Marketing Interactions

Can B2B Marketers Become Content Whisperers?

One of the mandates bandied about lately is that B2B marketers need to become listeners. They should set up listening posts and they must listen first, before launching marketing programs. You're told listening is a requisite for establishing 2-way dialogue and sustaining relationships across the buying process. If you've "listened" to all of this, then you know that listening informs (or should) how marketers respond to prospects' online behavior.

Anyone who's married or in a relationship can relate to "listening." Trust me, I've been married to a wonderful Italian man for 16 years and it's not so much what's being said, but what it means, that counts.

This is great and dandy for one-to-one relationships or even amongst small groups of people, family and friends, but what happens when you're a B2B marketer with thousands of contacts in your database? How the heck do you manage listening to that level of volume? In other words, the input of a few will not necessarily correlate to the wishes or intentions of the many.

Telling marketers they need to listen is one thing. Helping them figure out how to do so in a way that produces an effective input to inform marketing programs is entirely another.

A Few Ways Listening Goes Wrong

Listening is defined as making an effort to hear something. Hearing can be defined as paying attention to gain knowledge or insight.

Unfortunately, many people treat listening as the stimulus for their response, rather than an act of learning to inform their response. I call that selfish listening. Much marketing is done in relation to selfish listening. This is when you see the "me, me, and more about me" marketing content based on products and company grandeur rather than what prospects are interested in.

The other thing that can have listening lead your marketing astray is when you allow individuals—rather than the collective that relates to your personas—to influence how you market to a segment of a target market. You see examples of this related to the squeaky-wheel-that-gets-the-grease syndrome.

If one person says so, is it true? How about 10? Or 100?

The Role of Personas in Listening

When trying to determine if what you're hearing from prospects should inform your content marketing strategy, the first thing you need to do is ground the feedback. Is the person (or people) you're listening to representative of the persona the marketing program is designed to engage?

Marketers must make sure that feedback and dialogue is considered in the appropriate context before acting upon it.

Is the input common? How can you be sure?

Assuming you have a content strategy that was used to develop content related to answering your persona's questions, concerns, and informational needs related to solving a specific problem your product addresses, what inputs can be used for "listening?"

For example:

• The average time spent reading the content is 25 seconds when it takes an average person over 2 minutes to read the piece is an indication that the content isn't a relevant part of the persona dialogue.


• A lack of click through—whether from social media or email—indicates that your message isn't resonating with your audience.


• A discussion you start on a LinkedIn group or industry forum where you know your persona hangs out that points to a blog post to back up your premise gets no clicks or comments.


• A blog post written for Persona A gets shared by dozens, receives numerous comments and garners a nice volume of clicks to a landing page you linked to offering a white paper on a related subject.


• An article in your lead nurturing program for Persona B that also offers links to related content is shared by a number of prospects with colleagues they work with at the company.


• A Twitter thread using your hashtag becomes active with numerous people offering comments and perspective.

The list above includes both good and not so good responses to your content marketing efforts. If you're listening in relation to personas, you can likely find some things to improve and determine which may not be relevant based on who is reacting to what content.

The one thing marketers often forget is that just because we design content for one persona, doesn't mean it won't find exposure with others. In other words, all feedback should not be weighted equally.

You will never make everyone happy, so you must choose how and when to allow listening to shift your strategies and your response.

From Listener to Content Whisperer

The trick to listening is to equate what you're "hearing" to creating higher engagement, interest, and momentum with your personas.

Don't get me wrong. If an individual reacts to your content by leaving a comment or saying something on social media or replying to an email, a relevant response is warranted. But that doesn't necessarily mean changing your strategy.

In B2B marketing, often the response is passive viewing. At least during quite a bit of the self-education phase that seems to be growing longer as more and more content fills up what used to be empty space. But marketers cannot sit by passively if we want to achieve their goals. That's a luxury reserved for your prospects.

This is when becoming a content whisperer comes into play.

Nicoholas Evans wrote The Horse Whisperer, inspired by Dan "Buck" Brannaman who is known for the philosophy of natural horsemanship, based on the idea of "...using an understanding of how horses think and communicate to train the horse to accept humans and work confidently and responsively with them. One of Brannaman's stated goals is to make the animal feel safe and secure around humans so that the horse and rider can achieve a true union."

To become a content whisperer, marketers must focus on listening to propect behaviors to help them become credible (safe) resources that buyers trust (secure) and want to do business with (union). (Okay - maybe stretching it, but bear with me)

When prospects are passively engaging, marketers must "listen" to that engagement based on the information prospects are willing to spend time with. If they respond with content related to those topics, then they are helping to create a two-way dialogue that is the goal of listening.

• Prospect expresses interest
• Marketer provides more related content
• Prospect engages again
• And so it goes

If marketers have designed content to answer specific questions that a persona will have to get answered during their buying process to move to next steps, then based on the content they engage with, a marketer should be able to anticipate what might also be of interest. This is the art and science of B2B storytelling at its finest.

It's important to note that content whispering is not only related to your content, but to content produced by others that may get the reaction or dialogue you're looking to establish. Marketers need to consider not just what prospects say, but what they do.

What can you learn from "listening" to the content that engages people represented by your personas?

Perhaps becoming a Content Whisperer is a skill worth developing...if you want to create a 2-way dialogue that builds momentum toward buying.

What do you think?

What Purpose Do Your Buyer Personas Serve?

In every project I work on, some version of buyer personas are involved. Sometimes I'm given personas (usually "profiles") to work with and sometimes developing them is the first step in the project. Let me tell you that I've seen a lot of personas - or what passes for them.

What I have noticed is that there seems to be two types of personas: those suited for marketing and those better suited for salespeople.

For example, I recently saw a collection of personas that were labled with titles such as The Forward-Leaning Buyer, The Risk-Averse Buyer, and The Jock Buyer (yes, I'm making these up for demonstration). The kicker is that each of these personas could be representative of the same title, roles, and responsibilitites as the others.

These personas went on to detail the personal lives and attributes of the personas including marital status, number of kids and even the breed of the family dog. And let's not overlook sports and entertainment preferences. (Yes, I'm still talking about B2B personas)

There were some useful details for marketers, but my first thought is how the heck would marketers begin to figure out which one of these personas were representative of their prospects in order to segment their databases appropriately?

Perhaps these personas are indicative of the need to develop content about how to train your Australian Shepherd to play frisbee or how to improve the efficiency of shuttling your kids to after-school activities. Then we could postulate that anyone responding to the content is related to the corresponding persona.

Okay - all joking aside - Buyer personas must serve the purpose they are designed to address.

From a B2B marketing perspective, this means that a buyer persona should:

• Serve as a tool that can be referenced easily to help guide the development of relevant marketing programs for the market segment represented by that persona.


• Point to specific topics of content as related to priorities defined as important to the persona.


• Reveal the circumstances of what could derail the deal (or the championing of the deal)


• Be unique from all other personas to indicate a truly definable market segment.

The purpose for a B2B marketing persona is to have a tool that defines and guides the marketing programs developed to engage a specific market segment. Never forget that a persona is similar to a composite sketch. It must help you to get close enough to the business interests of the actual humans involved in the process to create the opportunity for marketing programs to reach the goals set for them.

Personas that are based on personality traits or personal situations will not help as there are just too many variables to address to roll them up into a useful set of guidelines that have any traction with a market segment. This being said, these personality-driven profiles may be useful conversational tools for sales reps who are in conversations with a Director of Customer Service who they learn has an Aussie who won't return the frisbee.

Do you see the difference?

BTW - the picture is my girl, Bella, who absolutely LOVES to play frisbee.

 

Expectations and Experience are the New Competition

For years, B2B marketers have been worried about competitors' products and solutions. They spent a considerable amount of effort trying to differentiate their features and prove their offering is better than another company's version of something similar.

As technology continues to shorten product time-to-market and allow for rapid updates and improvements, it's also enabled marketers to become publishers, applying even more pressure to move faster to produce more information than competing vendors. Online publishing is the new version of one-upping. (Competitor A just published a cool infographic, we need one, too!)

The issue is that not much has changed in the way messaging is designed. Just today, I saw a template for a client to complete that was based on the premise of a persona message map. However, the columns requested information all about the products, unique product value proposition and product differentiators. Although there was an attempt to align these messages with the persona's goal, it was so high-level that the only real choice left is to talk about the products rather than what the persona really wants and needs.

Due to the ease of accessing information online, a big part of what's changed in the buying process are your customers' expectations about the experience they'll have along the way.

Because buyers can self-educate rapidly and much easier than the were able to in the past, they know more. In return for this education, they've raised the bar. They expect to continue to receive value each step along the way. And they expect it on their terms.

This is a big adjustment for marketers who are used to working on internal timelines and still believe they control the information flow. Or that what they want to say is what buyers want to hear.

What's important to note is that all this technology evolution and speed to market has also increased the complexity of solving problems. It's just not as simple as buying a product anymore. Education is the resulting mainstay. It will always be needed. Expertise is necessary beyond the product to help deliver on the promise made. Preparing for the future is no longer a next step down the road, it's an ongoing effort that needs to be incorporated as part of every purchase decision.

What marketers choose to publish online can no longer be "good enough" content. Instead, content has to play an integral role in facilitating the buyer's experience. And that's not best served by feeds-and-speeds content.

You know this, but it bears repeating: according to Selling Power, “Today, up to 70% of a customer’s buying decision is now made based on information he or she finds online well before a salesperson has a chance to get involved.”

What Buyers Expect:

• Educational information. 23% say there's not enough - IDG Connect


• Expertise. 48% said if the quality of thought leadership improved, it would influence their purchase decision - ITSMA and PAC


• Relevance. 39% say this key element is missing - IDG Connect


• Consistent Value. 43% of marketers say customers view their content as disjointed or hit and miss - Forrester Research

I read a lot of research that delves into the opinions and thoughts of B2B buyers. Not once have I ever read a statistic saying that they want more product or solution information.

What buyers are saying is that their expectations have changed. Their online behavior and engagement levels are barometers reflective of the experience provided to them by your content, web properties and social media dialogues.

Let's face it. The only true differentiators left are your expertise and the experience your company provides to help buyers achieve their goals. If it was just about products, it would be a hat toss.

You're no longer competing against the vendor with a similar product down the street. It's the ability to exceed buyer expectations and provide a valuable buying experience that will determine the winner when the time comes to make a purchase decision.

Marketing Cloud Computing to Non-Believer CIOs

Cloud computing is a pretty big deal. It's one of the top priorities for many CIOs. So, it should be a pretty easy process to build a B2B content strategy that helps CIOs make a purchasing decision.

Or is it?

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters and have a ton of Google Alerts to help me mine for information I use to learn more about the buyers my clients sell to. In my Inbox today was a bonanza of a resource. SearchCIO sent me a link to: Quick take: Why iRobot's CIO doesn't like enterprise cloud computing

This resource is a quick interview with Jay Leader, CIO of iRobot, in which he clearly distills exactly why he's not sold on cloud computing. He shares the questions he has and the obstacles he'd need to overcome to change his mind. This kind of stuff is uber helpful to constructing nurturing programs, as topics for blog posts and providing seed ideas for all types of content.

Take a look at all the great nuggets from this interview:

IT Projects Completed and Planned:

• Completed: Integration of ERP and Product Lifecycle Management systems to shorten product time to market
• Completed: A major upgrade to their collaboration portal
• Planned: enterprise architecture and business intelligence

Culture:

• The CEO has a degree in computer science from MIT
• The company's legal counsel has a degree in engineering from MIT
• The company is filled with engineers - according to Leader, "It's like having 700 CIOs"
• Actually, the company was a brainchild of MIT

Now, if you were pursuing this company as a named-account, you can do a lot with the above information.

But take a look at the questions Leader raises that can be applied to a campaign directed at CIOs in companies with similar characteristics, such as: High Tech Manufacturing, $500M revenues, 700+ employees

Objections and Obstacles:

• Show me an economic model that proves cloud computing is cheaper than how I manage my storage today.


• How do I get out of a cloud provider if I'm unhappy?


• What change in competency do I need to manage disconnected enterprises?


• I understand the potential, but how do I actually reap the value promised?


• Why would I pay to store documents somewhere else?


• If it isn't more secure, cost-effective and functional that what I have, why would I do this?


• I don't have an environment that needs burst resources, so the ability to scale quickly doesn't make a big impression on me.


• How do I integrate the data that is out in the cloud?


• I have a data center and staff, don't plan on getting rid of either.


• How will I really know where my data is being stored?

Leader also mentions a colleague who implemented Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) who has a staff of sysadmins when what he now needs are project managers and coordinators.

If you're selling cloud computing, how many of these questions and obstacles have you addressed in your content strategy?

Even if you're not selling cloud computing, the glimpse into the questions that come to mind for a CIO considering a technology purchase can help you dig deeper into your own content strategy to ensure that you're addressing the issues that come up for non-believers.

I'd also bet that even if your prospect is a believer, there are a few non-believers that must be brought around in order for the deal to move forward. The interesting thing is that cloud computing is being discussed all over the place. It's hard to go to any IT community or portal and not hear about it.

Don't let the hype about a solution serve as blinders. There are always objections to change that must be addressed. Interviews with people like your prospects can be terrific sources of insight for generating relevant ideas to weave into your content strategy.

NOTE: This is only one perspective, so don't base an entire strategy on Leader, but use it to assess your strategy and possibly fill any gaps that exist. Go talk to your salespeople to see if they're experiencing any of these objections and obstacles. Ask customers with similar characteristics if they had to answer any of these questions during their buying experience and how much importance was placed on those they did have to sort through.

Why B2B Marketers Must Address Status Quo

When I do stategic planning workshops with my clients, we get into a lot of discussions about buying stages. Anyone who's followed me for a while or read my book knows that I always start very early in the process with the stage of Status Quo.

My definition of status quo is the buyer's current situation. We get to that by answering questions such as:

• How are they doing what your product enables today?
• What workarounds may be in place that could be escalating pain?
• Why should they care about what you're talking about?
• What would get their attention?
• What would they need to learn to become motivated to change?

In a recent conversation, a client voiced concern that we were starting too early in the process. Comments such as "this is a mature market, they know they need to change" came up as I probed deeper.

My response was, "If that's true, then why aren't they actively pursuing change?"

There's a big difference in knowing change is available and actually agreeing that change is needed and taking steps to do something about it.

Regardless of what you think your prospects and customers already know, they still have a status quo. If you can't motivate them to move from that position, you can't sell them anything. Period. End of discussion.

Heck, I "know" a lot of stuff, but I don't necessarily act on it. Even if I "know" it will be good for me.

But addressing status quo goes much deeper than determining their current position. It means you have to figure out why they aren't changing and what might make them reconsider their stance that status quo is good enough.

When looking for an approache to dislodge status quo, try applying some of these questions:

• What trigger event would cause them to pursue change?


• Is the way they've been offered the idea of change not aligned with their perspective?


• What business objective might they miss achieving if they don't change?


• What future opportunity might they miss if they don't start changing now?


• Is there a cultural "elephant in the room?"


• What move by a competitor might get them out of the gate?


• Is an industry development moving their market right while they're still going left?


• Is a regulatory or compliance change coming that they will need help addressing?


• Are they losing market share even while growing revenues?


• Are they meeting their KPIs, but still leaving revenue on the table they don't see?


• Will a looming merger threaten their market position?


• Is there a new market opportunity that they're missing due to their status quo?


• Who is an obstacle? (In B2B, there's nearly always a consensus that must be reached)


• What is an obstacle blocking change (process, legacy equipment, TCO, etc.)

Those are just a few ways to look at how you might position marketing content to catch your buyers' attention and arouse their curiosity about the costs of status quo. Just make sure you're creating a business-relevant dialogue, not a treatise about why your product is the best choice.

The goal in this stage is not to get them to choose a product, it's to get them to choose to pursue change. Big difference.

In today's market environment, good enough isn't a strategic growth plan, it's a recipe for obsolescence.

What will it take for you to reach buyers and make them reconsider their adherrence to status quo?

What other questions would you add to the list?

The Myth of the Magic Bullet for Content Marketing

I'll just come right out and say it. There is no such thing as a magic bullet for B2B content marketing. This was a question brought up recently during a B2B Year in Review roundtable where I was one of the panelists over on Focus.com. I've been thinking quite a bit about it since then.

Carlos Hidalgo (@cahidalgo) posed the question:

Why are so many vendors & consultants making it sound as if B2B Marketing (technology, content development, etc.) is simple & should be done in weeks?

The simple truth is that none of this is, well, simple.

I know this is probably not what you wanted to hear, but as you head into the New Year you need to set the appropriate expectations for the evolution of your B2B marketing programs. For the purpose of this post, I'm only taking on the content marketing challenge.

Content marketing is a practice that it takes time to learn and, face it now, you'll never master it because it changes along with technology, tools, channels, buyers, preferences, trends, the economy, markets, industry evolution, and more. Heck, I've been a practitioner of content marketing for a few decades and I learn something new every single day.

But that's what makes it so vibrant, exciting and worthwhile. When you've put in the effort and you get it working well, it's about the best thing, ever. Yes, I'm a content wonk.

Here's the thing about content marketing. Where you start is important.

If there's a chance that I'm wrong and there is a magic bullet for content marketing, this first step is the closest to magic you're going to get.

Start Here >> Build Buyer Insights

That's right. What you don't know about your buyers will tank your content marketing programs before they even begin to roll down the runway.

When I work on projects, this step sometimes takes the most effort (depending on how many segments, profiles, personas — whatever you want to call them — are identified) And, in B2B marketing, there is always more than one. Research shows that most companies average at least three. I'm working on several projects right now that each have five.

What gets really interesting is when you dig deep enough to start seeing the real differences between them. Priorities shift, orientations are different, social behaviors vary and even career paths follow different patterns.

Why You Must Build Buyer Insights

Without buyer insights, you have no idea who you're developing content for. Remember that last high-level white paper that you read? The one where the focus was so broad that it was basically useless to you. The writer had no clue who the readers were. This is also usually when content devolves back into solution speak, because that's what IS known. Oh, sure, the writer may have been told to target the content to IT executives in global manufacturing companies with revenues of one billion or more.

What the heck does that mean?

Compare that to this instruction:

Target the content to "Ed," the Director of IT in a global manufacturing company. His latest challenge is to help distributed product development teams collaborate seamlessly to shorten time to market.

He not only needs to address allowing personally owned mobile devices, tablets and laptops on the network, but to make sure that the company's data stays secure. But his legacy infrastructure is giving him fits and starts as the complexity of managing it increases with each new service his team must deliver.

Ed craves simplicity, but he can't get approval from the CIO and the CFO for the hefty price tag a "rip and replace" would cost, nor can he afford any disruption to end users while he straightens out the mess — not if he wants that promotion he's in line for when his boss retires next year.

Would the content you write for Ed be positioned differently than the content you write for an IT executive in a company with one billion or more in revenues?

You bet it would.

Where do you get this information?

• LinkedIn profiles of people like Ed (don't forget to review the groups they've joined)
• Interviews with customers
• Interviews with salespeople
• Job boards
• Annual reports from companies with similar firmographics
• Twitter streams for specific #hashtags
• Blogs written by or for people like Ed

Building buyer insights takes a bit of time, but it's worth the effort. It's not a magic bullet, but it is the first pill you should swallow if you want to form a solid foundation upon which you can create contagious content that your prospects want to read and use to take next steps.

And that's the whole point, isn't it?

Deliver a Psychic Pizza with B2B Marketing

Catching up on my reading this weekend, I came across an interview in the AMA's Marketing News magazine with John Goodman, vice chairman of Tarp Worldwide Inc. In case you're not familiar, his firm is the one that discovered the ratio of 5:1 for cost of acquiring a new customer vs. keeping an existing one. He also says that, for B2B, think more like 20 to 50 times as much.

Let's get to that Psychic Pizza - an excerpt from the interview:

Q: According to Tarp research, if companies can anticipate the customer’s next question or need and proactively deliver it, they’ll move the transaction from uneventful to dazzling. You call this ‘psychic pizza’—that is, ringing a customer’s doorbell and saying, ‘Here is the pizza you were about to order.’ How can marketers create a ‘psychic pizza’ experience?

A: They can identify the next question the customer is going to ask or the next service that is going to be needed and basically figure out how to get there in advance with that answer or with that service.

He doesn't provide any B2B examples, but to give you an idea of what a psychic pizza looks like in action, consider Allstate Insurance. They know if you have children and they know when your teenager is reaching driving age. So they created a brochure that says "Here's how to talk to your kid about driving..." Parents have responded well because it helps them know how to approach that conversation with just-in-time information they need.

Applying the Psychic Pizza concept to content marketing works along the same lines. I'm constantly talking about the Buyer Q&A and the art of simulating conversations when developing a content strategy. It's essentially the same thing - albeit without the cool name.

The point is that Psychic Pizza applies to every interaction a company has with prospects, customers and even partners and employees. It applies to marketing, sales, customer service, product development, and more. For now, I'll box it in around eMarketing and the buyer experience.

From an eMarketing perspective, it really is about knowing your buyers well enough to develop what I'll term "psychic knowledge." Psychic knowledge for marketing comes from doing the work to learn about your buyers' problems and priorities well enough to break them down to determine all the questions, issues and obstacles they'll encounter during the process of trying to solve the problem. (buy your solution)

Once you have those pieces, you can answer each one with content designed to deliver recognizable value your buyers want and need to take next steps. That's how you build a Psychic Pizza for content marketing. Think of it in terms of anticipation, not assumption.

Start by figuring out how to get from "Why the Heck Should I Care?" to "Tell Me More." In many cases we don't start early enough in the process.

From an eMarketing perspective, marketers will need to get much better at analyzing online behavior to evolve their Psychic Pizza.

Mr. Goodman also made a great point about metrics. He cautions us to realize that using averages can cloak critical points that we need to isolate. For example, customer service call satisfaction. If we take this metric as an overall average, we may think our customers are highly satisfied. But, if we take out all the easy calls that are handled quickly and look at the more difficult ones, we may see something very different.

Additionally, he pointed out this obsession companies have with comparing themselves to industry metrics. That's leaving a lot to chance unless you know your customers are exactly like everyone else's customers. And, we all know they're not.

This concept of Psychic Pizza from a content marketing perspective gets to the heart of what differentiates your company from other options. It emphasizes the need to become proactive in our content marketing strategies through knowing just who the prospect or customer is and what they're looking for at this moment (anticipating) based on their previous behavior.

If what you know is that your prospect is a CIO in the Telecom industry, your psychic sensibilities need nourishment - lots of it.

Are B2B Salespeople Thought Leaders?

I was reading Opportunity Nurturing: Sending Stuff Isn't Always the Best Solution over on the Openview Blog where Devon McDonald interviewed Trish Bertuzzi, from The Bridge Group Inc. Trish really GETS IT, so I stop whenver I see her mentioned anywhere to see what she has to say.

In response to the question: Who should be sending nurturing content, marketing or sales?

Trish said: "It depends on how far along you are in the sales process. If you are intermediate, then marketing should be coming into play. If your opportunity is later in the sales process, the message needs to be personal from the sales rep because, at the end of the day, it’s all about relationships. Also, the salesperson needs to be viewed as the thought leader, not just the company."

Notice that last sentence? (emphasis mine)

Is this a component of your B2B marketing-to-sales strategy?

Are your salespeople working to be viewed as thought leaders by prospects and customers?

My guess for most of them would be "nope - not interested - need to make quota."

It just so happens that Sales 2.0 Conference is going on this week in San Francisco (#s20c) and there are a few Tweets that back up the need for salespeople to provide more value to buyers:

@barbaragiamanco: Buyers complete 80% of buying cycle b4 interacting with #sales people.#newhandshake #s20c

@LaurenEHarper: #Social is not a quick fix. Reality is it takes effort both on and offline to connect with prospects and make a sale- @barbaragiamanco #s20c

@heinzmarketing: "Ditch the pitch - this is a conversation economy, not a sales pitch economy" @gerhard20 #s20c

@asmithspi: Sales managers typically hire for selling and people skills but customers want industry expertise and business acumen @SolutionSelling#s20c

@scoremoresales: 70% mktg & sales execs rank "inability to differentiate as primary inhibit to growth via @TMcCormick2011 #s20c

Moving on, I was just in a conversation today about how to get the knowledge out of subject matter experts within a company to create bylined articles for them and set them up as thought leaders.

Not everyone is a writer. Not everyone is a publisher. But there's a lot of value lurking in your people that should be extracted and showcased. Not just for your company's benefit, but to help them prove they differentiate your company from others, and that they're worth speaking with because they have fresh, relevant and valuable ideas. The net is credibility and trust for your company AND your salespeople. That's what wins complex sales in today's market.

So, what should B2B marketers be doing?

First of all, it's a mindset: Helping your salespeople be seen as thought leaders also helps with content marketing strategy. It's content, right? Nice, meaty late-stage content that's something other than a solution brief. Think about it.

Secondly, you need to facilitate the process:

• Interview them.
• Find out what they're passionate about - it's really more than just selling your products.
• What issues do they see that they can help customers better understand?
• Why do they believe so strongly in your product? It's deeper than the feeds and speeds.
• What do they see coming down the pike?
• If you put them in a room with a product manager, what kind of conversation develops?
• If you ride along on a customer call, what do you hear?
• Are they active in social media? Can you help them be more effective?

After all, you don't want this to happen:

@sales20conf: #s20c @TomScontras reveals with lols that he got kicked out of #LI group for pushing his message. Ditch the pitch!

@sales20conf: #s20c @TomScontras In person or phone, reps know how to join conversation. But how do you show up in a social convo? @GlanceNetworks

A lot of marketers think helping sales makes them subservient, but you need to get over it. If salespeople are not successful in adjusting to today's buyer and giving them what they want and need, your marketing efforts are headed for the nearest drain.

Can you afford not to incorporate salesperson thought leadership into your marketing-to-sales strategy?

Is Your B2B Lead Database Like Your Attic?

Today, I received an email from LinkedIn informing me that 86 of my contacts have started something new (read changed jobs or titles). That's about 17% of my total contacts - and that's ocurred since the first of the year, in less than 7 months.

How long have your leads been in your database? What percentage of them do you think have changed jobs, invalidating the information you have on file?

DemandGen Report conducted a survey in October of 2010 and, "found that more than 62% of organizations rely on marketing/prospect data that is 20 to 40% incomplete or inaccurate." Their CRM records are also pretty messy as respondents estimate that between 10% and 40% of the information is not worth the form it was entered from.

Just this year, I helped a client develop and launch nurturing campaigns only to discover that approximately 45% of the emails in their database were undeliverable because the list had sat dormant for nearly 2 years.

According to Sirius Decisions, lead databases double every 12 to 18 months. This means there's a lot of opportunity for bad data to buiild up like the clutter in your attic.

It's bad enough that such high levels of dirty data exist, but what's really concerning is what the DemandGen Report survey found when they asked about how B2B companies planned to declutter their databases:

• 30% have no strategy
• 34% "ask" their sales team to update records
• 15% append to complete or update records each quarter

The no-strategy folks need to wake up to the smell of a musty attic. Especially if they don't even bother to eliminate the bad records altogether.

The more than a third who ask salespeople to update the record during their interactions with the contact need to stop and think. If buyers spend 70% of their time with marketing, how many will ever make it to a sales conversation that allows their record to be updated? A long-term buying cycle for a complex sales leaves plenty of time for change to occur before sales ever steps into the picture.

Appending the records is at least a worthy try, but I also wonder how great appending services are at keeping up with the speed of data change?

Data hygiene is becoming a necessity that we can no longer ignore by closing the attic door and hoping it will happen miraculously on its own. Marketers spend a lot of time, money and resources generating leads. We need a better plan for keeping those records intact with valid information.

Marketing automation with progressive profiling in play may be one way to more efficiently address this issue. Inside sales teleprospecting as an integrated component of lead nurturing programs may also be a great choice.

But beyond dirty data, marketers should also consider the implications of how fast roles can change. For marketers who segment their databases and/or use personas to create marketing programs, you cannot leave those tools sitting in the attic along with your database.

Can you answer the following questions in relation to the changes that may be happening in your database?

• If one contact leaves, is the job filled by someone new or did that job get merged with another? (If the latter, this is a new persona and a new market segment if it happens often enough)
• If the change is due to layoffs, how might that impact the target market's interest in acquiring what we sell? (Do they need you more or less?)

In other words, are the people you thought were your prospects, still your prospects? Or are they now someone you really don't know? And have the reasons why they need what you sell changed?

The attic is only good for things past their prime. This should not include your leads.

How to Get Buy-in for Marketing Automation

Today, Eloqua released a new guide designed to help marketers gain C-level buy-in for marketing automation. It's brilliant. Not just for helping marketers frame the conversation with the executives at their company, but as an example of how to create a personalized, multi-persona campaign that helps a buying committee gain consensus.

This probably isn't what Joe, Brian and the rest of the folks over at Eloqua will be overjoyed that I chose to write about, but if you're looking for a template for how to create relevant, personalized marketing campaigns, go download this guide!

Here's the setup:

The story is based on the concept of Revenue Performance Management (RPM) - good story. The great thing about the story of RPM is that marketing automation is just one component of the bigger RPM picture (people and process being the other two). But it's also a story that has hooks for the different people (personas) marketers need to get on board to gain budget to purchase the technology.

The guide makes a very clear and compelling case that marketers must focus on what matters to each persona, not the feeds and speeds of the technology. And it shows you what this might look like in a colorful, 9-page guide. I said brilliant, right?

Take a look at what I'm talking about:

The CEO cares about top line growth, profitability, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and the competition. They worry about overall company performance - some of them variables that are confounding because it's hard to lock down the numbers - or what they mean. Emphasize accountability.

The CFO cares about revenue growth, Op-Ex and Cap-Ex, return on investment and risk management. They worry about accuracy in forecasts and taking proactive action, not reacting after the fact. Emphasize the ability to measure things that are important to them, such as pipeline impact and momentum and improved budget spend. Show them how they'll be able to gain visibility to make more informed decisions.

The IT folks generally think marketers have no idea what it takes to do what they ask. They have a ton on their plates besides what your need to execute your latest campaign. Be prepared to show them you understand what you're requesting from them and additional benefits marketing automation will bring to help them reach other objectives they're tasked to address - such as tying together disparate reporting systems and improving data integrity.

You can see how all this comes together in the guide - this is just  a brief swipe. If you need to build a business case for marketing automation, all the better.

But, irrespective of that, if you're challenged to figure out how to improve the relevance of your content and need to address multiple personas on the buying committee for your solution - this is a great example of how to go about constructing a marketing program to do just that.

From a content perspective, think about how each topic of interest to each persona can be addressed as separate content assets, or even combined into a white paper or used to drive a script for a video. If you think about it creatively, you can build a storyboard for each executive - and seed the conversations they'll have with each other when you're not in the room.

And that's just what we all hope to accomplish with our content marketing initiatives - right?

Learn more and Download the Guide Here