Marketing Interactions

Are B2B Marketers Missing the Point?

Marketing Sherpa released this chart today about the processes B2B marketers are using to manage prospects across their buying cycles. What concerns me is the percentage of marketers who've labeled these processes as non-priority items and assigned them to purgatory.

In my opinion, these marketers may well be the next to experience purgatory.

Let's take a look at why a few priorities need to shift:

• Collaborate with Sales to define sales-ready leads.
  This one always leaves me a bit perplexed. In essence, one of marketing's most important jobs is to generate and qualify leads worthy of sales pursuit. Yet they don't seem to care what sales people consider to be a qualified lead. Thankfully, 20% are planning to change this but 35% don't seem to think it matters enough to make it a priority. I'm sorry, I just don't get it.


• Measure lead generation contribution to revenue.
  In the age of increased demand for marketing accountability, it makes zero sense not to be able to account for marketing program contribution to revenues. Nada, zilch. For all the marketers out there whining about your budgets, start measuring this metric. If marketing is wants to be considered a contributor to driving the strategic direction of the company, they need to start learning how to prove their impact to business objectives.


• Have system for rating "qualified" and "warm" leads.
  If you want to keep that divide between marketing and sales nice and healthy then keep tossing contacts over the wall to sales. As it is now, salespeople spend more time on administrative tasks and research than they do on selling. This is not the best use of their time. And yes, marketers, this one's on you. Salespeople need help prioritizing leads so that their selling time can be maximized for best results. Spinning their wheels trying to talk to prospects not ready to talk with them isn't productive and it just irritates your prospects.


• Have a process for nurturing leads not sales ready.
  Considering that only about 20% of leads generated are ready for a sales conversation—if you're lucky—this means that 38% of marketers are fine with wasting 80% of their lead generation budgets. That just does not make good business sense. With buyers in control of their buying process, the growth in self-education opportunities and the increasing complexity of the problems they're charged with solving, the need for nurturing has never been higher. But, never fear, if you don't do it, your competitors will be glad to take those future buyers off your hands.


• Closed-loop tracking from source to conclusion.
  This one goes back to measuring lead generation contribution to revenues. But, beyond that, it also means discovering which sources provide the highest quality leads and which you should eliminate due to poor quality leads that don't convert. Given that 43% of marketers say this is not a priority added to the 31% that said they don't track lead gen to revenues, 74% of marketers don't think that monitoring what happens over the entire course of the buying process is important. Considering how much farther across the buying process marketers must now reach to get sales people in the game, this could be one of the biggest mistakes being made today.


• Have a process for handing leads back to marketing.
  The fact that 53% of marketers think that once they toss leads to sales they have been absolved of any further responsibility in the buying process is just frightening. If you tie this result with the 38% of marketers who don't have a nurturing process for leads not sales ready, it gets to be a really scary statistic of 91% of marketers who are not engaged in facilitating the entirety of the buying process.

Is it just me, or does anyone else see a disconnect here between what should be priorities given today's business environment and what marketers think is not important?

Tech Buyers Find Salespeople Lacking

There's a growing divide between buyer expectations and sales conversations. This reality is evidenced by findings in Forrester Research's Technology Buyer Insight Study: Are Salespeople Prepared for Executive Conversations?

Here are a couple of eye-opening responses from buyers:

"Only 15% of executives believe that their meetings with salespeople are valuable and live up to their expectations. Not surprisingly, with such low marks on the value of that first meeting, the probability of a given salesperson securing another appointment is extremely low, as only 7% of executives say they usually accept a follow-on meeting." [emphasis mine]

The research points to some key factors that contribute to this result.

• Training salespeople on how to have conversations with a "generic executive" doesn't translate into meaningful dialogue about specific business issues, roles and responsibilities. In fact, "...no such role as a C-level executive exists." 


• Onboarding programs are often designed to get reps up to speed quickly on the company's product vision—not on understanding the roles and responsibilities of the prospects they're going to be selling to.


• Vendor use of jargon and their lack of simplifying issue complexity often keep business-oriented buyers from grasping the nuances of how technology can help to solve their problem. When it's too difficult, the executive will choose to switch priorities something easier to understand and take next steps toward solving.


• Customer examples and stories used don't match the buyer's reality, making it hard for them to validate the need to take next steps because the salesperson isn't proving that they understand their business situation.

In fact, if your salesperson is in a meeting and the buyer's admin interrupts with a call that the buyer agrees to take, it's likely that your sales rep has just been shut down. "...one CIO of a pharmaceutical company reflected that he will choose to take the call over 50% of the time."

So, what can marketing do to help enable the sales team?

• Develop and share highly targeted personas. Even better, work with sales on the development and refinement of those personas.


• Design highly segmented content marketing programs to address the buyer's perspective at each stage of the buying process, based on those personas. Make them easy to access for salespeople.


• Create content based on addressing specific roles and responsibilities of prospective buyers and package it up for sales to access and use easily.


• Eliminate the jargon and complexity by creating content designed to answer specific questions buyers have at each stage of the buying process. Create a conversational brief for sales that indicates which resources should be used when for specific buyer segments.


• Create a variety of customer examples based on situations, industries, company size and problem resolution—not on the list of products you sold them. Make sure the customer stories include quantifiable results your salespeople can reference during conversations as they explain how your customer was able to overcome the obstacles they were facing.

If marketing is tackling the buyer-focused content marketing challenge, they've got the resources that sales needs to have conversations that meet buyers' expectations. Instead of looking at this as a sales problem, companies need to look at it as a buying problem and address it fluidly from one end of the process to the other. By combining resources, sales enablement can become a core component of the marketing-to-sales process, not a standalone monkey on your sales team's back.

Juan Eloqua's Grande Guide to Lead Scoring

Eloqua has released the first in a series of B2B marketing guides labeled the Grande Guides. This first one is on Lead Scoring. To have a bit of fun, they've also created Juan Eloqua - who's quite a Bold and Smoky guy whose specialty is growing fine coffee and, of course, revenues. If you haven't met Juan, you should.

The Grande Guide to Lead Scoring is a nice educational piece. There's plenty of explanation about what it is, why you need it and tips for creating a lead scoring model of your own.

So I won't cover it here - go get your own copy.

What I want to discuss in this post is one of the predictions Eloqua makes at the end about the future of Lead Scoring. The second item on the list is content scoring:

"Content-based scoring. Companies that regularly refine their scoring models begin to notice patterns in lead quality that can be directly tied to the content that is accessed during the buying process. Advanced organizations are experimenting with scoring models based on content type – like whitepapers, product information and customer testimonials – instead of the download activity itself."

I'd like to add a few ideas to their definition of content scoring. Learning more about content type is great. It can guide you to the types of content you produce, but that's not nearly enough to help your content impact the buying process overall.

I suggest that we start looking at content groups or tracks - whatever you'd like to call them.

There are a couple of ways to think about content groups:

• The content you use across the duration of a nurturing program. If your content is designed to answer prospects' questions at each stage of the buying process, which content assets are getting the most attention? Take a look at what the content addresses. Find out from sales if this is a sticking point, slowing momentum. Perhaps you'll need to create more of it. Also look at which content is getting the least attention. Is it in the wrong place in the track? Or is it answering a question your prospects don't have?


• All the content you have that addresses one problem-to-solution scenario, whether in your nurturing track or on your website, blog, etc. Are prospects seeking out related content in other locations? There should be a way to tag content so that marketers can say - show me the response to all the content that covers problem X. We should also be able to determine individual interest levels based on topic, not just types of content read.

Knowing that a prospect downloaded 5 white papers and 3 customer stories and 2 data sheets is one thing. Knowing that all of those resources are related to solving problem X can impact when you reach out as well as the quality of the conversations you'll be able to have with the prospect.

With buyers expectations growing much faster than our abilities to engage them with added value, we need insights that help us to have better conversations, build our credibility and convince them that our company is the best choice to help them solve their problems.

The interest part of lead scoring needs to be based on a solid content strategy.

Webinar Q&A: Content is Marketing Currency - Australian Audience

It was my pleasure to present to a great Australian audience earlier this week about how Content is Marketing Currency, sponsored by Citrix Online, GoToWebinar. We didn't have time to get to all the questions, so I'd like to do so now.

In case you're wondering why the place distinction, I presented a version of this webinar to a U.S. audience a few months ago. You can see their Q&A here. 

Q. Can you provide the sources for the statistics you quoted during the webinar?

Most of them are linked to within the eBook the webinar is based upon. You can download a copy of Content is Marketing Currency here. [registration required]

I also used a statistic from Forrester's North American and European B2B Social Technographics Online Survey, conducted in Q1 2010, with 1,011 business decision makers in companies with more than 100 employees that found:

85% of these business professionals say they use social media for business decision making.

Q. Where do you see the future of content being positioned in a world more geared towards Social Media?

Content will become even more critical as social media becomes more prevalent. Social media participation is reliant on content. Even a 140 character Tweet is content. Most Tweets include links that lead to more content. As people spend more time online, interacting in more ways, the need for content will grow exponentially. Marketers who begin defining and developing processes to manage content marketing will be better suited to take advantage of new opportunities as they develop.

The one critical factor about positioning content in a world more geared toward social media is buyer knowledge and insight. Many marketers think buyer personas are a nice to have, not a must have. They are mistaken. The only way your content can evolve from company and product focused feeds and speeds content is if it is designed to match your buyers' perspectives about their highest priority issues.

See my post, Marketing Above the Noise, for another view of why content must be designed for buyers and tightly targeted to segments in order to drive engagement. This type of effort is what it will take to ensure your content's effectiveness in a social and digitally driven business environment.

Q. What is the 'relevance' check for updated content. i.e. If I have used one of the 8 methods to get new content ideas, how can i go back and check the relevance or positive impact it has had... can i simply connect this to analytics?

[Note: This question refers to the 8 methods of listening I discussed in the webinar. They include: Phrasing, Webinars, Blogs, Twitter Streams, LinkedIn, Bit.ly link statistics, Feedback and Content Use Analytics.]

This is a tough one to answer without knowing exactly which one of the methods you're talking about, but I'll give it a shot.

Simply stated, analytics of some kind will be necessary to validate that the changes you've made are indeed relevant to your audience. What you'll need first is to benchmark response to whatever it is you're changing first so that you can measure lift or drag against previous results.

Whatever it is that you change will dictate the type of analytics you use.

Take for example the method of listening for phrasing. Let's say you remove some formal terminology [jargon] from a content asset and replace it with terms you've identified as used by your prospects (or people like them) in social media dialogue. Then you use those terms to Tweet a link to the content.

• How many people ReTweeted your Tweet?
• How many of their followers ReTweeted them?
• How many clicks did the link get? (check your Bit.ly stats)
• How long did people stay with the content after click through? (are they bouncing, scanning or reading?)
• What did they do after they read it? (visit another page, opt-in to your blog's RSS feed or subscribe to your newsletter, etc.)

The thing to remember is that if this is a dramatic change, the adjustment in perception by your audience may take several exposures to convince them to change behavior and spend more time with your content. Consistency and sticking with it are the keys to encouraging this change.

Q. I just Googled Wordpress and found wordpress.com and wordpress.org. Which was Ardath referring to earlier?

[Note: I mentioned several blogging platforms that were affordable to prove that there's not really an argument for not embracing publishing technology.]

http://wordpress.com/ is the on-demand, hosted version of the popular blogging software.

http://wordpress.org/ is the open source version that you download and host yourself and allows for much more customization than the hosted, on-demand version.

http://www.typepad.com/ is what I use to run this blog. The pro version allowing customized templates is $8.95 per month.

Pricing and availability of publishing tools means that marketers can have easy access to the tools they need. Learning how to use the technology is a skill set that marketers must develop, along with strategies and processes for managing the content that fuels them.

Q. There's a lot of focus on online content/marketing, however where do you see offline marketing and associated content fitting in - especially given the need to track and measure effectiveness?

Offline marketing is becoming more integrated with online marketing. Examples include attendees Tweeting from conferences, seminars and workshops using the event's Twitter hashtag and personalized URLs in direct mail pieces. Both of these examples can be measured and tracked.

As print is not my specialty, I'd like to direct you to an excellent take written by Joe Pulizzi on the Junta 42 blog: 7 Reasons Print Will Make a Comeback in 2011

Q. what chain of command do companies normally follow to have the delivery teams compose valuable content (as per the guidelines given by the marketing team - i.e. after "listening")

I'm not sure there's a "normal" or standard for applying listening to content development, as of yet. What I recommend is to create what I call a Style Baseline for a specific target audience.

The baseline includes two columns - what to use, what not to use. Here's what I'm talking about:

Q: as far as publishing content is concerned, what are your views? What Comes First? The Content OR The Design of the Presentation? (i.e. i mean to ask, what comes first, the content (text) or the design (website layout, colors, alignment, etc.)

Content comes first. At least in my opinion, I'm not sure how you would know what you need for design if you don't have the content. This said, if you have branding guidelines, then you already know what your content will need to fit. Even when I create a slide deck, I have to know what story I'm telling in my presentation to be able to create the slides to establish the flow of ideas.

When I write a white paper, it's not until I have the text that I know if I'll have a need for sidebars, quotes, graphics, etc. and how many or what type of placement I'll need.

Trust me, the message is more important than the design. Both matter, but without the right content, the best design in the world won't engage your prospects.

Q. How do you make sure the client/buyer can see that you deal in a wide range of specialisations in case they ever need it, while remaining relevant?

If you deal in a "wide range of specialisations" the first thing you need to assess is which of them would apply to each segment of your prospects. Once you determine that, then you need to look at the content you've created based on a problem the prospect needs to solve. Look for crossover extensions or overlaps.

You might start by looking at the combinations of products your current customers are using - see how they work together and why the customer chose to use that array.

One way to expose this is to write in depth customer stories that showcase the main problem-to-solution scenario and then explain what caused the customer to adopt other products in addition.

If you see a prospect who's been expressing interest in one area suddenly start reading content that addresses another, priorities may have shifted. You may want to send some follow-up content on that new interest to gauge if it's a casual interest or a deeper engagement.

Just remember that if you overwhelm prospects with choices and conflicting messages, you'll lose their interest because it becomes too much work to engage with you. Keep it simple. Focus on meeting one priority at a time.

Marketing Above the Noise

Boy is there a lot of noise in the marketplace today! B2B companies are touting that their products and solutions increase desirable outcomes and minimize the issues that hinder business achievements. The problem is that it often seems that there are only so many outcomes to go around.

Products/Solutions can INCREASE:

• Revenues
• Productivity
• Efficiency
• Accuracy
• Opportunities
• Engagement
• Satisfaction
• Etc....

Products/Solutions can REDUCE:

• Costs
• Time to Market
• Latency
• Time to Decisions
• Energy Use
• Headcount
• Buying Cycles
• Etc....

The gist is that what's important to your buyer is either the increase or the reduction of something. Your products are either maximizing or minimizing based on how your prospects frame their priorities and objectives.

So, if there are only so many benefits, values or outcomes (pick your term) - how are companies going to differentiate themselves and their products to a marketplace where their prospects are hearing the same things from countless vendors?

Your messaging and content needs to frame the context in a way that resonates with buyers.

For example, take "drive revenues." Is there a website that doesn't tout this as a benefit? This is what I call a vanilla benefit. It's so broad that it means nothing. Who doesn't want to increase revenues? But the phrase "drive revenues" actually doesn't have enough meaning to motivate and engage your buyers because it doesn't tell them how to get there.

There are many ways to increase revenues. The key is to think about the how and the why instead of relying on the vanilla benefit (the what).

For example:

Why is your prospect's priority focused on driving revenues?

• Perhaps it's because he's a product manager and his job rides on the amount of product that gets sold in the marketplace.
• Perhaps it's because she's the director of inside sales and her reps must provide the direct sales team with leads worthy of pursuit or they won't meet their quota for sales.
• Perhaps your prospect is a contact center manager and his initiative is to increase cross-sell and up-sell to current customers.
• It could be that your prospect is the CEO and responsible for increasing stock value for investors through continuous growth milestones the company must achieve.

To each of these people, the concept of driving revenues has a different context. The reasons supporting the goal are different. Their role and responsibilities within the company are different.

Now think about the how. How can they best contribute to the overall objective of driving revenues?

• For the product manager, perhaps it's making the packaging more appealing or getting salespeople trained in how to sell it. Maybe it's improved management of production to meet demand.
• For the inside sales manager, perhaps it's providing faster access to information that enables her reps to have better conversations with prospects, improving their quality and prioritization.
• For the contact center manager, perhaps it's the ability for her reps to easily know what products the customer already has and which are appropriate add-ons or advances.
• For the CEO, perhaps it's better dashboards or information visibility that enables better decisions.

When you can get specific enough to narrow your focus to the who, why and how that relates to the what (driving revenues) - then you can create messaging and content that raises you above the noise. Once again, that's why it's so important to KNOW your prospects.

Is your messaging specific enough to get heard?

Genius.com Removes the Handcuffs with Free, Instant-On Demand Generation

I recently caught up with Scott Mersy, VP of Marketing, and Parker Trewin, Director of Marketing Communications for Genius.com to discuss their Free, Instant-On offering of Genius Demand Generation.

First, the details:

• No need for IT - Instant-On Website Tracking
• Up to 3,000 contacts
• Up to 10,000 emails per month
• No limit on page views
• Automated integration with Salesforce.com with entry of password.
• Triggered response
• Web-to-Lead forms
• Email Marketing
• Segmentation and List Building
• Multichannel and social media tracking (My review of Genius gURLs)
• See all the features here

You all know how I feel about the need for marketing automation technology to drive business objectives and to provide quantifiable proof of marketing's contribution to downstream revenues. Marketing performance cannot improve to the degree necessary to drive business results without technology.

But, let's talk for a minute about why Genius.com is providing a free Demand Generation Solution. The company is passionate about helping marketing and sales successfully drive revenues. Here are a few of the things they believe:

• Marketers should have the ability to test their approaches and prove business case for the tools that fit their needs without being handcuffed to a solution that's not right for them.


• Marketing automation should be intuitive and easy to use—providing instant gratification—not require months of deployment, intensive training to operate or monopolize your IT staff.


• Marketing automation should improve communications and responsiveness between marketing and sales, not impede it with the creation of another silo.


• Education is a responsibility they embrace passionately to help marketers build the skill set they need to successfully develop programs that match the current needs of the marketplace, using the technology to deliver them.

Over the last week, since Genius.com's announcement, there have been reviews and comments made about this idea of "free." Some think it's great and some feathers are ruffled. It's an interesting discussion with lots of opinions. Here are a few - don't forget to check out the comments:

Will Marketing Automation Be Free? by Jep Castelein (@jepc)

Genius.com Offers Free Version: How Much Does It Lower True Cost of Entry by David Raab (@draab)

Closing the Technology Innovation Vs. People/Process Stagnation Gap in Modern B2B Demand Generation by Adam Needles (@abneedles)

Now, I'll throw my thoughts into the ring.

I work with a lot of clients in the process of adopting marketing automation technology from a variety of vendors. In most cases, they've purchased the solution prior to determining the people, process and content combination they'll need to be successful in using it. Thankfully, they've decided to figure that out sooner, rather than later.

Some of their questions include:

• What needs to change in our thinking and planning to make the switch from manual to automated marketing?
• What kind and how much content do we need? How will we produce it?
• What calls to action do we need to create momentum in the buying process? How will we know it's working?
• What's the most effective way to segment our audiences?
• How can we learn what we need to know to connect better with our buyers?

As companies work to answer these questions and develop the skill sets they need to move forward, Genius.com's free offering can help.

Consider the following possibilities:

• Choose a segment audience and run one campaign across an entire buying cycle. That's the real beauty in removing the limitation of a 30-day trial with limits on functionality.
• Divide the campaign into A/B groups and test different versions of content, email subject lines, etc. to gauge response and learn what matters to your prospects.
• Treat it as a pilot project and establish goals to identify business value, identify which features are important to you and what doesn't work.
• Incorporate social media and use gURLs to prove the value of your participation in attracting leads, improving continuous dialogue, etc.
• Trial a Google Ad Words campaign and measure impact.
• Have your salespeople use the Outlook integration to prove the success [or identify areas for improvements] in engaging late stage leads with the messages they send.

With the focus removed from the technology purchase and implementation, marketers and sales organizations alike are free to apply their attention to the people, process and content needed to power prospect and customer dialogues throughout the buying process.

That's the power of free demand generation technology. Developing the skill sets, processes and content may not be free, but without the technology in use, it's very difficult to judge how the concepts will work in action when all you have is theory.

For those who think there will be no impact to adoption because companies aren't purchasing the technology upfront, I beg to differ. The stake being put in the ground is the application of the people, process and content to prove business value. That's often a bigger stake than the cost of the technology. If companies are not willing to do that, they won't be successful whether they purchase the technology or don't.

Start at Status Quo to Create Buyer' Momentum

I hear a lot of B2B marketers say that their prospects are already aware of the problem, so they believe this indicates that marketing content should focus further down the buying pipeline. This perspective can set you up for a long haul. After all, if prospects are "aware" of the problem, but not motivated to fix it, there's no momentum.

Think about how hard it is to go from 0 to 60 without an accelerator?

It's like pushing dead weight up a hill. Imagine Sisyphus with the boulder on the mountain and you'll get the idea. That's what you're facing if you ignore the status quo position of your prospects and think you can jump ahead to helping them solve the problem. They aren't there yet.

There's a big difference between awareness and urgency.

Urgency drives the motivation to solve the problem. Urgency is directly equivalent to the amount of pain the problem is producing. Your content will be ineffective unless you've got prospects who consider their problem urgent enough to solve. This means you need to help them get the problem to the top of their priority list.

Oh, wait.

You think your prospects are already motivated to solve the problem?

Really?

Who motivated them?

Whoever motivated the prospect to take action is likely to be who you're now competing against to get their attention to switch to your company. Problem is that you're late to the game. You've allowed the prospect the opportunity to develop a reliance upon another company for the information that motivated them to take next steps.

Your challenge now is to:

• unseat that competitor
• develop more credibility with the prospect than the competitor has already established
• catch and keep their attention 
• pass the comparison test over the duration of the buying process

It doesn't have to be that hard. Decide to focus on the entire buying process and eschew the shortcuts that really only make your job more difficult than it has to be. The trade off is worth the extra effort. 

Spin Your Marketing Dialogue Wisely

When I work with clients to help them create a marketing dialogue, it's amazing how many of them dig in their heels about what they think is most important focus. Often times, I absolutely agree that the outcome they're adamant that they help their customers achieve is indeed correct. The point of contention arises when we talk about how they'll create a marketing dialogue that gets them in more conversations that result in qualified sales opportunities that field sales can close.

It's all in how you go about framing the marketing dialogue.

Choice 1: You can take the same stance as everyone else and hope that people choose to talk to you, despite the plethora of choices available to them. Yes, you can stand firm and lead with those words and ideas you've invested in so heavily.

Or...

Choice 2: You can re-frame the dialogue in a unique way - one that leads to the same desirable outcome prospects want via a differentiated path that encourages prospects to engage. You see, once there's a new choice amidst a sea of sameness, people want to know what it is and why it's different.

It's all in the spin.

A few ideas to help you spin your marketing dialogue:

Take a look at what others are not saying. Where are the gaps in their marketing dialogues?

Assess companies who are promising similar results that may not be in the same classification as your product. In other words, which kind of companies own the conversation you want? Quite often this may surprise you.

I wrote a post about The Fallacy of No Competition recently that gets at this issue. The gist for this post is that the companies who own the conversation may not even be on your radar if you aren't broadening your scope to assess by conversational focus, not just product/solution classification.

I guarantee you that there are multiple ways to solve whatever problem your product solves. And the solution doesn't have to look like yours to be a valid choice.

Ask yourself what could cause those solutions to fail for customers? What does your solution do differently?

How is your approach to the problem different?

Consider this scenario as an example:

Is everyone talking about speed when what produces the best results is actually quality in execution? Does achieving that quality of execution result in the speed improvement?

What would happen if you spun your marketing dialogue to lead with a process that supports quality in execution that, once achieved, results in speed? Will the freshness of the approach inspire conversation with your prospects that you have difficulty achieving with your current messaging?

What if the extended story is the repeatability and continuous improvement your customers get because they established the process for quality in execution as the foundation?

Marketing is about getting into conversation with people who can/will buy from you. It's not about closing the deal from the starting gate. Not in a B2B complex sale. It's definitely not about saying the same things everyone else says. 

How does your marketing dialogue make you different, more interesting than everyone else? How can you put more spin on it to catch and keep your prospects' attention?

Marketing Automation Needs a Relationship

Much has been written about marketing automation. It's a hot topic, and rightly so. Anyone who reads this blog knows how much I believe in the need to have technology in order to execute on marketing strategies in today's digital business environment. But what often gets overlooked is who owns the marketing automation system.

The word "automation" leads people to think that the system runs itself. But that's a misconception. Sure, it'll fire off emails for nurturing programs, or send an alert to a salesperson when a lead's score tops out. But, that's just a gnat's eyelash of what's possible.

If your company buys into the concept of marketing automation - and, in my honest opinion, they should - then you need to also think about who will have the relationship with your system. It's important. In fact, it's critical.

The best take on this I've seen lately is put into words by Craig Rosenberg (@funnelholic), also VP of Products and Services for Focus.

Find out why you need a system owner and how to build the business case to get one in this interview Craig did with Christopher Doran, VP of Marketing for Manticore Technology (@cdoran). Craig also shares his thoughts on creating a baseline to get you started with metrics.

For a deeper dive, there's also a link to download Craig's section of The Quinessential Marketing Automation Guidebook. If you haven't read it, you should.

Read Craig's interview here.

What Goal is Your Marketing Content Achieving?

When I was growing up, my father used to tell me, "Just focus on doing one thing—and do it right." That advice holds true today for B2B marketing content. Every single content asset you produce must have a goal. If it has more than one goal, it's likely going to fail to accomplish what you set out to do.

Content goals are many, but here are a few:

• Enable your prospect to understand a concept that relates to solving a problem important to them.
• Provide insight on an industry trend that could impact their business in the future.
• Prove that the risk a prospect perceives as related to the solution is actually lower than they thought - especially when working with you. 
• Inform them about how their peers and competitors are handling the issue.
• Show them how to build a business case.
• Simplify the perceived complexity of implementation.
• Relate a solution to business objectives they have a stake in achieving.

Those are only a few, but perhaps you've noticed the nature of a content goal is based on  audience benefits, not the call to action. Content goals are related to takeaways. The point is that if your content achieves its goal, the call to action becomes a natural next step (provided it's aligned with the goal).

If you create content that's designed with more than one of these goals in mind, you either create such a complex piece of content that your audience needs to get out their hip waders to get through it, or you've skimmed the surface of each goal and ended up providing nothing intrinsically valuable. 

What happens is that we want everyone to engage with our content. We're not happy with a targeted audience because we still think marketing is a numbers game. We think 300 views is more valuable than 50 really engaged viewers that we can motivate to take next steps with us.

Maybe it's that "do more with less" attitude that's permeating the business environment. But, it doesn't work with content. It also doesn't work with buyers overwhelmed with information who are looking for the answer they need to a specific question they have during their buying process.

If you think they're going to troll through pages of content to find that one nugget, you're mistaken. They don't have time. They'll hit the back button and enter a new search query in about 7 seconds if they don't get the orientation they need.

Each content asset should be designed to do one thing—and to do it right based on the audience it's designed for. If you can do that, you'll see that your content all starts working together to produce highly engaged prospects more likely to convert into sales opportunities.