Marketing Interactions

Content Strategy Must Reach Beyond Marketing

Arguably, content strategy is most often thought of as a marketing application. That's a great start, but it doesn't do the practice justice. In fact, that view tends to cause siloed efforts and limit the potential of content strategy.

Content is a part of everything a business does in regards to communicating with prospects, customers, and the industries their offerings serve.

Content is anything that says something about your company, brand, expertise, or point of view that forms an impression, including:

• email
• video
• articles
• white papers
• blog posts
• blog comments
• conversations
• trade show swag
• call scripts
• sales collateral
• webinars
• advertising
• conference presentations
• newsletters
• direct mail
• solution briefs
• Tweets
• status updates
• discussion forum participation
• infographics
• referrals
• eBooks
• executive interviews
• press releases
• advocates
• data sheets
• media coverage
• customer stories
• websites
• ETC.

*Note the the focus of this blog post is on external audiences. But it also applies to internal audiences as well with another long list of formats and applications.

That's a lot of stuff. It's also why I wrote the previous post about why content should never be in a silo. Please note that much of this is created by the company, but some of it is not, such as referrals, and advocates. And some can come from the company as well as others, such as Tweets, status updates, and discussion forum participation. Regardless of source, it's still content that affects impressions about your company--good or bad.

(How content strategy applies to addressing content created by others about your company is another post)

The point I want to focus on today is that content strategy must address what lives beyond traditional marketing boundaries.

Two of the most prominent boundaries that must be dissolved are Sales Momentum and Customer Retention and Expansion.

Sales Momentum:

You may also think of this as Sales Enablement, but I don't like the term "enablement." Salespeople, by their very nature, should be enabled. The role content strategy can play with Sales is in helping them to continue to escalate opportunity momentum towards a deal, rather than stop it in its tracks if they step into the process out of sync.

I'm sick and tired of the battle for alignment between marketing and sales. There, I said it. Seems ridiculous if you ask me. I work with marketers everyday that are engaging salespeople in content strategy design and development because they realize salespeople are critical to the process. Not to mention that Sales really appreciates the help due to the constant change and shifting buyer attention in the marketplace today.Their position has changed, and they know it.

One of the interesting things I see when marketers involve Sales is that salespeople often have no real idea of what marketing actually does that may be helpful to them. This being said, just as marketers can no longer implement effective programs without getting to know their buyers, they also cannot help salespeople without knowing them, their priorities and what they're experiencing on the street that may be blocking or winning deals.

Marketers cannot provide the same content to salespeople that they provide to prospects. The context is different and the situation is different. The questions and obstacles are different.The interactions are different and so are the expectations from buyers on the receiving end.

By working with Sales, marketers can create content that salespeople will actually use to develop and engage late-stage opportunities. Once they see it's useful, valuable, and helps opportunities move to the next step in buying, marketers will find themselves inundated with requests for more. And that's a good thing!

Marketers must prove accountability. If they can do so by tracking use of content designed for sales interactions, their contribution to downstream revenues can be better substantiated. I hear a lot about salespeople taking credit for deals at the expense of marketing, but if the caveat to getting more content designed for them includes feedback on what's working, why it works, and what it helps them to accomplish, that will diminish.

Think about it.

Customer Retention and Expansion:

Most of what I see marketers focused on is new customer acquisition. But I often hear the lament that companies are having a difficult time expanding customer footprints. When I ask how their content strategy is designed to promote customer retention and expansion I hear things such as, we have an annual user conference or we send a monthly or quarterly newsletter. Or that it's someone else's problem, such as account reps or customer service.

Those are cop outs.

A few things marketers need to realize about customers is that their status quo is different than that of prospects. They solved their problem when they bought your solution, right? So what's next? What did solving that problem do to open up possibilities that can now be addressed?

That's where to start.

Expanding customer accounts is not about promoting products. It's still about solving problems - new ones. Why do companies think that rule changes once prospects become customers?

Do you have customer personas? Yes, they are different than buyer personas. See above.

Do you have content that helps them use the solution they've purchased to its fullest value? Have you made it clear why they should? Sharing your expertise should only increase in relation to customers. They are  much more of a known value to you than prospects.

And I'm not talking about using feeds and features. I'm talking about business value. Think beyond the end users of your solutions to other impacts the results of using it make to your customers' businesses.

How can you tie that into their ability to solve new problems? What's the additional business value they can gain?

Growth doesn't just come from new customer acquisition. But, for some reason, companies seem to take their customers for granted by assuming they need less attention than potential new logos. That's not a good business decision.

Perhaps it's time to rethink your customer retention and expansion programs and how they fit into your content strategy.

Marketing and Sales - Two islands, no bridge?

Last week I was in Minneapolis speaking at Confab and attending AA-ISP. It's the first time I've gone directly from a conference focused exclusively on content strategy to an inside sales conference. Can I just say, Whoa!

It was like hoping from one island to another without a bridge.

First, a snapshot of my impressions of Confab:

• Wonderful conference with a tight focus on a topic that's my passion
• Commaraderie that spawned comments such as "I found my people!"
• Inspiring conversations with people who actually "get" content
• Met a number of people I've been watching/stalking from afar
• Had a great crowd at my presentation that asked very thoughtful questions - bless all of you!
• Cake (lots of CAKE) and our own cocktail - the Lorem Sipsum - and it was GOOD!

Overall, it was inspiring! I thought, WOW, marketers are making a lot of progress. In a number of conversations, I met marketers who were rocking it, but weren't sure they really were. Yes - all of you, take note - you're on the right track.

I felt great - cake not withstanding.

Then I went two blocks down the street to sign books and attend the AA-ISP conference.

As a marketer, it was like walking into a foreign land. And I say this having worked and collaborated wtih a number of inside sales organizations on successful projects. I actually knew as many people at this conference as I did at Confab. Many of them on board with the alignment imperative between the two professions.

Unfortunately, what I found in several of the presentations that I attended was either a total lack or respect for marketing or no mention of them at all. In all fairness, many marketers don't mention sales much, but it does come up more often since marketing actually serves sales (or they should be).

Here's the part that really sets me back. There were a number of really terrific ideas presented at AA-ISP. Really good, with the potential to be great collaborative efforts with marketing in order to create higher efficiencies and greater momentum in the sales process. Wonderful opportunities for overlays.

But the emphasis was on sales owning, controlling and keeping all of these ideas on their island. No sharing.

I can't help but wonder that if this is what salespeople are learning at conferences, no wonder the subject of alignment is still as controversial today as it ever was. And going nowhere fast.

Which brings me to a question that my friend, Trish Bertuzzi (@bridgegroupinc) posed in a recent Focus roundtable we did together:

If prospects are spending up to 70% of their buying process with marketing, why is it that only 50% of sales reps are meeting quota?

Seems to me that both marketing and sales need to bridge this gap and work together if we're going to improve the prospects' experience during their buying process to the point that objectives are met on both sides of the equation.

I'm not placing blame on sales, I'm just noting that something's gotta give if we're going to reach higher levels of success for our companies. It really shouldn't be this hard. Ultimately we're all working toward the same goals...aren't we?

On the high side - I watched Anneke Seley (@annekeseley) receive her Lifetime Achievement Award and was proud to be there clapping and cheering for her. Congrats, Anneke!

4 Areas of Challenge in B2B Marketing

Browsing my LinkedIn Groups today, I came across a discussion started by Holger Schulze on the B2B Technology Marketing Community that got me thinking. Holger asked:

Can you use ONE WORD to describe the biggest challenge facing B2B Marketing today?

Holger always asks these fantastic, insightful questions. At the time I checked, the question had received 85 one-word responses. Considering them in combination, I was intrigued so of course I entered them all into a spreadsheet and started doing a bit of armchair analysis. Here's what I came up with.

The responses (from my perspective) fall into four distinct areas of challenge for B2B marketers:

• Management
• Execution
• Mindset
• Market

Even more interesting, when counting up the number of responses after I'd divied them up, management, execution and mindset each received 22. Market received 15.

The distribution makes me wonder if marketers are still overly focused on internal stuff rather than markets? However you look at it, the answers point to some clear indications of a few things that need to be ironed out.

Here's my interpretation of each of the four areas of challenge:

[*Note some words submitted by more than one person.]

Management:

The overall standouts in what I've labeled management fall into several clusters:

• Accountability, Measurement, Revenue, Sales
• Budget, Profitability, Credit
• Goals, Effectiveness, Success
• Professionalism, People, Time, Collaboration
• Automation, Integration, Overcomplicated
• Branding, Communication

Proving ROI and the alignment of marketing spend with results have risen as imperatives for marketers and are obviously proving challenging. This can also be tied to technology challenges as well as the overall integration of marketing programs across the enterprise. Talent, time and teamwork are proving difficult to solve for marketing departments with limited resources and an ever-widening scope of responsibilities.

Execution:

The words attributed to execution are evidence of difficulty in matching marketing programs to the challenges of management as well as to market receptiveness.

• Attention, Awareness, Proposition, Relevance
• Engagement, Follow-up, Relationship
• Clarity, Consistency, Disconnect
• Leads, Target
• Content

Relevance received the highest number of responses across the board. That only one person responded with content suprised me a bit, although a number of these could be reflective of the quality of content that's being produced. Importantly, what becomes obvious is that all stages across the entirety of the funnel appear to be challenging—from beginning to end.

Mindset:

This area shows evidence that marketing is changing so quickly and comprehensively that we need to do some work to help marketers adapt in order to equip them to resolve the other areas of challenge.

• Competence, Confidence, Creativity, Focus, Flexibility
• Dullness, Differenetiation, Saturation
• Insightfulness, Listening, Ill-defined
• Fear, Obsolescence, Uncertainty

Marketers cannot be at their most effective when they lack confidence in what they are doing or realize that their skillsets don't prepare them to address today's markets. If you look at the third bullet, it's obvious that there's still work to be done to get to know our markets so damn well that the programs we create for them [not for us] will help us to overcome many of the challenges identified by Holger's question.

Market:

It's important to remember that these challenges were voiced by marketers and apply to their perceptions of what they think their target audiences think. Or even how they perceive the marketplace.

• Clutter, Hype, Noise
• Choices, Commoditization, Fragmentation
• Skepticism, Trust, Value, Loyalty

The ease of publishing has definitely made it a world of too much information. Audiences have changed and fragmented and the ability to gain more insight into vendors without ever speaking to them allows perceptions to form that may or may not be realistic. But, it's what it is and we've got to rise above it to do our jobs effectively and answer the challenges of the other three areas.

When you evaluate management, execution, mindset and marketing, you can see how one feeds into another. The best part of this analysis is that you can also start seeing paths to resolution.

The one-word challenges play off one another so that if you solve one cluster, it's highly likely that another will diminish. This said, I also find it interesting that personas or buyer knowledge didn't make the list. If that's resolved and applied, a lot of these words might vanish from the list.

It's also important to note that 4 marketers said their answer was a definitive NO. That there was not one word to define the biggest challenge to B2B marketing today. I agree with them.

What do you think?

Would you have arranged the one-word responses differently?

If I can add my own word (beyond NO) - I think it would be Interaction - but you probably could have guessed that!

Where Sales Can Lead Marketing Off Course

There's a reason why B2B marketers have issues in alignment with their sales-oriented colleagues. It's really not all that hard to figure out. Basically it's about perspective.

Where marketing demand generation programs are focused primarily on the pre-sales stages of buying, sales is focused on what happens after a lead is qualified and, hopefully, a deal is imminent.

I'm a huge advocate for marketing and sales alignment and collaboration, but there are times were it's not wise to take salespeople's input as the gospel. It's not because they're wrong, it's simply that their areas of interest and focus are different.

This means that marketers have to develop their interpretation skills and evaluate what sales tells them in a way that allows their input to be more useful than harmful.

A few of the things salespeople have been know to say that marketers need to take with a grain of salt may include:

"We don't need to educate our prospects - they already know they need to solve the problem."

This is one of my favorites. Why? Because if the person doesn't know they need what the sales rep is selling, the sales rep disqualifies them as having too long of a horizon and goes looking for others who are closer to the buying window.

The problem with this assumption is that if your company's marketing programs are not educating prospects about the problem then you're not in the early conversation. Trust me, someone else is doing the education and it's likely your competitors. This means what the prospect learns about the problem is slanted in your competitor's favor.

And, if salespeople could back up their thinking, they'd realize that educating prospects is the precursor to "building the RFP." In other words, if you're not out there helping the market shape the conversation about what the problem is, how best to solve it and why do it now - you're just plain giving an advantage to competitors. And that means your salespeople need to work twice as hard to break through and get their ideas into the conversation.

So, salespeople are essentially making their lives harder by telling marketing that your prospects are already educated, so don't bother. I mean, really. Think about this. Then, if you still don't buy it, go read the section in Dan Ariely's book, Predictably Irrational, focused on anchors. That's what you want your company to be. The anchor for your prospects ideas about solving the problem.

"We want all the leads marketing generates, so give them to us directly upon opt in."

This one is predicated on the idea that sales reps don't want to miss any hot leads so they go after all the twitching contacts that marketing can find, regardless of buying stage or qualification. Gauging the readiness of new opt-ins is a solid idea. It just lacks something in the execution when left to salespeople. They're looking for one thing, and one thing only — a sales opportunity.

The problem with this approach to lead generation is that your CRM becomes a dumping ground for leads that sales reps choose not to pursue. They sit dormant and unloved. When you consider that, maybe, 15% of leads generated are in the later stages of buying, you're wasting a lot of lead gen spend. In essence, if you're generating 100 new leads per month, 85 of them are likely being wasted.

Change that. Make it a priority this year. Your accountability rating with the company will earn a major boost.

Based on culture, this is sometimes hard to do, but it must be done. Take those leads back and put them into nurturing programs. [The optimal process would be for marketing to score the leads and only transition those who match an agreed upon, ideal lead definition.] After all, 85% of the leads you generate have the possibility of becoming future sales — if you pay attention to them appropriately.

"Your content and collateral doesn't work. We'll create our own, thank you very much."

This is, unfortunately, very often true. However, given that much of the buying process now occurs prior to sales engagement (up to 70% according to Sirius Decisions), this attitude and process can halt buying momentum and create a fragmented experience for your buyers.

Well, that's if marketing is telling a comprehensive story mapped across buying stages.

Consider the scenario where prospects are moving right along, engaging with the content presented by marketing and have interpreted it as relevant and valuable to them up to the point they choose to enter a dialogue with sales. Then sales comes along and starts telling them a wholly different story. One that halts their momentum because they have to restart how they're thinking about the issue at hand.

This happens all the time. Trust me, salespeople creating content in a vacuum is as bad as marketing creating content in a vacuum. Two stories that orient your buyers differently do not speak highly of your company as in having the right hand know what the left is doing, if you will.

One key example of this is that salespeople like that slide with the hundred customer logos. They think it gives the company depth. Good marketing stories will focus on the scenarios that are most relevant to the prospect segment (persona) that marketing content is shared with. The logo menagerie is company oriented (look at us - we've got all these great clients) and the scenario version is prospect oriented (look at how someone like you is solving the same problem—and doing it successfully)

These are just a few ideas to get you to start looking at what sales says from their orientation and perspective and hoping you realize how what they say can serve to take your marketing programs off course. Sales has good ideas, but they need to be adapted to work the earlier stages of marketing.

Salt is your friend.

Is Marketing a Numbers Game?

I get very frustrated when I hear salespeople talk about numbers in relation to sales. Like if you need $X in revenues, then you need to generate X number of leads because you'll only close X% of them. That kind of thinking gives permission to lose deals because a rep is only expected to close a certain percentage.

Seems to me that's setting most sales reps up to only ever make the X%. Research shows that only 50% of reps are making quota today.

What's interesting is that marketing's #1 challenge is generating high-quality leads. Likely because they've been tasked with front-loading the top of the funnel with as many "leads" as possible so that sales reps could make that convoluted formula work. Therefore, the focus on volume over quality has meant that they weren't defining quality, but rather a type of contact that might have some interest in acquiring something your company sells. And, dare I say, sometimes not even that.

After all, I get tossed to sales teams at the download of a white paper I'm accessing for research. If most of those companies ever bothered to look at my website they'd realize that I'm not, nor will I ever, become their customer.

So does this fascination with formulas keep sales and marketing from alignment?

Marketing is being charged with generating more qualified leads as well as accountability for doing so.

Sales is charged with meeting a revenue quota which many of them thinks is defined by a formula.

Yet one of the outcomes of generating quality leads means less volume because you've removed the unlikely candidates and extended the dialogues with those who remained. But it also means those leads will have a higher propensity to convert into customers.

What do you suppose that does to the sales formula?

If we turn it on its head, what will happen?

What if your company said to sales: Here's 10 high-quality leads. Close 6 of them. How would that change the sales process? What would it do to collaboration between marketing and sales?

What would it take to empower marketers to share a better story and for salespeople to have better conversations that provide more recognizable value to prospects?

What would it take for marketing to provide leads with quality high enough for sales reps to be able to close 6 out of 10?

Sales Support as B2B Marketing Leadership

I saw this Tweet from Adam Needles during Dreamforce and it's really bothering me. In all fairness to Stacey - I don't have the actual context, so I'm taking this at face value for this post.

@abneedles: "Good marketing doesn't matter. What matters is sales." via @staceyepstein at @Dreamforce #DF10 #B2B

My first knee-jerk reaction was something along the lines of, "Are you bleeping kidding me?" I couldn't believe that sentence would come from a VP of Marketing. Then I took a few (read a lot) of deep breaths and considered that perhaps what she meant was that if marketing doesn't result in sales, then it doesn't matter how brilliant it is.

Okay - that I can get behind, because truly at the end of the day, revenue must be the outcome of both marketing and sales. Then I saw this Tweet:

@abneedles "Salespeople feel they ... translate what they see as marketing's theoretical arguments into a practical message." @staceyepstein #DF10 #B2B

If this is indeed true, which could be illustrated by the hours that salespeople spend re-inventing or creating their own collateral, then marketing needs to step up. They're obviously missing the translation capability to get to the ground level of their buyers' perspectives.

This said, if salespeople really believe this, then why aren't they taking steps to show marketing how to translate? According to Sirius Decisions, buyers are 70% of their way through the buying process by the time they allow a sales conversation. If sales truly believe that marketing is irrelevant, then it would seem prudent to help them correct that misstep considering how much longer marketing has impact on the buying process before sales gets involved.

Why does it feel like marketing is the one who's supposed to do all the heavy lifting in the marketing-to-sales alignment endeavor?

Wouldn't it make sense to have sales actually help ensure that the 30% of time they get with a prospect is positioned to help them close deals? Or, even better, what if by working with marketing your salespeople could get into the buyer's process earlier - expanding the time they have to impact the buyer relationship? Ever considered that?

Marketing at 30,000 feet no longer counts. It's too far out of reach to be relevant to the people grasping with issues your offerings address. Vague pleasantries (as I call them) are from the old school of universal umbrella branding and awareness. The problem is time. There's less of it - a lot less. Specificity counts. Take that a step further to personalized specificity and you're a heck of a lot closer to content that buyers will find interesting.

Next up, the Tweet about a perspective that could put marketers back in the basement:

@abneedles Sounds like our session-track speakers int he sales/marketing alignment session see marketing in a sales-support role. Yikes. #DF10 #B2B

But, does it have to? The interpretation is dependent upon how "sales-support" is defined. If you consider that everything marketing does is focused on helping sales sell more by helping buyers buy (or it should be), then we are in a sales support role. However, sales support doesn't mean subservient. Adam gets to that with this Tweet:

@abneedles In a Web 2.0 world, #B2B marketing must become the leader of a holistic demand gen process -- not just tactical lead gen. #B2B #DF10

And, consider that sales doesn't have all the answers either. When exactly does that practical messaging translation come into play given this statistic?

KBlalock: RT @cahidalgo: 31% of reps r not prepared to speak to a prospect at time of first engagement via IDC #B2B #df10

Could this be due to a lack of respect for the work marketers are doing to get to know prospects well enough to catch and keep their attention for longer periods of time as cycles increase? Perhaps it's because many reps are schooled in products and solutions, but not so much about their prospect's reality, industry trends, influencers and competitive alternatives (Hint: Think beyond the obvious competitive choices).

This Tweet points out an interesting observation:

hoovers: RT @abneedles Sales-driven marketing is 'like driving with the rearview mirror.' via McAfee marketer #B2B #DF10

This is because salespeople are usually concentrating on the end-stages of the deal. They aren't paying attention to all that time prior to transition that's involved in the development of a sales-ready opportunity. If you only look at the buying process from the point at which sales will agree to pursue leads, you've missed a lot. (Read 70% of their buying process).

This Tweet gets to the goal. This is where marketing can create a noticeable impact. The skill sets that marketing needs to evolve are based on achieving this:

abneedles: Now listening to a top marketer at @InformaticaCorp talk about getting to predictable revenue via marketing. #B2B #DF10

As a final thought, consider that sales support is not just about your sales team. It's also about your buyers. Marketing needs to support the needs, priorities and interests of both. The more proactive they are about doing this, the more of a leadership role they can attain. Developing end-to-end lead management processes is a great place to start.

After all, isn't leadership about supporting the evolution and sustainability of success?

I missed being at Dreamforce this year. But, I'm thankful for all the Tweets that shared what was going on and made me think.

How to Keep Marketing Vs. Sales Alive and Thriving

Earlier this week I wrote a post asking the question Does Sales Care About Alignment with Marketing? Some great comments were made about the fact that sales will LOVE marketing if they get QUALITY leads. But not much was said about what it takes to make that happen.

B2B marketing and sales alignment, sales enablement and integrating the pipeline into one end-to-end process won't occur just because your company needs to give salespeople qualified leads. It takes work. And, often this work requires shifting the culture for both departments.

For those of you making progress - Congrats! For those of you with a healthy Marketing VS Sales mentality, see how many of these scenarios are true within your company:

WE...

1. Don't let marketing and sales speak to each other or share information.
2. Refuse to create an agreed-upon ideal lead definition.
3. Encourage sales to cherry-pick leads and let the others rot in the CRM.
4. Let salespeople tell their own stories and create their own content.
5. Have sales reps pitch everyone who downloads a white paper.
6. Mandate that marketing focus on increasing lead quantity.
7. Consider marketing a cost center.
8. Don't give marketing any technology that improves visibility into the buying process.
9. Only approve short-term marketing campaigns that include sales offers.
10. Give all the credit for revenue production to the sales team.

In case no one has mentioned this, operating your company's marketing and sales efforts as distinct, separate and siloed entities is self-defeating. Not to mention irritating to your prospects, buyers and customers due to the disconnects for them in their relationship with your company.

Alternatively, consider this scenario that can become a reality when marketing and sales work together:

Marketing generates net-new leads. They score the leads based on demographics and put them into nurturing tracks based on how they were sourced (subject matter interest) and who they are (personas).

Every couple of touches, the prospects are asked a progressive question on the landing page to help qualify them based on the ideal lead definition that marketing and sales have agreed upon.

When a certain score is reached, an inside sales rep is alerted to call the lead and provided with a follow-on content offer relevant to their expressed interests. This enables a conversation based on a topic of relevance to the lead. The inside sales rep either routes the lead to field sales as qualified for pursuit, or lets them remain in nurturing for futher development.

And the process continues consistently as marketing and sales work together to help prospects make progress across their buying process until they're ready to engage with sales.

The results?

Sales accepts 171% more leads than they used to.

Sales is able to increase their ability to connect with leads by 200% because leads feel like they know them due to relevant nurturing interactions.

Because the value the company provides is recognized by the leads based on education, expertise and evidence content, there is less discounting, resulting in higher revenue per won deal.

The time it takes to close deals is reduced by 30% from what it took before.

[These results are real as reported by Intellitactics and presented as a case study reported in my book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale]

If these improvements don't matter to your company, by all means, keep that Marketing VS Sales mentality alive and thriving in your company.

But, really, why would you want to?

Solicit Sales Feedback Marketers Can Use

Effective B2B eMarketing strategies must be built on knowledge—not gut instinct. The foundational knowledge that should drive all strategies must start with your prospects, buyers and customers. One of the best places to uncover this information is to—hold your breath—talk to your sales people.

The gathering and use of feedback seems to be a lost skill set and consistently rides very low on the totem pole of priorities. But, it shouldn't. It should be where marketers start and what you circle the wagons around on a regular basis.

Marketing is responsible for a lot of stuff. The thing about all the "stuff" is that it is all pointed toward customer acquisition and revenue production orchestrated by sales people. So why in the world so few marketers ever talk to sales people, let alone solicit the appropriate feedback, is a mystery.

Marketers who ignore the wealth of information sales people can provide that will help them improve the results they produce are shooting themselves in the foot (or worse places).

For marketers who want to improve their contribution to revenues, their relationships with the prospects they find it so hard to engage and their accountability to their companies, start by creating a feedback protocol to guide your efforts.

Suggestions for the type of knowledge you'll want to gather include:

What questions prospects are asking sales people?

• Are these questions that marketing could help to answer earlier in the buying process?
• Does the salesperson have content to use in answer to the questions?
• If it was determined that a prospect had the question top of mind, would it indicate an appropriate opportunity to involve sales?

Which content we give them is usable as is?

• Can salespeople use the content we give them as is?
• Which content are they recreating?
• Do they revise it solely for personalization reasons? How?
• Or must they redevelop it because it doesn't suit late-stage needs?

Are prospects as qualified as marketers think their score indicates?

• Did marketing pass the prospect to sales at the appropriate time?
• Too early? Were they unresponsive to sales communications?
• Too late? Were competitors already in the conversation?
• Suggestions for better indications of sales readiness?

What was the result of the initial meeting?

• How many attempts did it take to get the initial meeting?
• What next steps were agreed to?

What else in addition to what marketing provided does sales need at the handoff?

• Richer profiles.
• Detailed activity history.
• Continuing storyline approaches based on interest.
• Introduction to connect the prospect to the salesperson.

What surprised the salesperson the most about the prospect conversation?

• Was the prospect well educated on our offerings?
• Did they have a clear idea of how our company could help them?
• Did any false assumptions exist with the prospect?

Who else is involved in the purchase decision?

• Based on who else, is the salesperson moving up, down or sideways within the organization?
• What types of questions, requirements do the additional people have?
• Is their influence critical enough that a marketing program should be established to target their needs?

What slide(s) did they wish they had in their deck at their last presentation?

• Are there slides marketing could provide that would improve the sales rep's conversation and make meeting preparation easier?
  

What are the obstacles to moving forward?

• Can the obstacles be removed with education, expertise or specific evidence that our company delivers what we promise?
• Does the obstacle suggest that the prospect would be better served by being returned to a nurturing program?

The above questions and considerations are only a few ideas of feedback that marketing could solicit from sales to help them improve their work in generating high-quality leads worthy of sales pursuit.

By establishing a feedback protocol, marketing will be closer to measuring apples to apples and identifying improvements and areas that could be shifting for prospects that they need to refine. If the feedback requested from sales is not consistent, then it will be hard to know if progress is being made or if the adjustments marketing makes in response to the feedback are really working.

However, it's not just about generating sales-ready leads. It's about ensuring that your sales people have the content, collateral and tools they need to keep the momentum going. It's about maximising their time in sales conversations, not reinventing the materials marketing gives them or spending hours researching prospects instead of serving them.

Marketing can have a huge impact on sales success. If they put the effort into providing what sales needs, not just what they "think" they should provide.

 

Are You Defining Now or the Future?

B2B marketers are really digging in and working to establish plans and goals for their content marketing programs. This is terrific and I applaud you all. However, I'm seeing a trend happening when marketing and salespeople aren't collaborating to define these efforts together.

The issue that can arise is that—based on who marketers get direction and input from—they can be designing content marketing programs based on where the company hopes to be, rather than where they are right now.

Here's an example of what I mean:

A company decides they want to reach more decision makers at the CXO level. So they design a content marketing program for lead generation and nurturing to attract and engage those specific people.

The marketing team does their homework, creating personas and profiles that help them define pain points, areas of interest, motivating factors and content consumption preferences.

They create an editorial calendar and develop great content.

They generate leads, nurture them and pass them to sales when appropriate.

None of these potential deals seem to go anywhere.

What happened?

The sales team isn't prepared to have executive conversations upon account entry. They're used to going in at the line-of-business level and creating a champion who clears the path and guides them through executive conversations.

Sales is now frustrated and irritated with marketing and says - you guessed it - the leads they're getting aren't acceptable.

Marketing—by not collaborating with sales—has actually set them up to fail.

You may be sitting there thinking this isn't the case in your company, but I suggest you go take a look. Through probing, I often discover that marketing has identified decision makers based on who signs the contract, not on the people actually involved in the buying process.

Or it could be that there's an executive mandate to gain the attention of a specific target that they think will help the comapny circumvent longer sales processes by getting to the ultimate decision maker from the start. Sometimes this makes sense, and sometimes it doesn't.

If salespeople aren't prepared for the kinds of conversations marketing is getting them, then you have a problem.

Just as marketing uses personas to guide them about the kind of content a specific target market will likely be interested in, salespeople need to have the skills, insights and knowledge to develop those dialogues into conversations with traction toward purchase.

If your company wants to evolve those conversations, you need a plan for both marketing and sales to be successful. One without the other is wishful thinking based on where your company may want to be in the future, but can't yet manage in the present.

This is yet another reason marketers must involve sales in the definition of target markets, personas and better transitions at the handoff.

There's no reason your company can't evolve to capitalize on new markets or growth opportunities, just that you need to take it a step at a time by planning from how you define "now" to how you'll achieve that future state, together.

 

Why Marketing and Sales Need an SLA

The B2B marketing-to-sales process can be a long and complex process for your company—as well as your customers. Without agreement for who does what, when, managing the buying process behind the scenes can get messy, fast. Collaboration between marketing and sales teams to develop a Service Level Agreement (SLA) can help to smooth the process and create appreciable results.

Companies that haven't developed an appropriate work flow and process for the disposition and handling of their leads from start to finish put their customer acquisition success at risk by:

• Sending mixed messages to leads that diminish company credibility.
• Mishandling leads and dropping the ball on expectations.
• Wasting their sales reps time in the pursuit of unqualified leads.
• Unwittingly giving the advantage to better organized competitors.
• and more...

A well orchestrated process with agreement on both sides will foster respect between marketing and sales counterparts by setting the appropriate responses to lead behavior that drive business objectives and productivity. It doesn't hurt at all that the end result is more trust and engagement with leads that become buyers.

You see, your prospects don't care if they're dealing with marketing or sales. What they do care about is gaining access to the right information at the right time in relation to a business problem they're trying to solve. What your leads encounter during the buying process is like a test drive of what their experience as your customer might be like. Regardless of what marketing and sales departments think of each other, to create a consistent and valuable experience for leads, the two departments must figure out how to get in sync.

Since prospects have taken the wheel to steer their buying process, pushing salespeople toward the end stages, this means companies have to make the flow from status quo through purchase decision dynamic and seamless.

Some of the components for managing the buying process that must have agreement between marketing and sales include:

• Lead definition. This includes the demographic and BANT (budget, authority, need, time line) items that sales needs to indicate pursuit will be worth their effort. With the expansion of the number of people in the buying committee, it's also prudent to define which influencers may give sales the "foot-in-the-door" they need to move the process forward. For example, if a lead has need and time line, but not budget or signing authority—and activity is high—they're definitely worth a sales conversation.


• Lead score. Overall qualification of leads including scores for definition, activity profile and timeliness of interest. Marketing needs to get agreement from sales on the exceptions to scored behavior that accelerate or decelerate the hand off. By working together to define how a score is attributed, both sides are taking responsibility for the creation of qualified leads. Marketing can guess all they want, but if salespeople aren't getting what they need, they won't work the leads passed to them.


• Trigger event. What prompts the conversion from marketing to sales? Research which behaviors have resulted in other closed deals. A score on its own is often not enough to warrant sales follow-up. For example, what circumstances would prompt a transfer to inside sales instead of field sales? In addition to specific inquiries, trigger events may include online demos, asking a leading question during a webinar, visiting the How to Buy page on your website in addition to other content views.


• Sales Response. How long does sales have to follow-up with a converted lead? What is their responsibility for providing feedback to marketing on the status of the lead? Are there times when a lead should be "protected" from marketing to ensure that the conversation with the sales rep is not interrupted?


• Sales Returns. What are the criteria for sales returning a lead to marketing for further nurturing? How long is it acceptable for a lead to sit dormant before it should be returned to marketing for further nurturing and qualification? With the cost spent generating leads, we need to make sure that no viable lead gets left behind by closing the loop.


• Nurturing Parameters. At what point does marketing stop nurturing and sales pick it up? Or is there a distinction? Perhaps there's a process where—once a lead has been accepted by sales—the lead is placed in a "personalized" nurturing process that appears to be sent by the salesperson. Creating extensions to nurturing programs for sales can result in consistent messaging throughout the buying process that strategically prompts leads to take next steps in concert with sales conversations.

These are only a few ideas for structuring an SLA. There are many nuances that may be specific to your prospects' buying process and/or your company's culture. The important thing to remember is that responsibility swings both ways:

Marketing is on the hot seat to prove that the leads they send to sales are qualified and ready to engage in sales activities with the intent to purchase.

Sales is on the hot seat to sell. Their responsibility is to share feedback with marketing to help them improve the lead qualification process to ensure that the company's time and efforts on their behalf are not wasted.

What would you add or change?