as a free download the week of March 19th.

Useful CRM Needs Planning

CRM, as a sales effectiveness tool, leaves a lot to be desired.

William Band summarizes it this way in a Best Practices report from Forrester, "Companies continue to struggle with CRM investments as suggested by studies that indicate as few as 14 percent of executives are fully satisfied with the impact CRM has had on productivity..."

Part of the problem is that CRM is often implemented as a standard toolset which has no relationship to the way your sales process actually works. In addition to that rigid feature set, expectations and/or requirements can easily spiral out of control. The more complex the system is to use, the more resistance and even abandonment you'll get from your sales professionals.

Watch out for:

• unrealistic forecast demands to feed impossible goals
• adding form fields to track things that don't matter
• an "optional" mindset precedent set by managers and/or peers
• salespeople who distort data to look better
• salespeople who don't want to be monitored
• IT exuberance in the implementation - they don't know what sales does (usually)
• putting costs ahead of customer satisfaction

The other thing that should be interwoven with your CRM system is the automated inclusion of data your organization already has on record. Your sales reps shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel, and if what your CRM system does is create yet one more silo of information, it's not got a chance in Hades of delivering the results your company wants.

In order to sell CRM to your sales team, you need to look at them as the "customer" for that system. Involve them in the process of defining the system and get buy-in through their contributions. You need to build ownership and enthusiasm by creating a system designed to help them deliver more closed deals. It's answering that What's In It For Me (WIIFM) question.

Tell the sales team the big-picture story. If they can grasp the potential for outcomes greater than they've achieved before, you'll at least get them to try. Make sure once you've got them enrolled, that you help them get results. Fast.

Most importantly, keep the CRM system easy to use. Irrelevant features that are confusing and time consuming with no payoff are turn offs and will drive salespeople to abandon their efforts.

The best way to build a CRM system that works is to connect it to marketing programs and loop it back from sales to marketing so no lead is ever abandoned. If you combine a marketing driven lead nurturing program that transitions highly qualified leads to the sales team at the time they're ready for a sales conversation, you'll get salespeople enrolled. Equally important, you'll extend marketing insights to monitor the process from lead generation through to closed deal and provide them information along the way to streamline and improve their processes and ensure their messaging is effective. Done correctly, the CRM system can help create a perpetual cycle of renewal and effectiveness for both sales and marketing.

Like any other tool, the success it helps the user achieve is an indication of how well the system will integrate into the users' processes and become an integral part of the way your company does business. However, if you throw it out there without consideration, what you get will not be pretty or...productive.

Transactions vs. Relationships

When reinventing the role marketing plays for your company, you need to determine whether you are selling transactions or building relationships. Is what your organization sells a one-time deal that's over once done, or is it something that will provide value over time?

In a B2B complex sale, it takes a (growing) number of interactions to get to a sale. During that time, are you focused on building a relationship that gets you to the deal or beyond the deal?

The cost of gaining a customer is high. Closing the deal is more often, than not, based on how well your salespeople have positioned themselves as trusted advisors. This means the salesperson needs to deliver expertise to the project that the company doesn't have internally. 

Marketing needs to go beyond product marketing and provide sales with insights that help them position your company for future business. Call it the cross-sell or up-sell, but without setting up the extension  by looking beyond that initial deal,  your company may very well be done once that initial sale is completed.

Every sale into a company affects more than just the department acquiring your product. Ask yourself what processes the implementation will impact. How does that impact roll out across the enterprise? What can marketing prepare sales to add to the conversation that shows your company cares about the customer's success as well as their own?

Perhaps the possibility exists for additional sales that add more functionality once the customer has mastered the first iteration of the original sale. If true, what can your salespeople do to add to the strategic thinking about that initial implementation that will set your customer up for a graceful transition to what's next?

Marketing needs to think way beyond collateral and messaging to process, people and business value. They need to think about how their company's products effect enterprises and how they help customers manage those outcomes in a way that's successful. Building customer loyalty and reducing churn is often dependent on ensuring they are prepared for what's next.

B2B Complex Sales Need Thought Leadership

B2C companies are mostly product driven. Most are simple sales, even services. Their mindset is more immediate and focused on the right-now sale. (okay, I’m generalizing, but bear with me)

B2B companies with complex sales are people driven – In a complex sale, 70% of a customer’s perception of your brand comes from their interactions with people. Most notably your salespeople. Since it can take 12 interactions or more to make a complex sale, have you thought about what your salespeople are saying? What they’re doing? How they represent the company?

What about all the other interactions a prospect has with your company? Generally the first interactions a prospect will have in relation to a B2B complex sale is through the organization’s website. How difficult is it for them to get information that drives them to get involved in building the knowledge they need to engage further?

Do you make everything that goes beyond the surface a lead generator and put it behind a registration form? The latest statistic is that registration forms are passed up by 95% of those presented with them.

So, let me ask you to consider why your company tries to force a relationship? Do you think that everyone who fills out the form is a potential customer? Well, they could be, but what are you going to do when you get their information? You’re going to send them email, right? Or call them. How do you know what you send them will be of value? Do you track what their interests are and send them only material related to those interests? Do you know what else they find valuable at your website?

Sharing information can help set you apart. If your ideas are good ones, people will remember and your company will build a reputation as a trusted advisor. Helping people learn how to think beyond their immediate concerns to the effect of potential solutions on related processes and company objectives will make a difference.

There is always the "big" picture to be considered. Ramifications that might be undiscovered if possible impact is not expanded beyond the immediate. Becoming a thought leader is a valuable asset in people-driven complex sales.

Brian Carroll has a great post On giving away ideas... if you'd like to read more about this. His post spawned mine and I thank him for the "idea" and the percentage example I pilfered.