Marketing Interactions

Collaboration and Portals

There's a lot being said about the new social technologies - Blogs, Wikis, RSS, etc.  But I find people talking about the replacement of tools and portals instead of the augmentation of existing systems.  This is a short-sighted view, in my opinion. But it seems to happen whenver the next "new" thing comes along.

To throw the baby out with the bathwater is hasty and not well thought out.  It seems to me that implementing social technology as a separate tool, away from portals and existing tools, just creates yet another silo that will need integration in the future.

I agree that the interactions available with social technology need widespread adoption across enterprises to create actionable knowledgebases by capturing experiences and insights from your employees, but I'm not sure why I'm not seeing more about combining them with the user interfaces you already have.  Combining social technology with portal tools creates effective, streamlined work environments that present actionable knowledge in context. 

Andrew McAfee's article in the Sloan Management Review states, "These tools may well reduce management’s ability to exert unilateral control and to express some level of negativity. Whether a company’s leaders really want this to happen and will be able to resist the temptation to silence dissent is an open question. Leaders will have to play a delicate role if they want Enterprise 2.0 technologies to succeed."

I hear this a lot from clients.  They are worried about letting their employees post to the sales portal or Intranet because they could be snarky or negative.  If you really believe this, what do you think is in those emails that are flying around?  If you're worried about your sales team and they're the ones putting the public face on your company, I'm wondering why they work for you? 

Posting to social technology includes your name.  When people's names are attached they pay more attention to what they say.  But the other benefit I think companies may be short-sighted about is using the information to grow, fix things and build good mojo for their culture. Including staff in the rollout and enlisting some evangelists can help.  Showing participants you're listening by taking action on inputs and participating with them can be done to great effect.  But Andrew is right about watching the way you do it.

Wouldn't you rather hear about a problem from an employee instead of a customer?  There will always be differing opinions about how things should be done.  I do agree with Andrew, that the challenge will be in how management handles dissent, but it can be done and even convert dissenters into evangelists by addressing the issues instead of silencing them or, even worse, ignoring the issues they highlight.

Bill Ives has some thoughts about this article as well. His comment about workspaces gives me hope that others are thinking along the lines of extension and integration rather than separation of technologies.

Are you using social technology in your company?  I'd love to know how it's going...

Marketers and Technology

A recent survey by Forrester shows that out of 371 marketing executives interviewed, 91% prefer to work with service providers and ASPs over their own IT department.  What's interesting about this is the mounting pressure for IT and Marketing to get along due to the increased need for technology to keep pace in the marketplace.

Here's the problem.  Most Midsize companies have IT departments staffed to manage their legacy applications and network infrastructure.  They do not have web expertise.  Given the need to have enterprise-wide integration and information access and sharing, IT is busy enough trying to keep up and get ahead with their core responsibilities.

Marketing moves fast.  Technology innovation is happening faster than ever.  One of the biggest complaints I hear from marekters is not that they dislike working with their IT departments in theory, but they can't maintain efficiencies with the timeline that IT gives them.  No offense to IT, but often they think web apps are simple things that can be custom architected without a lot of effort.  Not true.  Not if they're planning on deploying a system that marketing can manage themselves. 

They may be able to build it, but the constantly changing needs for new functionality and the support required for dynamic functionality that is focused on user interactions is often beyond their scope and their capabilities.  Not because they can't do it, because their charter is for other technology projects that are legitimately imperative for operational efficiencies. 

It's actually a kind of catch-22.  But the question is, why expand expertise if a third-party provider can supply it for a fraction of the cost it would take for in-house IT to do it?  Isn't it better for the IT department to interface wtih service providers at integration points with web services than to dilute their attention from their main responsibilities?

If you want to know more about what marketing execs think about technology, go read this post by Elana Anderson of Forrester.

How is your company enabling marketing's technology needs?

Taskonomy and Taxonomy

Most websites are ordered by taxonomy, which is by metatag or keyword or some form of classification that deals with the words in the content.  This type of classification is helpful if you know exactly what words/terms to use.  For most of us, it's just frustrating and takes a lot of time.

Taskonomy, (as I read about on the Anecdote blog and as defined by Donald Norman) is arranging things around how we get our work done. 

Think about that for a minute.  What a valuable concept for a sales portal, intranet or customer/ partner extranet.  It speaks to context and the ability to relate objects that build off one another together in a way that helps a user accomplish a task.  Think about the experience using taskonomy could provide to your customers. It can also be powerful in application for your salespeople.

If the task is to prepare to discuss Product A with a client in a meeting, it isvaluable to have all the messaging, value statements, data sheets, success stories, testimonials, analyst reports, etc. all in one place, but linked together in a meaningful way that helps your salesperson build the story .

I know - I've spoken about this repeatedly, but this blog post made me think about it in terms that I thought were valuable.  I'm not saying get rid of taxonomy, I'm saying the combination of the two will give your users a more empowering experience and increase efficiency.

Shawn, at Anecdote, summed it up nicely: "The problem we face is that organisations are obsessed with order, taxonomies, and wanting their workplace to work like a well-oiled machine. It’s time we shifted the focus to taskonomy and re-balance our approach to organisational issues by including more right brain thinking (design, story, empathy, meaning. symphony, play)."

How is the way you're presenting content incorporating right-brain thinking?

Who's your reader?

One thing I've noticed lately in work with clients is that the content they put on their website is often the content they use for everything else.  To put this in context with your sales portal, why is it that you think your salespeople want to read the same content on the sales portal that's on the website?  What does it do for them, other than show them what their propects are seeing?  And what makes you think they can't go there to read it?

I'll back off a bit and say that if you're doing lead generation with your white papers that, yes, it's nice to put that type of content on your sales portal so your team can get at it with no hassles.  But, here's my question: What supporting content do you use to show them how to leverage and extend the white paper's information with prospects and customers?

Are there key takeaways they can make sure a prospect understands in relation to how it will impact them?  Is there a cool feature on a data sheet that delivers more than is obvious that a salesperson can reinforce or disclose?

In order to provide actionable knowledge, you nedd to reach deeper and provide more depth of understanding in ways that serve your sales team and help them create better conversations wtih their prospects and customers.  Give them something valuable to use that helps them build relationships. 

David Meerman Scott has a great post, Think like a publisher, today that talks about knowing your reader and planning your content strategy accordingly.  Go read it.

To make your sales portal more productive, think about context.  If you feature a white paper, what other content is associated with it that gives the sales person a better conversation?  Your marketing collateral is about messaging, emotion and calls to action.  Your sales conversations need to be about enriching the value that the prospect or customer is already reaching for.

Is your content written for the right audience?

Why Naked CRM Doesn't Work

Maximize CRM Value with an Interactive Sales Portal Learn how a sales portal can provide the tools both sales and marketing need to improve performance by aligning CRM with sales processes, providing on-demand access to valuable, real-time information and enabling collaboration.  Download the eBook here.

Wise Interactions

Wise interactions are focused on building relationships. 

The way most companies approach interactions is to get the "win."  They go out of their way to use analytics applications and put stock in how many clicks they get from their messaging and then try to conquer the lead they've acquired and close the deal.

In a B2B complex sale, that's not likely to happen.  If your demand generation process isn't converting leads into qualified prospects, it's time to ask yourself why not?  Why is lead demand fizzling?

In the world of digital intelligence, your company is starting from an unknown point.  How much does the lead already know about you by the time they actually interact with your company?  Better yet, what do they know?  Nurturing and inviting value-driven interactions are key in building relationships and moving them carefully along until a triggering event occurs that gives you permission to engage them in the next step of the process.

Information is important.  Actionable knowledge even more so.  But the biggest thing you can do with your interactions is show you care.  Communicate your understanding, be attentive.  Be willing to back up if you move ahead too fast.  Go for the long-haul relationship, rather than the quick win.  Quick wins can be your only wins.  Basing your relationship on trust sets you up for a strong relationship that will endure and flourish.

Tom Asacker's post, From Knowledge to Wisdom, has a great story about Bobby that you should read.  It's one of those lightbulb moments.  Some of the insights Tom shares are well worth a read.  For example;

"...wisdom is all about aligning interests."
"[wisdom] is about achieving the outcome that each desired."

And, "Knowledge, on the other hand, tries to win. To out-reason, to conquer. Knowledge is one sided. Wisdom works reciprocally. Knowledge is about getting the deal done. Wisdom understands that the purpose of each interaction is to grow the strength of the relationship."

Over on the Brand Builder blog, Olivier posts another of Tom's insights that I think applies here as well.  "No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care. And it doesn't take a genius to tell the difference between someone who listens in order to get something, and someone who listens because she cares."

Pretty powerful concepts.  Translating them to online interactions takes a bit more thinking.  For some more ideas on how to use online tools to nurture leads into relationships, read my ebook, Why Naked CRM Doesn't Work, where I share some ideas and scenarios about thoughtful interactions.  Feel free to pass the link along.

How wise are your interactions?

Why Naked CRM Doesn't Work

The media is full of stories about why CRM isn't successful and how companies are lagging behind the move to customer centricity.  Last month, I attended a CRM symposium and discovered that many executives aren't even aware of what's possible with CRM and how to have an impact with the technology.  I've done a lot of work on this issue and wanted to share my insights with you.

Why Naked CRM Doesn't Work: Maximize CRM Value with an Interactive Sales Portal is a new ebook I've written to help business executives come to grips with deriving value from their CRM systems.  It includes strategic ideas and scenarios about how to leverage the most value from the information your CRM system collects to drive sales and marketing effectiveness.  Technology can be very effective if it's implemented thoughtfully with attention paid to getting and giving the most out of every interaction.

Research shows that utilization is the primary obstacle preventing CRM from contributing lasting results to an organization’s performance and productivity. Many organizations spend a lot of effort and resources implementing CRM systems only to have salespeople resist using them. The key to successful CRM systems is the method by which information is collected and utilized. CRM systems collect the raw material, but to be successful, the collection must be painless and the raw material must be available in useful ways.

Learn how a sales portal can provide the tools both sales and marketing need to improve performance by aligning CRM with sales processes, providing on-demand access to valuable, real-time information and enabling collaboration. Interactive sales portals also reduce the need for manual data entry by extracting data from the backside to update the CRM system automatically. Learn about three major CRM challenges salespeople face and how sales portals can help to overcome them.

Download it now and pass the link on.  After you've read it, I'd enjoy hearing your thoughts and comments.

Customer Experience Perception

In the 1 to 1 magazine article, Don't Leave the Customer Experience to Chance (free registration required), a survey done by Strativity Group shows that out of 9,496 people asked, (42% employees and 52% their customers) that 81% of employees think they exceed customer expectations.  However, and this is telling, only 33% of the customers agreed with them. Ouch.

Perception from inside the company is quite often skewed to what's happening outside the company.  Not only do you have to listen to your customers, you have to know what you're listening for.  The problem many companies have is that they don't realize a customer is unhappy until it's too late to save them.  Once you hit that tipping point, it's usually too late to flip things back to the happy, delighted customer you used to have, or in many cases, thought you had.

This is why actionable information and integration with your CRM are so important.  But it's not enough to collect all the information, you have to give your staff the tools to leverage it in use with delivering the customer experience.

The 2005 Customer Experience Management Survey, Executive Study - done by Strativity Group - has a great graph that shows many of the issues that keep customer centricity from being a reality. A few of the key points are:

• Only 33.3% agree that they have the tools to service customers and resolve problems (up slightly from 31.4% in 2004).
• 59.2% state that their relationship with the customer is not well defined (up from 54.1% in 2004)

Customer Experience Management is a huge undertaking for a lot of companies.  It means shifting the view from self-interest, and product interest to pay attention to outside-in perceptions based on value received.  How to accomplish this is a difficult question to answer.  The problem is that doing nothing isn't going to help. 

Choosing a place to start is important.  One place to look is your CRM system and how effective the web interface you've put in front of it is in arming your staff with actionable information that serves the creation of value-driven interactions.  Admittedly, customer centricity needs to be an enterprise-wide endeavor, but trying to do it all at once will keep companies frozen in confusion about how to pull that off.  Start with getting your staff the tools they need to do their jobs.  Technology can go a long ways toward helping you make the shift.

The important thing is to think about how you apply it. Strategic planning is imperative for taking information and converting it to actionable knowledge that impacts the customer experience with positive outcomes.

What's your perception of your customer's experience?  Are you sure?

Stop Selling and Make a Difference

Do you find yourself sinking into a monologue about yourself or your products at sales meetings?
Do you wonder what that one key ingredient is that endears you to clients?
Have you lost control of your sales discussions?
How authentic are you during interactions with clients?
Do you have a controversial opinion that makes your clients sit up and take notice?

Rain Today has released a new eBook that packs a lot of punch.  Titled "The One Piece of Advice You Can't Sell Without"  From 11 Experts on Selling Professional Services, the ebook includes wisdom culled from some of the best in the business.  Download it now.

Here are a few key takeaways:

"Good selling isn't about persuasion, manipulation, or being glib.  In fact, the more you try to "sell" someone, the faster they want to get away from you."  Jill Konrath, best selling author of Selling to Big Companies.

"The only important discussion point is about value, and particularly that value which pertains to the buyer's emotions."  Alan Weiss, author of Million Dollar Consulting.

"If potential clients discover that you and they share the same opinion, supported by data that's easy to use, you will wipe out the competition." Frank Stasiowski, CEO PSMJ Resources.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.  There's a lot to be learned in these pages.  Got get the eBook.

Collaboration Marketing

I've written quite a bit about valuable on-demand interactions and how delivering a return on information exchange is key to building productive relationships.  Utilizing your website or portals to deliver useful context in exchange for attention is the basis behind my assertion that a web interface is a powerful tool to collect and deliver personalized information to both customers and legacy applications.

John Hagel posts about his experience speaking recently at the CMO Summit.  It's a lengthy post, but there's a lot of meat.  A few of his key points are:

1. The shift from marketing that focuses on the three I's: Intercept, Inhibit and Isolate to the three A's: Attract, Assist and Affiliate.  Which is summarized by his definition of "collaboration marketing" which is moving from one-to-one marketing to the many-to-one mindset.


2. He defines the customer-centric promise as: “Buy from me because I know you as an individual customer better than anyone else and you can trust me to use that knowledge to configure the right bundle of products and services to meet your individual needs.”


3. ROA Measure - Return on Attention.  "the question that customers will increasingly ask is: “Of the total attention I allocate to a particular source, what is the productivity of that attention in terms of  value received for effort and time invested?”


4. ROI Measure - Return on Information: "the more quickly a vendor can turn around and deliver tangible value in return for information from a customer, the more quickly and effectively the vendor will be able to build trust and willingness to provide even more information."

He also talks about reverse markets and a disappointing adoption rate for vendors.  What I see as the holdup is the fear of relinquishing control.  But what I can't figure out is why companies are often convinced that they have control?

In a marketplace increasingly short on time, getting attention from customers and prospects is going to be the biggest challenge to confront in the near future, if it isn't already.  I'd like to suggest that in addition to the three A's, we also add the three E's:

Engage: The key to ROA and ROI is going to be how well you can engage and impact the customer in exchange for their attention and information.  This will be determined by the value they perceive you provide.

Empower:  In using your products and/or services, are your customers more powerful in accomplishing their strategic goals?  How helpful are you in making sure?

Expectations: Have you gone beyond and exceeded them?  Consistently?  Not yours but theirs.  Okay, just checking to make sure you're still with me.

I wanted to include Experience as an "E," but I think all three of these play to the customer experience.  Experience is the umbrella for the future of marketing, sales and extending the lifecycle span.  The more interactive the experience is, the more emotional impact on building relationships that will last for a long haul that's mutually beneficial.

John's post is a great read.  Take a look at the comments too as there's some argument about his assertions on reverse markets which is interesting to consider.

How collaborative is your marketing?