Marketing Interactions

B2B Content Strategy Should Never Be a Wallflower

A B2B content marketing strategy should never be contained in a silo. First of all, to be literal, a silo is a dugout, cave or shelter for grain. Secondly, it denotes walls and barriers that keep its contents apart from everything else. A B2B content marketing strategy must lead somewhere. It should be based on a continuum that matches the needs of prospects and customers wherever they may be in the experience at any time.

The issue I see often, is that content marketing is an add-on to everything else that marketers have on their plates. It's viewed as a campaign, a project or a standalone initiaitve. A silo. This is in part related to the way marketers are wired. In the traditional sense, most of what marketers do has start and end dates and each effort is graded on its own merit (I'm using the word "merit" loosely).

How's our SEO strategy doing?

How many "leads" did that last campaign produce?

Did our webinar attendees increase for this topic?

How many followers did our Twitter account attract last month?

Is our web traffic growing?

Don't get me wrong, we need to measure and evaluate, but we need to quit using our metrics as boundaries that separate one initiative from another. To do this, we need to look at transitions and experiences across buying and the customer lifecycle.

An experience is a set of dynamic transitions that flow together. Until you step out of it or it ends.

When marketers focus on campaigns, they are instituting a construct that boxes in and ends the experience. Three email touches and a sales call, move on. This construct is for us, not related to anything our prospects or customers need, want or value. It was created so that we could manage and measure our efforts based on some ridiculous notion that a short-term campaign can definitively drive sales for a long-term buying process.

But I digress. The point I want to make is about the need to integrate transitions.

Channels are proliferating and marketers need to pay attention to the transitions between them. If your social media team isn't cognizant of your nurturing program, for example, how fluid will the experience be for a prospect or customer taking part in both?

If a buyer watches a video on your YouTube! channel and finds it fun and informative, then visits your website only to see a bunch of dry, product-focused content they find neither fun, nor informative, how will you overcome that disconnect? Or can you?

Often overlooked is the critical transition from marketing to sales. Marketers often plan their content strategy without ever sharing it with sales or - highly recommended - involving sales in its development. If the entire be all and end all of marketing is to help produce and grow customers, why the heck is this transition so overlooked?

It's time for marketing to stop producing more wallflowers and start creating the Belles of the Ball! You may laugh but the Belles of the Ball are sought out, followed and considered highly engaging. This will never happen if we don't integrate all of our marketing initiatives into our strategy and consider how to gain the benefits of dynamic experiences based on transitions.

I know this is difficult. If it was easy it wouldn't be near as much fun!

Take the first step by evaluating everything you're doing and discovering how to create better transitions that tell a story your audience finds engaging. Start connecting the dots. Just don't leave your content strategy sitting on the sidelines as just another project.

 

Changing the Conversation

When B2B companies develop and implement a content marketing strategy it should be obvious that big change is afoot. Not just for marketers, but for everyone involved in the demand-to-revenue generation process. The most pivotal thing that needs to change in parallel across roles is the "conversation."

There are at least 3 types of conversations that will change in the marketing-to-sales process when a full-bodied, buyer-focused content strategy is put in place.

Content Conversations: These are the conversations that are generated by the valuable ideas that marketing content shares to answer questions buyers have during each stage of buying.

In fact, when a content marketing strategy is implemented, the word "campaign" should be stricken from the company's lexicon. It's no longer a stop and start endeavor, but a continuum that must be addressed ongoingly. Content marketing focused on buyer needs, preferences and priorities should get people thinking and talking about how to solve their problems using your ideas.

The interaction and engagement established via content marketing can be labeled a dialogue, two-way communications, or whatever you like, but it's still about enabling conversation.

Inside Sales Conversations: Once content conversations occur, inside sales can no longer follow-up with the lame script we've all experienced that's focused on selling or mining the prospect for qualifying information without delivering any value in return. A conversation must be mutually beneficial or it won't continue. 

As I've said in another post, content marketing changes expectations. Addressing these new expectations must be apparent in everything that follows. It's about the "experience" of the conversation. A self-serving call focused on what the company wants to know/sell/get isn't going to cut it.

The problem is that you cannot just hand inside salespeople a new script and expect that to do it. Changing the conversation requires a change management process that includes orientation, education, tools and ongoing support/coaching with a feedback loop that enables refinement.

Let's face it, content is a wonderful tool, but it's not definitive until it's validated to have done what it's supposed to do. In a complex B2B sale, that means human contact by inside sales. If the orientation, purpose and "content" of the calls doesn't reflect the expectations and experience set by your content, all that hard work and investment can be cast aside by a prospect who feels mislead by a wasteful conversation.

Sales Conversations: Salespeople are now coming into conversations with buyers differently than before. Buyers are educated, informed and self-focused. Salespeople need to understand just what that means and how they add value when they're no longer building releationships from the start - in many cases.

Stepping into the conversation where the prospect expects it to continue is the new competence that sales must embrace. But they are not clairvoyant. Marketers and inside sales both need to contribute to improving this transition. After all, they know what's transpired prior to the handoff.

Getting buy-in from sales (at all levels) is needed to change the conversation. How does changing the conversation fit into your content strategy framework?

Have you considered what it means to change the conversation?

How will you go about collaborating with all the teams involved to ensure the demand to revenue generation process will be a consistent conversational exchange that evolves as it needs to result in customer acquisition?

And finally, the end result of how well all of this works is reflected in Buying Committee Conversations. And those will play a major role in the decision to purchase.

 

What Happens When Inbound Marketing Works?

The term "inbound marketing" is getting a lot of play these days as B2B marketers grapple with labels and learning more about how marketing practices are evolving — including the dynamics of content marketing. I'm not getting into what all that means now, but invite you to be part of The Great Marketing Conversation, on January 24th, if you'd like to delve into the nuances. With Robert Rose, Mike Volpe, and Marcus Sheridan, we're bound to stir up quite a discussion.

What I do want to talk about in this post is what happens when your inbound content marketing works. Have you thought about it beyond the idea of getting prospects to come to you? Do you have a response plan? Is your sales team on board?

The whole point of inbound marketing is getting prospects to find and interact with your company. But it's what you do once you make that happen that can determine the success or failure of your contribution to revenues.

Here's the thing:

Generating inbound prospects who are more highly qualified and sales ready is the goal. But when you change the buying experience, you need to consider how the underlying processes on your side must change as well. Not just for marketing, but for sales.

What companies haven't yet quite grasped is that by changing the buying experience, they've also changed their buyers' expectations. And you can't stop those changes at the handoff and hope to be successful if your salespeople try to continue on in the way they've always done. It just doesn't work that way. This is where sales enablement needs to be orchestrated to keep the brakes off momentum.

Consider this scenario:

• You've worked really hard to understand your buyers and develop content focused on their needs, problems, goals and aspirations. (not your products)


• A prospect is following you on Twitter, visiting your blog and following the links you share socially.


• One day he goes online to search for specific information and comes across a search result for an eBook you published six months ago that they weren't aware of. So he visits your site and fills out the form to download it. He doesn't hesitate because his experience with your company has been great thus far.


• An inside sales rep sees the activity and calls the prospect to follow-up. Unfortunately, she starts off the conversation with a monologue about your company and products and tries to push the prospect into a demo.


• Your prospect extricates himself from the call and goes dormant.

Yes, this still happens. Happened to me just the other day from a company I thought knew better. And the account exec couldn't even tell me what I'd downloaded, just that they knew I'd downloaded something.

The problem is that all the work marketers do on the front end will be wasted if they don't create a response plan and enable sales (both inside and direct) to continue the dialogue without disappointing  prospects.

Follow-up by inside sales is fine. But remember that they need to be able to have a business-relevant conversation with the prospect. Following up on a content download isn't a sales call, but a relationship building experience. The sales rep should be able to discuss the topic the prospect expressed interest in and offer additional content the person may find relevant. Along the way, the rep can subtly learn more about the buying stage the prospect is in.

Inside sales follow-up should be treated as a form of progressive profiling, unless there are buying indications that indicate it's time for escalation.

This means that marketers need to think beyond their lead generation strategy to create a response plan that coordinates with nurturing and how they'll enable sales to meet those expectations your brilliant content is setting. If you can't keep prospects engaged once they come to you, what's the point?

Things to think about include:

• The process in response to specific content downloads and lead gen offers
• What additional content offers relate to a download?
• What conversational prompts will be helpful to ensure relevant follow-up conversations?
• What questions need to be asked/answered to help you be more relevant as the relationship continues? Focus on need first, not budget.
• Should the reponse to a download be a call? Or should that download activity serve to trigger an auto reponse email to be sent with a related content offer?Or, perhaps it's indicative of which lead nurturing track the prospect will find most valuable.

The concept of inbound marketing is great. But the strategy must be planned beyond the "getting found" part to what comes next.

B2B Content Marketing as Trojan Horse

I sat in on the Content Marketing for Real Marketers webinar, with Joe Chernov and Rebecca Lieb, hosted by #CMI and Joe Pulizzi.

Of course there were many great points made, but two of them stood out and prompted this blog post:

• Content draws 10X more media attention than product launches.
• Diminishing the brand representation in favor of the story enables it to spread.

If you look at the first point, it offers proof that no one cares about products, but rather what they enable — which is what great content marketing is all about.

The second points out that it's not about your company, but about the story you're sharing.

I get asked a lot how to increase engagement with content. In fact, I know many marketers pining for the ability to get their content to go viral. In my experience you can't "make" something go viral. But you can certainly up the odds with the way your content is designed. (As an aside, viral means nothing in B2B if it isn't caused by the market you're trying to engage.)

The issues I run into when it comes time to actually execute a program by publishing content include (but are not limited to):

• Corporate editors bound and determined to get every trademark, service mark, product name and company name mentioned as often as possible when just talking about the product by an agnostic or industry label makes it easier for people to engage with the material.


• Corporate editors who insist that the grammar be perfect, thereby making the content a chore to read by removing contractions, inserting "that" everywhere possible and inserting jargon because it's part of the brand style guide. (e.g. use vs. leverage)


• Companies that insist their logo, tagline and template are prominently displayed on every content asset - even though the corporate brand mafia have already done all of the above.


• Companies that insist that the calls to action must be oriented around selling something.


• The inability to respond quickly because EVERYTHING must be approved before it's published.

The title of this post was also mentioned during the webinar and I love it. The concept is a perfect representation of content marketing done to best effect.

It's really that simple. If your content provides ideas that inspire people to visualize themselves solving their problems or the path to a better tomorrow, then you're on the right track. What you really want is for them to become so engaged that they take your ideas into conversations within their companies.

Such a simple concept, but one often overlooked because of the intense focus to insert the salesperson into the dialogue. Yes, of course that must happen in a B2B sale, but consider this:

If your content is designed to help people think about, visualize and discuss the ideas you share in relation to the problems your company solves, it serves as a Trojan Horse, getting salespeople invited into conversations faster than marketers can accomplish by trying to force the issue.

During the webinar, Joe mentioned that Eloqua's logo is getting smaller by design on the content they share. Do you actually think that no one recognizes that Eloqua is providing the content? By making themselves the secondary focus, Eloqua is actually helping their brand gain prominence, as counterintuitive as that may seem. Because they are not screaming "LOOK AT ME", the company is perceived as being more helpful by placing the emphasis on the content, not its brand representation.

Think about how you read content. Do you look for something interesting before you commit to spending time with it? I bet you do. Then, after you get that light bulb moment, you want to know who provided it. How much better of an impression has been made? How much more likely are you to remember the brand favorably?

It's about using the story as stealth marketing, not clubbing people over the head with your product. Once the story is "in," your company is "in" by association.

Great webinar! If you get a chance to listen to the archive, I suggest you do. There were many other great ideas shared during the session.

Sales Conversations Must Improve Buyer Experiences

The last couple of years have turned the B2B buying process inside out. Instead of seeking out salespeople to gain answers to their questions about solving problems, buyers now push sales conversations to the end of their purchasing process. The information they need for most of their research and consideration is now in plentiful supply on the Web.

This is downright frustrating for salespeople who are used to establishing a relationship at the start and guiding their prospective customers toward a purchase decision across the entire process. Because buyers now decide when to involve sales, stepping into the relationship in mid-stream is a new skill that requires salespeople to focus more on extending conversations than on starting them.

The way in which online dialogues are transitioned into 1-to-1 sales conversations can either keep your prospects’ buying momentum moving along or stop it cold.

The reality is that there’s a critical gap between what salespeople know well and what buyers want to discuss. According to the buyers who participated in a Forrester Research study, the sales meeting would be considered effective 65% of the time if the salesperson was capable of addressing the problem.

Unfortunately, this level of competence is not the norm. Considering that 53% of purchase decisions are made based on the buyer’s perceived quality of sales conversations, companies need to take action to transform the buyer's experience.

Step 1: Take Steps to Shift the Reality

Buyers are looking for vendors who can become strategic partners in helping them achieve business results they need. It’s not about products and solutions. It’s about what they enable your customers to achieve that they couldn’t do before. By enabling your salespeople to have relevant conversations based on business concerns and objectives the value-add becomes clear, moving price negotiation to the back burner by eliminating the commodity perception.

Giving buyers what they want should be built into our DNA. If your marketing strategies are pulling buyers farther through the purchasing process to the point where they’re willing to engage with a salesperson, your company has the intelligence available to help salespeople become value providers. By connecting the dots and contributing valuable ideas, salespeople will keep the momentum going that turns prospects into buyers.

Step 2: Connect the Dots

Buyers are busy. The new priority that just landed on their desk is not a replacement to their other responsibilities, but an addition to an already full plate. The complexity of solving problems in today’s dynamic business environment can be overwhelming. The speed of change is making knowledge obsolete faster than ever, lessening the confidence buyers used to have in the quality of their decisions. The following factors can help your salespeople become sought-after resources buyers search out to help them find the answers they need.

• Make Introductions: In my work with clients, I’ve heard a lot of salespeople say they want better transitions into their conversations with buyers. Instead of marketing (or inside sales) sending a qualified lead on to sales and expecting the salesperson to call in blind, provide an introduction. You do this for peers and colleagues, so it should be a natural extension to do so for your buyers. Given the brief, introductory email example below, you can see how much easier it will be for the salesperson to extend the conversation this buyer is already having with the company.
  
  Bill, I’d like to introduce you to Nancy Smith. Nancy is one of our best resources for insights about how to reduce costs in your data center without reinventing the wheel. She has been instrumental in helping companies just like yours increase efficiencies with virtualization.
  
  Nancy, please allow me to introduce Bill Jones. Bill is the CIO for ABC Corporation and is concerned about the escalating costs in his data center. He would like to ask a few questions raised for him by our white paper, How to Gain Economies of Scale in the Data Center.
  
  
• Simplify the Complexity: Your solution may have 57 whiz-bang features, all of which your salespeople are well-versed in discussing. But, your buyer’s immediate concern is about the few that will impact their immediate problem. With access to the prospect’s online activity history, a salesperson can easily see their highest interest points and come prepared to discuss the impact of the most closely related features to the problem at hand.


• Compare Apples to Apples: There are probably many alternatives to your product or solution. The ways in which companies talk about—and package—their products, makes it tough for buyers to compare the functionality head-to-head. Provide your salespeople with accurate assessments of “like” features including scenarios that showcase the performance of your offering.
  
  It’s important to provide as unbiased a view as possible. This can be difficult as it goes against the nature of selling—especially for passionate salespeople who believe your product is the best. Trust me. Your company’s credibility will escalate as a result. Disparaging competitors creates friction for your buyers that will have them wondering if what your salespeople say is true. That means they’ll be spending some time thinking about the competitor. And that’s not in your best interests.

Step 3: Contribute Ideas

A complex purchase is accompanied by the need for education. If your company is producing thought leadership content and comprehensive customer success stories, you likely have the insights salespeople need to weave valuable ideas into their conversations with buyers.

• Provide Unexpected Outcomes: The goal for solving a problem either increases or decreases something critical for the buyer (e.g., increased revenues, decreased expenses). Look deeper and prepare your salespeople to introduce additional outcomes buyers may not have considered when they set out to solve the problem. Take an in depth look at what your customers are achieving beyond the outcomes your solution is most commonly known to deliver.


• Address Overlapping Considerations: Buying committees are getting larger. This means there are more stakeholders, each with their own expectations about the way a problem is solved. It’s likely that implementing your solution will affect other departments and processes beyond your buyer’s immediate focus. Your salespeople need to be prepared to intelligently discuss the impact of your solution across the enterprise, to address the perspective of each member on the buying committee. 


• Overcome Obstacles: Even when buyers are tasked with solving a problem, that doesn’t mean they have a clear path to doing so. Salespeople must be able to help buyers overcome obstacles from a variety of sources—from executive misconceptions to the personal preferences of influencers to the internal competition over securing budget dollars for other projects.
  
  Building a business case is not one-size-fits-all. The components may be similar, but their order of importance will vary based on the culture of the prospective customer’s organization. The more salespeople know about which triggers are most important to buyers in specific situations, industries or in relation to primary goals, the better they can position your product—and your company—as the best choice for achieving the ROI buyers need.

Sales Conversations Must Create Movement

Every sales conversation must be focused on creating continuous momentum across the buying process. With increased competence in understanding how buyers make the necessary progress to complete a purchase decision, salespeople can be prepared to have conversations that drive desired outcomes. In the case of a complex sale, momentum is usually incremental. In other words, the purchase won’t result from one meeting. Enticing buyers to take the next steps is a critical outcome for each and every interaction.

Although learning about a buyers’ timeline, purchasing authority and budget are critical to helping the salesperson assess the value of the opportunity, they also need to become proficient at serving the buyers’ needs in parallel. The longer buyers stay in the same state, the less likely they are to purchase. Inertia causes friction and doubt. Continuous movement driven by sales conversations is the key to conversions—even if the movement is one step at a time.

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!

Writing Content is Not a Job for Sissies

Ken Rosen wrote a terrific guest post over on Mark Schaefer's blog, {grow} - Five questions to help you choose your target market. It's thought provoking in several ways. If you haven't read it, make sure to take a spin through. It's seriously good.

The gist of it is that building a foundation is important and not to be taken lightly.

There are two things Ken said that I'd like to expand upon here.

"You have to convert someone who needs your product into someone who buys your product."

Although he meant this in a target market kind of way, I immediately think about marketing content - what else? - and how this shift is the main job a B2B marketer's content needs to help facilitate.

We'll get to more of that later, but Ken's post also provides the answer to how this shift is accomplished when he's talking about why and how he can get decision makers to speak with him for an hour at a time.

"Because they got to talk about their world and what matters to them."

If you change the word "talk" to "think" - you'd be pretty close to defining the effect that good marketing content can create.

To get to great content, leave it as is and consider how to create content that actually inspires them to "talk" about it with their peers and colleagues because the ideas are so in tune with their world that they can't help themselves.

This is actually a two-part bang for your content buck. First they think about the ideas you're sharing with them, then they talk about them. And that's what sets things in motion to shift from need to buy.

So, how do you get this to happen?

Here's one way to think about it.

Write about your target audience - not to them.

Sounds counterintuitive, doesn't it?

Here's how this mindset will help. In order to write about someone, you have to:

• Know them really well.
• Learn what interests them and what they hope to achieve.
• Discover what obstacles are in the way.
• Find out what motivates them to take action.
• Gain common ground.

If, instead, you write to your audience, you're tempted to:

• Talk about you, your company and products.
• Try to convince them you're the best thing since sliced bread.
• Miss the mark by relying on assumptions.
• Slide in that sales pitch, no matter how much you think you're not doing that.

This is because you're being you and saying what you think is important without realizing that it's grounded in your world, not theirs. You've still got in the back of your mind what's important to you, not what matters to them.

Create a Cheat Sheet

When I create content for specific target audiences, I make myself a cheat sheet. It includes things like what matters to them in relation to the topic and what factors in their lives/companies impact the thing that matters, along with a few other things like what I want them to do next. If I have that next action in mind, I can tease it into the content so that when I get to the end, I'm not just tacking on a link to contact the company for a demo or some other action that comes out of left field.

I keep my cheat sheet open in the background on my computer and refer to it often while I'm writing to make sure I'm on track. Sometimes when I don't do this often enough, I find that I've veered off course and have to delete a bunch of work and restart. This usually happens when I start writing to them instead of about them.

To write great content requires a lot of attention, effort, stamina, creativity, research and tools - to mention just a few things. It's definitely not a job for sissies.

Relevance is Not an Option

B2B marketers are focused on lead generation more than they are on lead nurturing. The problem is that without the nurturing, generating leads is merely an exercise in trying to scrape the 10% who may be ready to buy and then dumping the rest into an afterthought category.

Likewise, 78% of marketers say that they're ramping up their social media use this year. One of their main metrics is the number of followers, likes or RSS feed subscriptions they can amass.

The problem with all of this isn't the number of people who click to follow, it's how marketers are going about engaging them.

Take a look at what happens when your messaging isn't perceived as "relevant":

• 49% unsubcribed to email streams they'd opted into previously
• 43% have "unliked" a company on Facebook, 38% due to irrelevance
• 52% have unfollowed a brand on Twitter

[See the report The Social Media Breakup]

Part of what causes this is that companies make assumptions about what customers want via a relationship on social media. A new study by IBM found that the perception gap is likely wider than you think:

 

The study recommends that, "Instead of asking why your company should engage in social media, ask why a customer would choose to interact with your company in a social platform. Recast social interaction strategies to focus on giving customers the value they seek and the customer intimacy will come."

In other words, whether social media, email, blogging, articles, white papers, eBooks, videos, podcasts, etc., the perceived value of the content is what you're being judged on every time. In all cases, just showing up is not going to work.

Before you set your expectations too high, consider that many customers in this study said they chose to interact with brands that they already had a strong relationship with. Perhaps the ramp up strategy for social media should actually be customer nurturing instead of new lead generation. Or, maybe it means using it later in your lead nurturing programs to create cross-over between channels once you've started building that relationship.

Those are just a few things to think about.

But the gist is that we do need to think about them. We need to listen and plan before we engage. We need to decide on which goals are the most appropriate for our company to pursue, given what we hear. And we need to make sure that the experience we offer across all our channels is consistently, well, relevant.

After all, 75% of executives say they believe that reaching out to customers via social media will improve customer advocacy. Unfortunately only 38% of customers agree.

I'd say we have some work to do.

Tell to Win – Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story

This new book, by Peter Guber, should just be labeled the manual for How to Tell Purposeful Stories. As the head of Mandalay Entertainment Group, a film producer, a professor at UCLA and a contributor to the Harvard Business Review, Peter knows story, and how to apply it in a business setting. Not just what makes a good story, but how to put purpose into one to motivate people to do what you need.

Tell to Win will be useful to anyone from executives to salespeople to actors and more, but I find it very inspiring from a marketing perspective. After all, isn’t our entire profession based upon our ability to convince, motivate and persuade people to trust and buy from the companies we represent?

Once you start reading this book, you won’t be able to put it down. But here’s what I want B2B marketers to do, while reading. Recognize that the power of an oral narrative can translate to a written one. Heck, the book is a clear example of that. (regardless that the power of the written story is downplayed in the book, which I'd argue with - especially given his delivery system of a book) This said, ignore that and start thinking about how you can help your prospects and customers share stories about the ideas you share with them as you read.

Here are a few examples of how to read this book as a transformational tool for your marketing stories:

Riding on the Story that Runs Your Audience – essentially this section makes the case for personas. It talks about the effort one goes through if they don’t address the underlying factors of concern for the person you’re trying to motivate. The better connection you can make in regards to what they care about, the more apt your story will be to convince them to do what you need them to. If you don’t put the time in to learn what inspires as well as concerns your target audience (goals vs. risks), your chances of persuading them to do anything are diminished.

The story that runs your audience, as well as the story that runs you is considered backstory.  In the book, Peter recounts the explanation given to him by Deepak Chopra:

“Backstories, he explained, emerge out of our memories of past experiences, imagination, and desire. ‘You create stories around these thoughts. Then you live out those stories and you call it life.’”

The Missing Link in Business – I’m sure you’re all aware of the amount of information that’s deluging all of us every day – including your prospective customers. Much of it is disregarded and overlooked because it has no meaning associated to it for us. Humans need to apply meaning to information in order to remember it. This is why feeds and speeds information about our products, waving our arms about our company’s achievements and talking about how great we are falls on deaf ears. It has no meaning for our audience. In essence, it’s not relevant and—without meaning—they don’t care.

Peter shares a story about how print, video and booklets didn’t influence people at World Bank “because the presentations didn’t feel genuine or authentic. However, when the same stories were told person-to-person, audiences listened closely and repeated them to others. The more the audience trusted the speaker, the more they trusted the authenticity of the telling…”

I’ve written and talked a lot about how marketers need to get stories into our prospects’ minds and help them visualize and ingest our ideas so they feel inspired to go tell others about them, discuss the opportunity and do so in relation to the expertise we share. Although Peter’s book is focused on oral storytelling, this example makes the case for the necessity of taking the time to build credibility and trust with our audiences as valuable resources of meaningful information. We can’t just toss out a white paper every quarter and expect people to believe us. No meaning, no memory.

“[W]hen someone tells us a story with data tucked inside, our brains cleverly lock the data onto the feelings we experience while listening to that story. Then, when the information is recalled, so is our feeling of that tell. The more rewarding our experience of the tell, the more positive our view of the data is likely to be.”

Peter makes the point that the more educated we become, the more conceptual and impersonal we become. “[O]ur educational system puts a premium on intellectual reasoning at the expense of emotion.” However, it’s important to realize that all of us tell stories. We just don’t realize that we do. If you really think about how we have conversations, our native language is storytelling. It’s been so since the beginning. It’s how we learn and evolve and how we interact within our communities. Just because we go to the office doesn’t mean a switch is flipped.

Essentially, the better marketers can get at using storytelling to engage their prospects, customers and communities, the better will be their power to connect and persuade people to choose to do business with their companies.

These are only a couple of examples in the early part of the book. It’s jampacked with insights, examples and, of course, stories as anecdotes that will help you transform the way you think about marketing content. The true value is in catching those light-bulb moments where you realize how to create stories that will motivate the action you need. If the red underlines and margin notes peppering my copy are any indication, there are a lot of those moments in this book.

Go buy this book.

In fact, buy a copy for every member of your team. It’s the best book on storytelling that I’ve read in quite some time.

B2B Marketing Needs People Geeks

I saw this Tweet from Scott Mersy (@smersy) yesterday and it got me thinking about the skills that marketers need to be successful in a buyer-driven world. This said, the idea translates to pretty much all marketing strategy and activities whether executed online or off.

#pink11 @theitskeptic : "we have tech geeks & process geeks. We need people geeks." #itsm #socialIT

Obviously, this tweet was meant for an IT audience, but stick with me and let's explore the impact of People Geeks for B2B marketing.

First - let's define a People Geek from a marketing perspective. To me, this means:

An individual relentlessly focused on knowing the people (prospects, influencers, customers) their company serves so well that they could become great friends having engrossing, unending conversations that always provide mutual value.

Without this type of knowledge and skill, creating content is a crap shoot.

And, if you think about it, everything a marketing organization produces is related to content. In fact, I'd challenge you to tell me what isn't related to content. Even analytics are based on what happens in relation to content.

But, back to the point. B2B marketing needs People Geeks to ensure that initiatives are designed to catch and keep the attention of the "people" the organization needs to build relationships with in order to do business—regardless of format, tactic or platform. I'd even go so far as to say that it's tough to be a marketer today without being a People Geek.

The qualities and tasks of a People Geek include:

• Curious - a driving need to continuously investigate, learn about and cultivate all the information needed to truly know the people the company serves—now and as they evolve over time in the marketplace.


• Extrovert - the ability and willingness to participate in social activities with these people as opportunities occur. Even better, to create the opportunities.


• Conversational - the ability to respond on the fly by combining what's known about the person with what's relevant based on what your company's offerings enable.


• Writer - command of the written word to produce a variety of interesting content based on what they know people will value.


• Patient - to pursue the interactions across the entirety of the buying process without pushing when the person isn't ready.


• Helpful - the overwhelming desire to be generous with knowledge—whether or not the person buys as a direct result.


• Guide - the ability to allow people to lead/control their process while skillfully guiding them to the next steps in your story that they need to take based on their stage in the buying process.


• Collaborative - the ability to interface with others (sales, support, service, etc.) to both gather and share information that enables a comprehensive understanding of the creation of satisfying and successful interactions across the organization.

Finally, People Geeks need to be strategic in order to apply what they know about their "people" to creating programs that serve them as well as contribute to the achievement of company objectives.

Are your marketers People Geeks? Can you visualize the difference that could occur with your marketing efforts if they were?