Marketing Interactions

Handicapping Your B2B Target Market

Who wouldn’t love to have the Superfecta ticket when four long shots finish in the money at the racetrack?  Luck is a good thing, we all need it, but I wouldn’t want to wager business results on the concept.

Avid horse racing fans spend hours handicapping their bets. They subscribe to publications like The Daily Racing Form, belong to online forums like TVG.com and study what the celebrated handicappers pick. They look at bloodlines, work times and previous finish times. Occasionally they go with name or jockey or trainer, but not unless all the other things line up.

Creating personas for a target market is a lot like handicapping race horses. You want to know everything you can about them. Especially anything that will help you win. Some handicappers love a bloodline. They’ll bet anything with a "Bold" heredity or a "River" bloodline, for example. This is closer to what you’re trying to accomplish with a persona.

A persona pulls the traits of a group of people together so you can make certain assumptions about them and determine the best way to engage them—and this is very important—before they get locked onto a preference for some other vendor. The best way to get close enough to your target is to know enough about them to craft messaging so relevant that putting your organization on their list of vendors under consideration is a given.

Building layers of knowledge about your prospects will come as time goes by and you have the opportunity to learn more and more. As you do, flesh out your persona with more details and give your company the opportunity to continuously up the odds of creating actionable relationships.

As an example, I’m borrowing Adele Revella’s example of Chris.
(You can see her blog post here. The comments are interesting as well.)

Chris is 29 years old and recently married. He and Karen want children some day, but she’s also got a good job, and with the pressures of a big mortgage, they think they’ll wait a few years to start their family.  For now their baby is Logan, a two-year-old springer spaniel that they rescued from a shelter.

Chris has been in the tech industry for five years. He was a product manager until the most recent reorganization created a separate product marketing group. He willingly made the move to the new department, but that was more than a year ago and he is still trying to understand just how his job fits with those in product management, marketing communications, and sales.

Chris is responsible for the go-to-market planning for several products, but he spends most of his time; attending meetings, answering emails, writing content for sales collateral,  helping sales people with customer accounts, and driving to and from work – the new house has resulted in a longer commute and the traffic is horrible.

These pressures, plus a tight travel budget, have limited Chris's customer interactions to times when he helps sales people with demos or prospect presentations – definitely not what he had in mind when he took this job. He knows he’s not spending enough time listening to the market or working on strategic activities, but he doesn’t have time to get focused amid the daily frenzy of requests and emails. He keeps thinking that there is a more effective way to do his real job, but can’t figure out how to get there from here.

Given Adele’s example above, what conclusions can you draw?
What messaging focuses are likely to engage Chris?

What’s interesting is the mix of personal and work environment information. People asked Adele a lot of questions to extend their insights to his personal life, but that’s a lot more to do with enjoying the story than approaching him as a prospect for work purchases in a B2B environment.

There comes a point at which you must guard against getting too involved in individual personal characteristics when developing B2B personas for marketing programs. You need to remain conscious of the fact that a persona is representative of a group of people. Not just one. So make sure that the factors you choose to use are common across the specific segment.

Save any specific details for salespeople to use when the time comes for personal conversations. In fact, if you can add them to the prospect profile to memorialize them for later, all the better.

A persona should give you an idea about selling to a select target market. With that in mind, here are some things to think about if you have prospects and customers in Chris’ situation.

• Chris needs to maximize his time. Because he knows he doesn't spend enough time keeping up-to-date with market information, can you help him do so while making your point? What can you tell him that he may have missed?


• Better collaboration tools might help him work better with the departments he interfaces with and may even cut back on all that email. If you're thinking of contacting him via email, your message has to be spot on to get his attention amidst all those requests and other emails he receives.


• If you're considering using white papers, time-pressed people like Chris will appreciate an executive summary so they can quickly learn if the paper will be of value. He's unlikely to make  time to read something he's unsure has a payoff he needs.


• Podcasts with market insights and strategic thinking ideas he can listen to during his commute might help him get some of his focus back. Someone like Chris doesn’t have extra time to read more stuff, so if you can help him leverage audio during his drive, that may help you get closer to him.


• What insights can you provide that help him improve how he takes his product lines to market? What customer stories can you share that shine a light on your expertise in action? How do people like him increase their effectiveness?

Given the information you know about Chris, what else would you like to know that can help you craft more relevant content and communications that engage him?

Would knowing if he bought an immaculate house in good repair vs. a fixer upper tell you if he’s willing to roll his sleeves up for a project or if he’d be a better candidate for a one-stop solution that the vendor maintains for him?

The point is that we need to get creative and thoughtful about what we can glean from the intelligence we gather. Especially with social media encouraging people to share more insights about themselves that you've never had access to before.

Handicapping your targets is an ongoing process. This only scratches the surface of what’s possible. You’ll have to stretch your thinking to discover which details can be used to generate that extra relevancy which could mark the difference between getting your foot in the door or being left at the gate.

Many B2B Websites Still Suck Wind

Why is it that B2B websites are so terrible at engaging the people they're designed to serve?

The simple answer is because companies tend to design websites based on what they think is important, rather than what their prospects and customers value. This has been said again, and again...and again. In fact, one of my most highly read posts, even today, is B2B Websites Not Effective—a post I wrote June 5, 2006.

The other issue is that websites are political hot potatoes. For some reason, there seem to be a lot of territorial turf wars. Not sure why, when the goal is to engage prospects and customers to build new and ongoing relationships that result in your selling more stuff.

But, that's a conundrum for another post.

What I'd like to know is who wrote the rule that says all corporate websites must follow a standard navigation format?

You know what I mean. That siloed, uninteresting and uninformative menu that includes stuff like:

• Products
• Solutions
• Resources
• Case Studies
• News/Press
• About Us

Does this navigation say "All About You" or "All About Us?"

Confronted by this navigation, visitors look at your homepage to try to find a clue about what to do next based on their purpose for the visit. [Read try to find something valuable to them.]

Unfortunately, the top half of most websites is now consumed by a big banner graphic or flash widget that immediately requires us to scroll down if whatever it features is not why we came.

Then, perhaps there are a span of boxes across the bottom that offer choices like:

• Latest News/Press - see more about why we're so terrific.
• Solution Focus - click to learn more about our product feeds and speeds.
• Customer story - gosh, I hope that's about a customer like me...oh, only the first paragraph. The rest of it talks about your products with a couple of obnoxiously Rah! Rah! testimonial quotes called out in the sidebars.

Or maybe you're featuring a new white paper with a snazzy cover on a topic I'm actually interested in learning more about.

Now we're getting somewhere. Oh...you want me to give you 20 fields of my personal information? Hmm. Let me go do a search and see if I can find out the same stuff somewhere else...

Hmm. The only other text on the page says, "We're the leading provider of..."

Oh, wait. There's a tiny link to your corporate blog up in the little navigation at the very top of the page. Maybe I can find something interesting there...click. Hmm. More stuff all about you. No wonder independent blogs are more highly thought of than corporate ones.

Doesn't this scenario make you wonder what you can do to improve user experience at your website? Your company's website may not be this bad, but I'm pretty sure that it can use some improvement to meet your prospects' ideas about value delivery. [Read immediate gratification for dropping by.]

Here are a couple of tips:

• Figure out the top 3 reasons people who need what you sell visit your website. If it's a complex sale, I can guarantee you that they're not looking for the "contact a sales rep" button on their first visit. Then make sure your homepage addresses those three things in a noticeable manner.


• Create navigation that actually makes sense to your website visitors based on the problems your offerings help them solve. [Even if you must keep the standard format, you need to figure out how to immediately engage your visitor traffic. Hyper links, call outs in your sidebars, something.]


• Eliminate dead ends. When your visitors have enough gumption to click on a link, make sure you deliver on the promise for that click and that you've got a pathway to pull them more deeply into the topic they've just told you they find valuable.


• Make engaging with you simple. Allow them to dole out their information a bit at a time in exchange for content they value. Choose when you do that carefully. For example, you might provide an excerpt or executive summary of a white paper to prove it's worth it for them to part with information. Be sure you're only asking for information you need right now based on our relationship.
  
  For example, do you really need my street address when I download a white paper? Short forms will deliver a much higher opt-in rate. Just saying.

Addressing your website engagement is not about structural redesign so much as it's about the words used and the options provided. Nothing a little website content renovation can't fix, in most cases. It's all about perspective. Theirs—not yours.

I'll leave you with the same quote I used to end the 2006 post. For many b2b companies, this quote is—unfortunately—still true:

"Companies are still designing for themselves rather than for their customers. They place serious barriers in the way of prospects who use the Web to discover companies to put on their shortlists."

 

B2B Marketing Content Turn Offs

Content marketing is growing in leaps and bounds. The formats and types of content that engage your prospects are multiplying. The majority of B2B buyers turn to the Internet first to begin their research. In fact, research by Interwoven shows that 22% of global marketing spend (read $1.5 Trillion!) is allocated to content origination, publication, syndication and promotion.

So it just won't do to put all that effort into content development if it only results in turning off your prospects.

In order to eliminate the turn offs from your marketing content, you've got to assume your prospects perspective and give your content some tough love—before you let it fly.

Here's a down and dirty 7 Point Content Value Audit:

1. Jargon, Hype, Fluff, and blatant Puffery have no place in compelling content.
   Do I need to say more? Actually, Go Thump Your Chest in the Gym a post from the Phoenix Rising blog, makes this point crystal clear.


2. Generalist focus without specific value statements.
   This is like telling your prospects to do something just because you said so. It's imperative that you help them understand the value—for them, not you. And, if you think about it, in order to present a value that resonates, you've got to have a specialist focus, not a generic one-size-fits-all approach.


3. Lack of evidence to prove promised results.
   Even if you have value statements, they're only frivolous promises without the evidence to support that what you say is true.


4. Inflated, tedious writing style.
   Try reading your content out loud. Do you struggle for breath when reading a single sentence? Even when we read, our brain has the same interpretation as our lungs do when we speak. Plus, the thought gets lost. Aim for 35 words or less in a sentence. Make your points clear and compelling.


5. No connection to industry trends or issues.
   Your prospects want insights related to trends and issues that could impact their business results. Your content should show your ability to look beyond just your product and apply whatever it does to real world scenarios.


6. Ambiguous takeaways.
   See my recent blog post, Plan B2B Content for the Takeaway, to learn the difference between takeaways and calls to action. Your content needs both—and yes, they are different.


7. No humanity.
   Is your content written for "Jerry" or a role within a company with 300 employees generating revenues higher than $100 million? The best way to engage people, gain pass along and create great recall is with content written for people - not vague, one-dimensional images.
   
   For those of you wondering why recall is important, it's that wonderful response from a prospect when you follow up and they say, "Oh, yeah, that was  great white paper. You know, I was wondering if you could tell me more about...

Here's why you have a huge opportunity to have an impact on lead generation and move prospects through those lengthening sales cycles faster:

According to CMO research on content ROI, "Only 22 percent of respondents say they are very satisfied with the caliber of technology content." And, when you consider that IT buyers also say they only find relevant content 42% of the time, expending the effort to eliminate content turn offs has some serious payback potential.

Kitchen-Sink Content is a Recipe for Failure

We’re all on the receiving end of email marketing messages. The problem is that most of them appear to try and do too much. It often feels like marketers have a list of all the stuff their solutions do and they want to cram it all into one message to make sure they say something that interests you.

That kind of content makes my head hurt. It’s confusing. It takes too much effort and I can’t be bothered to listen to someone who’s so unsure what to say to me.

Talk about impersonal. That’s about as general as you can get. At a time when buyers can filter the content they choose to read, you can’t afford to use kitchen-sink content.

Besides that, it’s lazy. And one of the most obvious traits of kitchen-sink content is that the message becomes so convoluted that it doesn’t make sense.

Here’s an example of a marketing email I received from a PR firm the other day:

I hope you don’t mind the follow-up. [Company’s] platform offers a unique Website Reengagement tool (different from shopping cart abandonment) that lets companies track and recognize customers who visit their website. With [Product], companies can tailor an email to abandon customers based on the web page visited to reengage them. They also offer a social networking tool which lets companies enable their subscribers to create their own social networks where all centered on the company's branded community center. This is only a few of the many unique services they offer their clients. [Company] has a long extensive list of happy clients that have seen tremendous ROI and invaluable results.

Yes. It was all in this one paragraph.

What really irritated me was that the PR firm probably charged this company for creating this drivel. Not only is the grammar awful, but the intention is muddy. I still really don’t have a clear idea of what this company does or why I should care. Unless, of course, I want to “tailor an email to abandon customers.”

The elements of kitchen-sink marketing are:

• Trying to say too much without understanding what it is you want to convey.


• Tossing in terms because you think they’ll catch attention – not because they make your message better or more easily understood.


• Displaying a self-oriented focus that doesn’t serve anyone well.

The effects of kitchen-sink marketing on your audience include:

• Instant delete or abandonment


• Negative credibility for your company

Obviously, this kind of content doesn’t create engagement. Nor does it enable marketers to sustain interest across a complex buying process. Suffice it to say that this is a surefire way to lose people, immediately, who could become qualified leads over time.

Tech Buyers Use Collateral for Purchase Decisions

Eccolo Media conducted a study to learn which collateral tech buyers use to make purchase decisions. Their premise was to prove that content development is more than a cost sink or requirement for doing business. The survey report, Eccolo Media 2008 B2B Technology Collateral Survey, definitely provides validation for their premise.

The survey results will also be helpful to B2B marketers who're planning for nurturing content development. It also validates the need for content that provides information buyers need, not just what you want to tell them.

Eccolo Media set out to learn:

"We asked them about their preferred collateral types, how they used content, if they shared it, and just how influential it was on their final technology purchase."

Worth noting, 67% of participants were decision makers, 33% influencers - all from U.S. companies. They were asked if "the collateral was viewed, listened to or read in the six months prior to a technology purchase."

5 types of content were included in the survey:

1. white papers
2. case studies / success stories
3. podcasts / audio files
4. video
5. product brochures / data sheets

Here are some of the survey findings:

• white papers were thought extremely or very influential by 44%
• brochures were the least influential at 33%
• 48% responded that case studies were very or extremely influential
• videos only hit 39%, but it's interesting to note that studio quality was considered important by 93% - casting doubt on that do-it-yourself idea being touted by social media folks. Well, at least for tech purchases.

Some interesting things to note:

Although product brochures weren't considered all that influential, they had high consumption rates, which makes sense at some point in the buying cycle, so you still need them. You just need to pay attention to when they're needed.

The younger the respondent, the more likely that they've listened to a podcast or viewed a video, so knowing who your buyers and influencers are can dictate content formats to some extent. And, even though many decision makers are older, the shift to the digital generation will happen.

Over 70% of white papers, case studies and product brochures were viewed on the computer screen, not downloaded. This means it's critical to think about format and design your content for consumption on computer screens. For example, do you really think people like to scroll up and down to read content in columns laid out in portrait format?

Pass along is alive and well. Over 60% shared collateral with other decision makers and influencers within their organization. So, think about how you can be even more helpful by offering versions that answer the specific needs of the decision makers and various influencers on the buying committee for your customers.

And, it's important to note that they don't just forward content to one person. Forty-four percent pass along white papers to 4 or more people.

For those of you only targeting decision makers with your content, consider this:

"White papers are very viral for influencers. While 66% of decision makers said that they share white papers with others, influencers shared them more often by a wide margin (83%). This may relate to respondents’ role in the purchase, with influencers passing on relevant information and decision makers considering the content more often than sharing it."

Your buyers want information focused on objective discussions of technology, not products. Gee, go figure! The length decision makers prefer is 4-6 pages, while influencers will go for 8 pages. Consider that influencers need to formulate discussions and learn how to speak to the issues to sway decision makers' perspectives. So, keep that in mind when targeting your white papers and help them out. Yet another validation for content designed for specific audiences.

This report is chock full of useful information that can help you not only prove the value content can provide during the buying process, but also to position it for higher consumption.

You can download the report with a fairly painless registration.

Narrow is the New Wide for B2B Marketing Content

Sometimes marketing communications make people feel like they're getting deluged by a fire hose. Marketers cram all these big ideas into one white paper or article trying to cover as much as possible in their effort to gain the attention of prospects.

It's the equivalent of saying,

"Hey, we're not really sure what you need, but in case this one BIG point doesn't get you, how about all these other ideas?"

Stop it.

Your prospects can't take it. When you leverage a fire hose mentality you overwhelm them.

Lead nurturing during a complex buying process is about reeling out small, potent, viable and strategic ideas in a way that helps your prospects embrace them. Once they've attached to one great idea, they'll more easily (and eagerly) dig into the next meaty topic you cover.

And here's the great part. Nurturing with one idea at a time allows you to measure more precisely for interest levels. If you cram a bunch of ideas into one piece of content, how the heck do you expect to know just what it was that caught your prospect's attention?

Which type of content allows you to learn more through prospect behavior?

A. A white paper that sets up a problem you know your prospects are grappling with and then talks about every feature of the solution that can be thrown at solving the problem.

B. A series of articles about the problem with each one focused on helping the prospect by answering a question they may have about solving it.

If you use the white paper example, all you know is that they may have the problem. If you use the article series, you've got the possibility of learning which questions and concerns may be more important. You've also got the chance to see how interested they are in solving it. In other words, how high a priority that problem is for them. If they read the whole series, that tells you something different than if they read 3 out of 5 articles in the series. 

Even if it's 3 articles, you now know which three questions the prospect was interested in and can tailor nurturing touches that dive deeper into those subjects to see if you can gain a higher level of engagement.

Take a look at the prospects who read those three articles. Are they in similar roles, industries or company sizes? Are they influencers or decision makers? You may be able to spot trends that help you get very targeted in how you interact with specific segments. Basing segmentation on expressed interest can give your marketing more traction.

B2B marketers need to take a more customer-focused approach. This is really hard to do if you can't pinpoint a specific issue or interest that your prospect will actively engage in dialogue about.

Just because you think an issue is important, doesn't mean they do. By breaking your content down into smaller ideas, you can explore them in greater depth. Instead of glossing over ideas because you need to cram them all into one content asset, you can take your time and be thoughtful about the expertise and insights you share. You can also learn if a question you think is important, isn't even on their radar.

Go look at your web analytics and see how long people spend on specific web pages. Let's say it's 1.56 minutes. Can they actually read the content on that page in that length of time? Attention spans are shorter. People want to get the information they need and get out. They're busy.

Providing a valuable exchange for their attention is the end goal. When you do that, your prospects respond with interest. Plus, shorter and targeted is likely easier for them to digest. That's because you can take a complex issue and break it into simple parts. As you expand the conversation with additional pieces, the parts weave together to make solving that complex issue an option that's appealing because you've become someone they've relied on over time.

A complex sale doesn't happen with one white paper download. Or even with just a series of articles. But, the more often you have interactions with your prospects that they see as helpful, the higher your credibility and value as a trusted resource.

Forgettable Follow-up on B2B Content Offers

I don't know about you, but I see a lot of B2B companies losing out on a huge opportunity when they follow up with people who download their marketing content offers.

Just in case you never answer your phone, or delete all your email unread, here's the norm:

You fill out a form to download a content offer that sounds appealing.

You get a call or an email from the related company that makes it so easy to say the equivalent of "Not interested" that the caller/emailer leaves your mind instantly.

Here are some examples of how B2B follow-up becomes forgettable:

Example 1:

[Company] Hello, I'm calling to follow-up on the white paper you downloaded from our company.

[Prospect] Um, which white paper would that be?

[Company] Well, I don't know, but our system shows you downloaded it a couple of weeks ago.

[Prospect] I don't remember. I download a lot of stuff.

[Company] Okay, well the reason I'm calling today is to see if you need any more information.

[Prospect: If I have no frickin clue what I downloaded, what information would I want?] No, thanks. I think I'm good.

[Company] Okay, I'm going to email you my contact information in case you think of something I can help you with.

[Prospect] Oh, yes. I'll certainly keep you in mind. [click, buzz, delete]

Example 2:

[Company] Hello, This is Sam from [Company]. I noticed you downloaded our paper on whiz bang issue 57 and I'm interested in helping learn more about how we can help solve your problem.

[Prospect] I'm just researching.

[Company] Well, do you have a project planned that we can discuss?

[Prospect] No, I'm just doing some research. [I knew I shouldn't have answered the phone.]

[Company] Okay, I'm going to send you some product information so you'll have it on file for when you need it.

[Prospect] Thanks. You have a nice day. [click, buzz, delete]

Example 3: 

Email follow-up message -

Thank you for requesting the [Recognizable Name] white paper. As you may know, [Our Company] is a leader in [whiz bang whatever] and we sponsored the white paper.

I'd look forward to learning what initiatives you're working on to see if [Our Solution] is a fit. I'd like to schedule a fifteen minute call to discuss your goals in [whiz bang whatever]. Please let me know when is a convenient time to talk.

Do you see anything in those examples that sounds familiar?

Did you see anything that was valuable to you? Or only stuff oriented around the company's goal of asking you to expend more effort on their behalf?

This is such a waste of time. Approaches like these do absolutely nothing to elevate your company's trust level or credibility. Instead, you're seen as self-serving and, ultimately, forgettable.

In order to get positive results from your B2B content offer follow-up, you need to think about why you're doing it.

The goal for follow-up is to extend a dialogue based on the interests expressed by the prospect's behavior.

With that in mind, your follow-up needs to deliver value that extends the interest captured by the original content download. In order to do so your communication needs to be relevant and valuable to the recipient. [And, by extension, to you.]

Your prospect has already paid you with the time and effort they expended downloading the original offer. Now you need to give them a reason for continued involvement.

Here are some ideas on how to improve the response to your follow-up:

• Have a business reason for the follow-up. Just touching base isn't good enough.


• Have an additional offer ready that builds on their expressed interest. An exclusive report, an article not publicly available, an invitation to a webinar on a related topic, etc.


• Know exactly what they downloaded and be specific to help them make the connection. People are busy. They download a lot of things. Expecting them to remember yours when you call/email out of the blue is just silly.


• If your follow-up is in relation to content you sponsored, they likely downloaded it because of the source, not you. So have something compelling to say if you want their interest to transfer to you.


• Follow-up promptly. Waiting a month means you're likely forgotten and someone else now has their attention.

DO NOT:

• Ask them to educate you.
• Put them on the spot.
• Be ignorant of the interaction that prompted the follow-up.
• Push product information on them.
• Lead with "blah, blah, blah" about your company
• Use buzz words and jargon in the description of your company.
• Forget to use a value proposition for the communication that's all about them, not you.

The key is to get the prospect to take another step with you because you've got something valuable to say or share that they need to know. If you don't have that, then you need to develop a follow-up strategy before you dial the phone or hit send.

Follow-up is just as important, if not more so, than the touch point that leads to it. Do not treat it as a smile-and-dial experience. That approach won't create movement through your pipeline. In fact, it can do more to lose prospects than to help them choose to do business with your company.

Why is Sales doing Nurturing?

I monitored the recent Sirius Decisions Summit through Twitter and I have to say I wish I was more surprised by some of the postings. Chad Horenfeldt from Anything Goes Marketing has an excellent summary of Tweets about the conference, so go there to see the other stuff. It's all serious (pun intended) food for thought.

The ones I want to talk about are these:

jblock: Only 32% of sales and marketing orgs work together to define programs for existing customers. @megheuer #sds09

cahidalgo: #sds09- 59% of attendees do not believe their sales and marketing are aligned.

jblock: 5%-10% of leads that are sitting in your CRM system as "dead" can become real opportunities if put into a nurturing program. #sds09

megheuer: #sds09 21% of attendees have a lead nurturing program in place now; twice that number are "working on it"

jblock: Focus is not so much at the top of the funnel; it has shifted to pipeline acceleration and sales enablememt. #sds09

RT @megheuer @damphoux: Barry Trailer, CSO Insights "Lead Nurturing - 42% suprisingly left to Sales" #sales20 (oppty for mktg to step up!)

The above statistics should make marketers sit up and take notice. We're challenged by our management more and more to quantify the results marketing produces, yet we're still heaping a lot of the process of creating opportunities on our sales teams. Even worse, many B2B companies are executing the marketing-to-sales process without being in sync.

With buyers in control and choosing with whom and when they want to interact — read pushing sales conversations later in their buying process — it's time to ask yourself about the impact of disconnected communication activity on your prospects and customers.

This lack of alignment gets even more concerning when you consider that only a third of sales and marketing teams work together on existing customer programs. And these are for people who already spend money with you. So, yes, why don't marketing and sales go to customers with their own distinct messaging and confuse the heck out of them. I'm sure it makes total sense in some universe to actually apply effort to create inconsistency that sends the underlying message that one hand doesn't know what the other is doing. I just can't imagine where that might be.

Okay, I'm ranting. I'll stop...maybe.

I'm glad to see that a majority of the attendees at the summit are working on establishing a nurturing program. And congrats to the 21% that have one. Go after that 5-10% of leads you can turn into real opportunities. Re-engaging leads you've already spent money, time and effort to attract makes a huge amount of sense, not to mention and additional revenue.

With the focus shifting from lead gen to pipeline momentum and sales enablement, marketing has a prime opportunity to step up.

Pipeline momentum isn't generated by salespeople calling to say, "I'm just touching base to see if you're ready to buy." Where's the value in that for the prospect? Even worse, since when is that kind of conversation a worthy use of a salesperson's time?

Pipeline momentum is created through strategic nurturing that shares valuable ideas that help prospects address the problems they're grappling to solve. The extension is that it sets them up for sales conversations that progress buying intentions.

Pipeline momentum happens when your marketing content is designed to help prospects visualize how to get the outcomes they need. And, it especially happens when your content helps get conversations going between buying committee members that helps them anchor more favorably to your ideas and expertise raising the value quotient for your company on their terms.

Salespeople aren't primed for hand holding over the long term. They have short-term goals and responsibilities that aren't suited to nurturing responsibility. Plus, each salesperson sells differently. That's quite often how messaging and storylines get mixed up if they enter the buying process too soon. Telling a story over the long term works best when it's consistently told to reinforce ideas, concepts and insights.

In a recent interview of Joe Galvin, VP and Research Director of Sirius Decisions, Mike Damphousse asked him: "...what can a quota carrying sales rep do on their own to help get that all important discussion with a real prospect?"

Joe's response begins: "First, they should take advantage of and capitalize on every qualified lead sent to them by marketing. Our benchmark data shows that marketing contributes between 18 and 34% of the sales pipeline depending on segment."

And that's one great reason why marketing should be nurturing. Imagine what might happen if marketing was contributing twice that amount and sales could stay focused on live, highly viable opportunities.

In order for pipeline momentum to continue fluidly from marketing communications to sales conversations, alignment in the story that gets told is critical. This will only happen if marketing and sales work together to create that story and base it on the buyer's perspective.

As Joe Galvin says, "Clients and prospects are overwhelmed by public domain information. As a sales professional in 2009 you must be able to tell them something they don’t know or can’t find on their own to gain their attention and respect." If marketing is working to enable sales to validate and extend the story they've told prospects during nurturing, they can set salespeople up to do just that.

Having salespeople perform nurturing when they're supposed to be — and are likely focused on — selling can be like tossing the prospects marketing has worked very hard to engage straight over to your competitors. The equivalent of saying, "Hey - are you short on opportunities? Let me give you some of ours."

Sales doesn't need the responsibility of nurturing. Keep them focused on serving opportunities so well they can't help but buy from you. Marketing needs to step up and claim the nurturing domain. And then measure for pipeline improvements. I'll bet you'll be amazed at what happens.

And that will serve as further justification for marketing and sales to align.

Finally, great post today by Megan Heuer on the Sirius Decisions Blog that backs me up! So glad I looked: Marketing Needs to Be More Nurturing

B2B Content Marketing Tips

ClickInsights, the Connect the Docs blog, is providing a series of interviews that include one meaty tip from a variety of experts to help marketers meet the challenge of creating better engagement with their prospects.

In this week's interview, they asked 5 B2B marketing experts,

"If you could give our readers one tip on how B2B marketers should do content marketing, what would that be?" 

The slide deck below is a preview of what you'll find in the interview blog post.

ClickInsights: Tips on how B2B marketers should do Content Marketing

View more presentations from Ambal Balakrishnan.

Tip Topics include:

• Map Content to Buying Stages
• For every claim you make in your content, ask yourself “So What?”
• Differentiate Your Content
• Educate, Entertain and Engage with Readers
• Know Your Customer

Each expert also shares some recommendations of resources and books you may find helpful. Go read the interview.

Other related posts include:

The Content Marketers - List of Lists Part 1 and Part 2

CMOs lack credibility with CEOs

The CMO Club recently polled its members about who has the most credibility with the CEO. Results show:

• 31% CFO
• 24% Head of Sales
• 13.8% CMO

While I'm not surprised to see CFO or Head of Sales ahead of the CMO, I am disappointed in the low percentage equated to CMOs—by CMOs. That said, I think CMOs are in a tough position where they've got to make the transition from vague marketing reports to hard-hitting proof points reflecting their contribution to business objectives on the CEO's agenda.

In response to the poll, The CMO Club asked respondents to provide some insight to their ratings. Their reasoning includes:

• CEO interest in the reports provided.
• Speaking the same language.

CEOs spend more time with CFOs and heads of sales because their priorities include managing the company's coffers and filling the company's coffers—ultimately increasing shareholder value.

If marketing wants to be considered a core pillar of their company's success, they need to pay some attention to perception. One of the best ways to do this is to build better relationships with those who do have the CEO's ear—the CFO and the head of sales.

Sort of like influencing the influencers.

Reports need to focus on things like:

• increase in sales-qualified leads
• increase in pipeline progression
• contribution to reduction of sales cycle 
• reduction in customer defections
• efficiency of budget spend related to outcomes produced

Focusing reports on lead generation numbers and growth in presumptive customer affinity doesn't mean anything unless it results in deals closed or customer contract renewals. For reports to merit attention, they must prove marketing initiatives are helping to produce business results.

This is why it's imperative for CMOs to work hand-in-glove with heads of sales. In order to gain insights that reflect high-impact contributions in reporting, marketing needs visibility across the sales process after the handoff. The farther into the pipeline marketing can provide assistance that enables sales to win more deals, faster, the more ammunition they have for hard-hitting reports CFOs will want to see.

When the CFO sees value in the efficiency of the budget spend in regards to the results produced, you've given them something to talk to the CEO about. And, you've safeguarded your budgets. When heads of sales can report higher sales, their professional status soars.

Think about this for a minute. Marketing spends a lot of time (or should) helping prospects and customers learn how to solve problems. In order to do that they learn the language thier buyers speak and they use it to increase relevance. They focus on high priority issues from the buyer's perspective.

Any of this ring a bell?

Well, why can't CMOs apply the same strategy to elevate their status with those who have the CEO's attention?

The more you help someone, the more they're inclined to repay the favor. That's human nature. Plus, they won't want you to stop.

If CMOs can get CFOs and heads of sales to sing their praises, CEOs will start taking notice of marketing as more than just a department that exists because, well, they're supposed to have one.

Update 5/12/09: suggested addition to report bullets up above by @treehousei via Twitter - hard dollar campaign ROI - Thanks Chris! Although often hard to do based on specific campaigns depending on sales cycle time if you're measuring throughput.