Marketing Interactions

B2B Prospects in Funnels more than Pipelines

It should come as no surprise that your B2B marketing content and nurturing programs are being tapped to provide value farther across the buying process. In fact, many of you are now tasked with moving prospects to that nirvana called sales readiness—before salespeople ever see them.

Because B2B buyers can now push sales activities to whenever they're ready, your funnel may be longer than your pipeline. This reality layers additional responsibility on the marketing team, but it also leaves salespeople somewhat at odds.

You see, when company's had a hold on critical information their buyers needed to learn how to solve their problems, a salesperson gained entry to the relationship a lot earlier. They got to know their prospects and helped them navigate the tricky waters of considered purchase decisions. The salesperson with the best relationship usually won the deal.

The difference is that now salespeople are coming on board at the end. They no longer have those relationships built over the long haul. Any trust or credibility that holds sway with prospects was created by someone else (e.g., marketing messaging and communications, brand knowledge, customer success stories and, likely, peer referrals).

When your pipeline is tilted to slide salespeople to the end stages of the buying process, the rules of engagement change.

Salespeople now have to be:

• prepared to step into the conversation in mid-stride.
• focused on delivering game-changing business value from the start.
• able to apply company expertise to differentiate their offerings.

There's no easing into this with a 60-slide presentation about your company and products. Your buyers likely know as much about your company and products as they need to. They expect your salespeople to come through the door prepared to add value, not have to educate them about their businesses.

What they care about is the value of the information salespeople can provide that tops whatever they've already learned, and how easily they can use it to make the best decision.

Since marketing is telling the longest story, they are positioned to better enable sales to meet and exceed the expectations of sales-ready prospects. When marketers can effectively move prospects farther through the buying process, they're in the perfect position to help salespeople keep up that momentum at the handoff.

To do this, marketers must provide end-stage content, messaging and conversational briefs to help salespeople get a running start. This does not mean recycling marketing content. It does mean fresh insights and intelligence that enables salespeople to bring something new and valuable to the conversation. Otherwise that prospect's momentum will come to a screeching halt.

The marketing-to-sales process is a team sport. I'm often stumped about why this is treated as two distinct efforts, instead of a fluid process. I'll bet your buyers are wondering about that, too.

I read somewhere (if anyone knows, tell me and I'll give credit) that—in the eyes of buyers—40% of the sale is dependent upon their interactions with salespeople. That's a pretty hefty weighting. And yet another reason that marketing needs to put more emphasis on enabling sales to get the job done.

A few sales enablement tips for marketers:

• Create content for buying stages—all of them.
• Prepare end-stage content in usable formats for salespeople.
• Provide access to activity histories and overviews of content the prospect found useful.
• Build presentations from a value—not company—perspective.
• Work with sales every step of the way to ensure you're giving them what they need.

This is not a once-and-done thing, it's a process that will need to be revisited and refined over time as you learn what works best for both your buyers and your sales team. Monitor what salespeople use and dump or fix anything that's not working. Stay involved and learn how salespeople are using what you give them to close deals. I can pretty much guarantee you they'll put things together in ways you haven't thought of doing.

Salespeople think differently than marketers. Embrace this as a source of insight from the people who have the most face-time with buyers. What you learn can also be used across your marketing programs to make them more human. Your prospects will notice.

How Sales Can Improve Marketing Intelligence

After the marketing-to-sales process is complete, the two should get together and conduct a debrief about the experience. Whether you won or lost the deal, there is a wealth of information to evaluate for competitive insights that can improve future emarketing efforts.

Often, this process is done by sales on their own or with their sales manager. However, this is a key moment for marketing to gain intelligence that can help them tweak and tune their content marketing strategy.

If you can involve the customer you gained or the opportunity you lost, even better.

Because sales has face-to-face insight, they can tell marketing things they'd not know otherwise. Body language, facial responses and enthusiasm levels are something marketing often only sees in virtual form. In fact, if it's at all possible, meeting with salespeople during their engagement with the opportunity can help marketing capture critical response data at different points in the process when it's still fresh in the salesperson's mind.

Sure, you can't do this for every sales activity, but consider trying it on a few choice ones and see what you learn. An example would be to try this with a salesperson actively engaged with a prospect in a target segment where you'd like to expand your market.

Consider using these 12 questions for marketing intelligence gathering:

1. How many attempts did it take for you to get in contact with the prospect? And, what worked - email, phone - combination of the two?


2. What made them agree to meet with you? (what were they most interested in, excited about)


3. When you got there, were other people in the meeting, too? Who were they? (then try to learn why each person was in the room - what was most important. This will vary based on role and stake in the project outcomes)


4. What's the problem the prospect needed to solve? Peripheral problems?


5. What trigger is propelling action? (deadlines, compliance, competitive advances, mandate from above, etc.)


6. What questions did they ask?


7. Were there any points of confusion they needed to clear up?


8. What risk factors were they concerned about?


9. What expertise do they need that they don't have in house for this project?


10. Which competitors did they mention? What had their attention?


11. Was there any point in your presentation where their body language told you they were losing interest?


12. Was there a point during the meeting when their enthusiasm became prominent?

As you read the questions above, did you see all the opportunities for insights that can help you create high-value marketing content that will increase your probability for higher engagement with that target segment?

Armed with the answers, go back to your prospect's activity profile and assess what content and communications they'd been exposed to during your emarketing and nurturing campaigns. How can that content be improved to add relevance for future campaigns to that target segment?

In today's marketplace you cannot afford for marketing to be guessing about what's effective. Especially when sales can easily provide these insights. In order to flesh out customer profiles and personas and get to a level of personalization that builds consistently higher engagement, you've got to get down to the nitty gritty in your intelligence gathering.

Sales can help. Ask them. After all, if they help you and your marketing efforts shorten sales cycles, everyone wins!

Marketing Can Help Sales Performance

CSO Insights reports that a sales rep's ability to convert a lead to an opportunity happens less than 50% of the time in more than 52% of companies surveyed. Their report shows that 83% of these companies report customer expectations of sales reps have grown—and sales reps aren't delivering.

Interestingly, the report also shows these 3 things are the most important focus for improving sales effectiveness:

• Doing their homework about the lead's company
  
• Implementing a strategy for converting a lead to an opportunity
  
• Having a lead nurturing process to keep top of mind with longer-horizon leads

Now, I may be crazy, but what in the heck is marketing doing if sales is supposed to be doing all of this? I know, I know. Sales wants marketing to stay out of their stuff [interesting perspective here] and let them create, work and manage their own leads because there's this lack of trust thing about lead quality. And marketing often seems content to stand back. But obviously this approach is not working.

The problem is that if this situation persists, everyone loses. I've written about this before.

Marketing needs to step up to the challenge and get that lead generation and nurturing process humming like a top. They need to profile leads and determine interests, priorities and relevance. And, they need to serve leads to sales when they are opportunities.

Yes, it's possible.

But only if marketing and sales start working together.

Take these steps to get started:

1. Get sales and marketing to define a qualified lead. Then get mutual agreement about the point at which leads become opportunities.


2. Determine what information is needed to create a profile sales can work from effectively and then create a nurturing plan that collects that information a bit at a time as engagement is built during that dialog.


3. Give sales the profile with the opportunity at transition. [consider utilizing a news system like Dow Jones to add trigger event intelligence to your lead profiles and help ensure you don't miss a lead-to-opportunity conversion point.]


4. Create a feedback loop that updates marketing on the status of the opportunity and empowers sales to put them back in nurturing if the opportunity cools. You've done too much to build that relationship to drop it now. 82.5% of leads will buy eventually, so keep on nurturing. Priorities will shift again.

This kind of a system is a start at rectifying a lot of the issues CSO Insights discovered in their research. And, it will create a cooperative environment focused on conversions.

Cooperative collaboration is a critical factor for building and sustaining business growth.

Well, isn't it?

Welcome to the Revenue Revolution!

I had the extreme pleasure of a conversation with Jon Miller, VP of Marketing for Marketo, the other day and got an inside look at their new Lead Insight for Sales tools.

But, let me back up for a minute to this revolution bit. Marketo is convinced (kudos to them) that in order to recapture the $1 trillion annual loss that results from sales and marketing misalignment nothing short of a Revenue Revolution will bring success.

They've even taken a bold step and invited sales and marketing professionals to sign their Revenue Revolution Manifesto and put their own stake in the ground for alignment. In their words, "The Revenue Revolution occurs when marketing and sales stop pointing fingers, cease working within their own silos, and unite to create dramatic improvements in marketing ROI, sales productivity, and most importantly top-line growth."

Marketo has put their money where their manifesto is by launching Lead Insight for Sales to complement and extend their other marketing tools and focus both sales and marketing on the Revenue Cycle. The Revenue Cycle is a comprehensive look at how all the singular components of the marketing-to-sales process integrate to produce measurable revenue outcomes. 

It's also about ramping up collaboration to improve the coordination and contribution from all the separate components or steps that lead to revenue generation.

“When marketing and sales teams coordinate their activities as part of a unified revenue process, companies get better at properly identifying and prioritizing opportunities,” said Barry Trailer of CSO Insights and a strategic advisor to Marketo. “This is important since better quality leads result in easier and better quality sales cycles, with more wins and ultimately more revenue."

What I like about Lead Insight for Sales is that it's designed to work with salespeople, not make them adopt something else. We all know how tough that is. The beta version has an integration with both salesforce.com and Microsoft Outlook. But the Marketo system becomes the system of record for the lifetime of the lead.

Visibility is greatly enhanced across the entire process from lead generation to revenue, meaning everyone can see what's happening, regardless of where the interactions initiate. The ability to close the loop on this process plays a key role in unifying your marketing-to-sales efforts.

And finally, the drag and drop interface incorporated throughout drip campaigns, scoring and routing leads is intuitive and easy to use. There's not going to be a long ramp-up period before your company can see, as well as actively participate and collaborate, deep inside the revenue cycle. By putting the focus squarely on profiling the lead's interest, activity and progression throughout the cycle, the benefits of marketing and sales alignment should become glaringly obvious.

It doesn't hurt to also include some additional insights from a recent report, “BtoB Lead Generation: Marketing ROI & Performance Evaluation Study,” showcased in an article on Demand Gen Report. You can go read the article, but I'll leave you with this tidbit:

"Of the respondents who projected they would outgrow their competition, those sales organizations gave higher marks to their marketing team’s performance and the alignment of sales and marketing. In addition, comparing those who rate their marketing effective to those who rate their marketing less effective shows higher positive rating for quality of leads (56% vs. 20%) and for conditioning leads to create higher preference and conversion rates (46% vs. 13%)."

Go check out demos of Marketo's tools here. Take a spin for yourself and start thinking about how your Revenue Cycle can be improved.

Content without a goal is unemployed

Is your marketing content unemployed? What I mean by this is that content, to be of value to anyone, must do something. If your content is not written with the express intention of helping your audience learn, understand or take action about something (or all three), it's just sitting there on your web page, taking up space.

And, quite possibly, driving people away from your website.

A lot of content I come across doesn't live up to its billing. How many times have you read a headline and thought, "yes, just what I'm looking for," only to click through and be disappointed to learn that the headline was geared for generating click throughs but nothing more? That's just one example of useless content.

I come across a lot of content that isn't employable. This condition is usually represented by:

• blah, blah, blah, so what - it's all about them stuff
• content that tells me about a subject but leaves the reader stumped as to what to do next to actually utilize that information effectively
• content that starts off on a good tack and then veers wildly in a direction that deviates from its implied promise
• content that's not in the least engaging to the audience it's attracting
• content obviously written for someone who's not your audience (different role, industry, interest)
• jargon filled content meant to generate search optimization but not audience comprehension.

Really irritating, unemployed content can be found on website homepages and consists of a description of what the company does that is so jargon-filled that no reasonable person can ascertain what that might be.

If you want to find your content highly employed, try a few of these pointers:

• write for your audience
• provide something they consider high value and relevant
• teach something
• clarify an issue
• make it easy to understand
• engage me with your style and tone
• make me feel welcome
• ensure I'm glad I clicked through
• give me a call to action that's about me, not you
• get to the point, then expand so I get something meaty that gets me involved

Highly employable content is:

• working hard in search results for audience-centric terms
• stayed with long enough to be read from beginning to end
• positioned to invite further engagement from the audience
• referred to others with similar interests
• interactive - meaning it invites response, generates conversation, etc.

Content has got to be more than words on a page. If it's not employable, boot it and "hire" other content that works harder for your audience. Yes, this means your content won't engage everyone. Then again, everyone is not your market.

Consequences of Turf

A lot of companies have their turf split up into plots. It's almost like homesteading. Field Marketing, PR, Corporate Marketing, Inside Sales, Direct Sales, etc. all have their piece of turf. The problem with these little plots of turf is that many of them have erected fences to protect their spot on the lawn and fend off encroachment.

Ah, I know. Everyone worked dang hard to get their share and believe they're entitled to to their spot of turf. But this practice of turf superiority impacts customer experience and company credibility by allowing the weeds of discontent to grow in between the patches in the lawn of your company.

Okay - I'll stop with the imagery.

Here's what I'm talking about. When everyone is fighting for dominance there isn't any cohesion. And, if you think it's only visible from inside the company, think again.

Here is an example to get you thinking about the consequences of turf:

Your company is launching a new product. PR is off creating an analyst campaign and generating lists of bloggers they can bombard with press releases. They've also considerately chosen to create a variety of "stock" responses they can post as "comments" on the blogs who choose to cover them.

Field marketing is creating an online campaign that focuses on product features for your new widget because product marketing has given them articles and data sheets written by the design engineers. They've eschewed the "dormant" leads in the database in favor of buying new lists that are better "targeted" to decision makers for these feature sets.

Corporate marketing has coined a new name for the widget that's hard to pronounce and doesn't mean anything, so they have to do a huge "branding" campaign to generate awareness and acceptance. The persona they're working from to position the company's channel partners isn't quite on target because the direct salespeople want to keep their nuggets of insight close to their chests and not risk giving their hard-won advantage to those folks they consider "competitors."

But, at least, in this effort, they're trying to put a customer spin on the message. Although, considering the variance from the rest of the company's go-to-market initiatives, it may serve to further distance people from embracing the new product. The lack of synchronization is evident. This means confusion—and that could also cost them current customers who become disconnected during this roll out.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Everyone is out doing their "job" and no one is collaborating or in alignment about coordinating the "go to market" strategy. No one is giving up their ability to have control over how their little piece of the turf is executed.

The CMO council recently released survey results that showed "only 6 percent of marketers rated their go-to-market capabilities as “extremely good,” with another 27 percent rating themselves as “quite effective.” Sales executives also provided notably low self-assessments, with only 6 percent giving their go-to-market capabilities the highest marks, and 29 percent calling themselves “quite effective.” [Driving the Bottom line from the Front line]

The other scary admission is that only 40% to 50% of the executives surveyed believe their marketing and sales functions are effective. But, even so, their focus continues to be on short-term gains, rather than on the longer-term vision.

This type of turf battle has been going on in companies forever. As it persists, the company's story gets diluted, twisted out of shape, and makes wild swings that skew their customers' and potential buyers' impressions. The more this turf issue is allowed to persist, the more detrimental the impact will be on both your customers' experiences and your company's credibility.

Besides that, if the grass burns and dies, how valuable is that patch of turf?

Sales and Marketing Get CLOSE

If you don't know about CLOSE - Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales Effectiveness - then you should. Here's the idea: The CMO Council partnered with Oracle and the Wall Street Journal to form an affinity network and online community channel that will help sales, marketing and channel professionals further their interactions, increase understanding of their allied functional areas, and provide the necessary tools, techniques and best practices for improved customer acquisition and value building.

I've been invited to become a partner with them in this endeavor, which is truly "close" to my work, as those of you who read this blog know.

As a partner, I'd like to ask you to participate in the CLOSE Survey. It'll only take you 15 minutes and they'll share the results with you.

This is a major study to understand where and how greater efficiencies and cooperation between departments can drive sales. Connecting sales and marketing efforts to streamline customer acquisition and how it's achieved is critical to achieving the growth your companies need to meet strategic goals. What you learn may be some critical "light bulb" ideas to help you make valuable changes within your own organizations.

Integration between these departments is something many of us have struggled with for years. By participating in this study, you can take the next step in actually helping develop processes to making this integration a reality.  Go take the survey today.

One of the other things CLOSE is doing is hosting one-day strategic invention workshops around the world to formulate best practices to drive sales effectiveness through closer alignment and integration with marketing.

As a partner, I'm privileged to offer you a link with a 25% discount to attend these workshops [but use the links below to register]: April 29, 2008 in Sao Paulo, Brazil - Register here May 12, 2008 in California at Stanford - Register here

These interactive workshops will establish best practices specific to where and how sales and marketing organizations should be deriving greater business value from tighter synergies, unified strategies, better information sharing and analytics, and well-defined measures and metrics.

Now you have the opportunity to participate in making a difference in how the gap is bridged between sales and marketing. I'm thinking that these workshops, studies and the CLOSE community are onto something we've needed to address for a long time.

Finally, you can go out and Join the Close community and work with all of us to generate best practices that can change the landscape of how sales and marketing drive value...together.

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

What's a Sales Portal?

As my last post for 2006, I thought I'd spend some time talking about Sales Portals. I do a lot of work closing the loop between marketing and sales. It still amazes me the blank responses I get when I start talking about the usefulness of a good sales portal.

Part of that may be the word "portal" itself.

A portal is an online interface that delivers information and interactions that help accomplish a goal. So, a sales portal should increase sales effectiveness through delivering actionable information and tools that help salespeople close deals. It should also be an internal collaborative community for the organization.

Realistically, every department in the company has some kind of role in Sales. Since sales is the end-goal of a company, then  everyone from HR to Finance to R&D to support & service has a role in the sales process.  The context may vary, but everyone plays a part in either getting customers or keeping them.

The sales portal should inform, educate, nurture and connect the employees of a company to help them engage with each other in productive activities that increase the company's overall success at achieving strategic objectives.  Yes, all based around the customer. Existing customers, future customers and perhaps most importantly, lost customers.

Participation should be encouraged and enabled.  Ask yourself the following questions:

• Do you know what each person's specialty or expertise is at your company? 
• Do you know who's working on what projects in what capacity?
• Do you know all the initiatives underway at your company?
• Do you know what's coming down the pike for new product launches?
• Do you know the best uses your customers have found for your products?
• Do you know why you lost customer X last year?

Suffice it to say that you can "do you know" yourself to death and probably come up with the "No" answer more than the "Yes" answer. Streamlining processes and creating transparency between departments that improves customer experiences dramatically is the goal of the sales portal.

Okay - I know some of you are rolling your eyes, thinking, "No - a sales portal is for salespeople."

I will agree that there are some tools that should be specifically for authorized/permissioned salespeople - like quote and proposal tools and such, but think about this for a second. Shouldn't everyone at your company know what values your products/solutions/services deliver? Shouldn't your front-line service and support staff know  what customers are being promised so they can deliver on those promises?

Insight should be available about what leads have been exposed to, what they've pulled to them and used and what they've participated in with your company. From the lead nurturing process to the sales process, marketing's efforts should seamlessly transition to sales processes and be available to see on the portal.

If Sally finds out her neighbor's company is looking for a solution you offer, shouldn't Sally be able to enter a lead and submit it to the sales process? If Evan finds out why a lead is looking at a competing vendor, wouldn't it be helpful if he could log that information and alert the sales rep working on that lead? Yes, some structure and process is needed here, but this is a blog post...

If you enable the participation of all employees in relevant ways, your company is building a knowledgebase that will evolve as it is used.  An actionable knowledge system that organically grows with each addition and provides insights to customers and about the workings of the company that many of your employees may not currently have.

It never ceases to amaze me that many companies still operate on a "need-to-know basis." Is that an illusion of grandeur or just over-controlling at it's finest? The more horizontal your company can become, the more in-tune it will be with creating and sustaining valuable customer experiences.

Finally, consider how much email could be cut out and how much knowledge reused if the sales portal is built for and encourages participation. How much knowledge is floating around your company being shared between a few individuals and lost to the company as a whole? How much could customer experiences be improved and how would the sales process be impacted by creating an actionable sales knowledge system, AKA a Sales Portal?

What activities will your company take next year to build better customer experiences?

User-Generated Content for B2B

User-generated content (UGC) has made quite a stir this year.  Mostly in the consumer marketplace with videos and build-your-own-product-version type tools.  From a B2B standpoint, UGC is based on collaboration through community. Many companies have created user groups and given them an online forum for discussion. This is the beginning of applying the concept of UGC for B2B. 

Patty Seybold has an interesting post on her blog Outside Innovation, Letting Your Customers Support Each Other, that talks about Peer-to-Peer support opportunities. She says, "...customers tell us that they often prefer the insights they get from learning from other customers’ experiences. They find relevant short cuts and tips. They often find another customer who has faced the same issue in the same context. It’s much easier to follow that person’s advice than it is to try to explain your context to someone who may not have experienced the same issue."

One of the biggest obstacles to companies who try this approach will be loosening control enough to really allow the peer-to-peer conversation to unfold. It's one thing to worry that peer advice might be misleading.  It's another to try and correct every little thing because they phrase it differently than company messaging would. 

The biggest way to build a group of enthusiastic supporters for your products is to allow peers to contribute. Patty's next post, Are You Leveraging Customer Generated Content goes on to give you some examples of how companies are doing this. Go read them and start thinking about how your B2B company can leverage UGC in the new year. It's not just for consumer brands.

I'm already working with several clients on how to encourage peer enthusiasm through online collaborative activities.  There is value to be had in gaining access to your customer's insights.  What they might not say directly to you, in a customer survey or interview, could come out candidly in a user forum and provide the insights your company needs to innovate and expand demand for your products and services.