Marketing Interactions

What's Your Sales Content Strategy for 2008?

Whenever there's talk about "content strategy," it's usually from a marketing angle. However, until the mega-breach between marketing and sales gets a bridge, salespeople mine for leads, develop sales collateral and initiate conversations on their own. Quite often without any input or assistance from marketing.

Oh, stop gasping, you know it's true. No matter how good marketing thinks their content and initiatives are, most of the time they don't provide to sales what sales needs to acquire, nurture or transition leads through the pipeline. At least from a sales' perspective.

Since we all know they do this, it's important to think about how sales is accomplishing their goals and what they're using to get things done. Gone are the days when each salesperson can get away with using whatever they want to come up with, without regard to the way it meshes with a company's story, expertise, brand, etc. They may still close sales, but if all experiences with the company aren't fluid, then the disconnect with your customers and potential customers will create a question in the customer's mind about the longevity of the relationship. And for good reason.

A sales content strategy can provide a myriad of benefits, such as:

• Your company's "persona" [brand, image] will be aligned.
• Construction will progress on the bridge between sales & marketing.
• The experiences you offer will be consistent for both customers & potential customers.
• Company expertise will shine and your trusted-vendor status will escalate.
• Consultative sales conversations, focused outward, will become the norm.
• Evidence of your commitment to customer needs will become obvious.
• Sales processes will be consistent, repeatable and increasingly productive.
• Intelligence gathered about your market will be quantifiable.
• CRM will actually become proactive instead of being reflective.

Those are all things that high-growth companies are striving to accomplish. And it's not as easy as throwing content at sales and telling them to use it. A sales content strategy needs to be developed with sales insights and collaboration. In fact, marketing should be developed with sales collaboration, but that's another conversation.

Sales knows stuff that other people in the company don't. Such as:

• What challenges your leads and customers face - everyday.
• What keeps them up at night.
• Problems that need to be addressed, peripherally from what your product does, to clear a path for what you sell.
• Challenges that are coming down the pike in the future that can't be ignored.
• What hot buttons set off the wrong responses.
• Which outcomes will sway perspective.

I could go on, but you get the drift. There's noise in the air that authenticity will be critical in the future, not just an option. Dennis Pombriant talks about it in his future prognostications. The CMO Council's work on Customer Affinity points to it. The volume of available attention is diminishing, and what's considered valuable is being scrutinized more intently.

All of these indicate the need to put thought and consideration into your sales content strategy. It's not a question of salespeople using content - because they will, even if they create it themselves. The opportunity is to develop a strategy around sales communications that accelerates customer acquisition while beneficially impacting the entire organization through broadening your "story."

In an ideal situation, sales would only be working with ready-to-close leads, but even if this was the reality, it would emphasize how critical sales content strategy is to future growth.

To begin thinking about a sales content strategy, ask yourself the following questions:

• How do salespeople share your company's expertise?
• What are the conversations they're having? How do they start, develop and evolve?
• What type of collateral are they creating on their own?
• Is there a consistent knowledge-to-lead transfer process across the sales force?
• How is engagement measured during the customer's buying stages?
• Do they build the right story? Is it one that creates longevity and loyalty in customer relationships?
• If you spoke with a lead after a sales conversation, what value add would they say your company provides?

Insight to these questions will help you acknowledge the importance of developing a sales content strategy, as well as define the components needed to provide salespeople with the content  they need to drive growth.

And don't just think printed content, think conversational transitions, evidence stories and consultative expertise development. Think value as defined by the customer's perspective.

Is information truly valuable or merely useful?

Every time you create a marketing communication you believe it's truly valuable to your audience—right? But, how do you know if you've hit on their Value Factors?

This blog post was generated by a comment made over on Tom Asacker's blog by a user named "pt." The conversation is about what to do with all the email that looks valuable when you get it, but requires more attention than you have at the time to give to it. So people file it with good intention to read it, when they get time, but somehow never do. I'm as guilty of this as the people who answered Tom's query. Don't you think your leads are doing the same thing?

What caught my attention was the assertion in the comments by "pt" that he/she now evaluates email based on value vs usefulness. Which ties in with "timely" relevance. In other words, what may be relevant to me today, may not have the same impact tomorrow.

Why not?

Maybe I found the answer I was looking for.

Perhaps the reason I thought I needed that information has shifted to something else.

Then again, I may have simply resolved that I no longer have the time or attention needed to apply to that topic right now. And, at the speed of information, I know there will be new insights available by the time I can focus on the topic, so collecting it now is considered a waste of time and effort.

The other factor that struck me in Tom's post was that he deals with emails he perceives to be valuable AND that will require little time to process. This means that your email message will potentially get better response if it's indicative of both value and the level of attention needed in order to improve response from your audience.

We're all information saturated. It comes faster and faster, everyday. So, how do you know what's valuable? I think there are Value Factors that, combined in different ways based on user-assigned importance, enable the recipient to rate your communications.

Here are a few Value Factors to consider:

• Reputation: Have you gotten valuable information from the sender in the past? Or have you heard peers/colleagues speak of them, seen a good review, read an article or eBook authored by them? Are they in your personal network?


• Urgency: Do you need information on this subject within the next day, week or month? Longer than that and it's probably not worth it. You'll forget you have it. I mean, let's face it, who trolls their email archives looking for something to read? No matter what your intentions were at the time.


• Status: Is it something you can talk about with someone you know or want to impress, help, etc? Will knowing what's in that message, or attached link or PDF download, help improve your "status" in some way? Because it is all about you, right?


• Passion: Is the subject matter something you're passionate about? Are you charged with developing expertise around that topic? Are you consumed with how to improve a process or deliverable related to it? Does the success of a project you're working on depend on generating knowledge that will improve the outcome?

Of course Value Factors beg the question of what is considered only useful. But, given the current information environment, useful is just no longer good enough. Valuable is now the price of attention.

What other value factors do you have for evaluating information? Please share them by adding a comment.

Happy Holidays!

Have a hug on me - and a very Happy Holiday!

Look forward to a New Year filled with health, happiness, wisdom and wealth.

#1 Customer-Centric Requirement for B2B Tech Companies

Reaching outward, to embrace the customer, is something many companies are striving to accomplish. But, assumptions that brand awareness or existing relationships are the primary prerequisites for market acquisition or customer retention may be incorrect.

According to some new research by CMO Council [press release 12/17], 99% of IT buyers said that they'd not select a vendor, scale back on using them or leave that vendor if they don't trust the vendor's commitment to them. If this attitude is representative of IT buyers' intentions on a larger scale, it gets even more serious. Only 7% of those asked think their vendors truly understand and are aligned with their needs.

Trust is huge. But it's not just a word, and often it's not logic based. Trust can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but most importantly it has to be earned. Determining how to build trust is one of the biggest reasons to get to know your customers. There's no way to do this if you don't know them and can't appropriately address their issues, challenges, goals, and needs. From their perspective.

Once you know your customers and potential customers, the biggest factor to address is  to make sure that they know you know. This is why thought leadership is such a big deal. Companies want to engage with vendors who bring them value beyond the products they sell. Most of your buyers are so busy today that they have no time to think strategically. They can only spare enough thinking to deal with their immediate issues. We've all been there before - there are only so many hours in a day.

Given the array of possibilities for how companies can choose to solve problems, it becomes even more important to offer them insights and expertise that  help them quickly assimilate and evaluate challenges, assess options and make wise choices for long-term outcomes.

For those B2B technology companies that cannot create content without mentioning themselves—or their products—a cazillion times, this is a terrific reason to recreate your marketing content strategy with a customer-centric focus. Although, if that intention doesn't permeate your company from end-to-end, you'll not get the results you expect - but that topic is bigger than this blog post...and starting with your marketing program is a good place to begin.

Microsites for Responsive Marketing

Trying to get changes made to corporate websites is often the bottleneck in executing on marketing campaigns. More and more, B2B companies are realizing that showcasing and sharing their expertise in a way that helps their leads better understand the challenges they're facing, and explore options for overcoming them, is a wise marketing move.

Problem is that marketers need a way to quickly get relevant information out in a way that generates usable intelligence for their marketing and nurturing strategies. Creating microsites for different challenges, focuses, industries or company types gives marketers a tighter way to connect with actively interested leads. And, the sites can be simple to navigate—hugely important given a recent statistic that 80% of website visitors leave if they have to click more than 4 times to get to the information they want.

However, if microsites are going to be a viable marketing tool, they need to be flexible and allow line-of-business, non-techie marketers to quickly upload and professionally present timely thought leadership content. You can't halt a campaign in the middle of the conversation. And, what many businesses don't realize is that filing a content piece with your outsourced agency who has a two-week lag time, severely restricts the agility of responding to what leads want. Especially if they shift focus.

Let's say that you plan a campaign. You develop your content on schedule, your agency deploys it, you send your first email and notice that a majority of your audience is not only clicking through on the link in your email, but are also expressing interest in an additional article on the microsite. The issue is that the follow-on content piece you have in the agency pipeline, and next up on the program, is written in a different direction.

So, what do you do? Send that piece, as scheduled, and miss out on responding appropriately to expressed interests? Or, do you do individual sends with a PDF of a new article that meets their needs, forgoing any ability to track response and interest metrics?

If your ability to connect with leads on their terms is hindered by a rigid process with a long advance time, then your company is going to miss out on those early steps of building what could turn out to be a gorgeous customer relationship.

One answer is to deploy microsites that marketing can manage. And yes, there is technology available that will hold template look and feel to corporate standards (for those of you shuddering) and working with them doesn't need to require expertise in technology.

Additionally, the ability to drive organic growth around your company's area of expertise can deliver huge results. In contrast to the corporate website which is usually focused on your industry, product and investors, you can cull a whole following that might not otherwise have connected with your company, based on your ability to optimize expert subject matter for search engines.

Corporate websites are great once the potential buyer has researched, gained knowledge, learned what he needs to know, decided how he wants to solve the problem and is ready to evaluate vendors. But, if you wait to get to know your leads at that point, you've probably missed the boat. Consider your microsite the responsive online presence that can get you in the conversation in the beginning, when beliefs, perceptions and attitudes are forming. That's where you need to be.

Map Needs to Problems for Relevant Marketing

You've spent time developing a marketing strategy, gotten your team in a room, researched and brainstormed about who your targeted potential customers are and defined their most compelling need. Finally, you've formulated a plan and you're ready to execute. But before you flip the switch, ask yourself if your target market has more than just the "need" for the outcome your products/services can deliver?

Unless there's a tight connection between how the lead has defined the problem and unless they've mapped the resulting consequences directly to the need your marketing campaign is focused on, you may be missing the mark.

To give you an idea of what I mean, consider fast growth. If you sell to small and mid-size companies, you may have evidence that defines your ideal target as those in the hyper-growth category. Let's say your product helps them get products to market faster.

You figure you've done a good job of aligning your campaign focus to your target market.

Maybe not.

What's the true, pressing problem for your targets? In order for them to continue their dramatic expansion what has to happen? Is whatever has to happen directly related to your product's capabilities/benefits?

This requires that you dig beyond the need as the defining focus and correlate high-consequence problems to needs. Unless the problem your product solves is what's keeping your target from the goal of dramatic expansion, then buying your product is not going to be first on their list.

What if how the lead defines "growth" is different than how you defined it? What if you read in a press release that they plan to expand by 25% next year, and you figure that means they need to up their product roll-outs?

But, the reality is that they've decided to focus on their core product and go after market acquisition, scuttling plans to scale their product line. You're now at the wrong end of this situation. Your focus is pushing products out the door, theirs is now pulling customers through it.

Logically, they may still very well "need" what you sell. What you sell may help them deliver on other business objectives, but, given how they plan to achieve their goals, what looks like a need that aligns with your marketing plan, actually has a problem disconnect. If the problem you solve isn't the one they've mapped to their need, then your marketing is lacking in relevance.

In this simplified example, this company needs a solution to the problem of how to quickly increase market acquisition, not a solution to the problem of how to decrease time to market for product roll-outs.

To map needs to problems, you often have to look beyond the obvious and beneath the surface. And, if you want to safeguard your campaign, consider all the ways you can map problems to a need, create a multi-pronged effort, and focus on targeting more narrowly defined market segments.

Give Your Expert Opinion on Customer Retention

The CMO Council is asking for the participation of marketing experts in this new survey and has asked me to pass along the information to my readers. Please take part - it'll take less than 15 minutes and you'll get a copy of the report - which, given the questions, should provide some great insights to how organizations are actually benefiting (or not) from their CRM implementations.

Here's their invitation:

In a "post-CRM" era rife with information overload, marketers must integrate and operationalize customer information to further the value of their customer relationships. According to recent research reported in CRM Magazine, 67.3 percent of the companies surveyed have implemented a CRM system. Unfortunately, only about 1 in 5 companies report significant improvements in revenue performance as a result of CRM investments.

Therefore, the The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council is engaging with senior global marketing executives like yourself to examine the degree to which marketers are integrating and operationalizing customer information to further the value of customer relationships and how to approach the challenge of providing a highly valuable single view of the customer. The study is sponsored by Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), IBM, and Dun & Bradstreet (D&B).

Anyone who completes this online survey before 12/29/07 will receive a free copy of the report!

Are Your "Sizzling Hot" Leads a Bit Chilly?

With predictive analytics, behavior analysis and personas the hot new marketing items, you'd think that determining the degree of "hotness" in leads would be easier.

But, if you're using an automated scoring system that counts clicks, this determination may not be as accurate as you think. Take a look at your process and see if you're really discerning a connection and capitalizing on the opportunity to develop your leads into actionable sales hand offs, or if you just assume you are.

First, let's look at indicators that a lead is NOT hot:

• They open one out of seven email communications.
• They download one white paper, but never look at another page on your website.
• They finally look at 8 pages on your website, but their total session time is less than 1 minute.
• They register for 3 webinars you're offering, but never attend.
• They fill out a survey but don't fill out the optional text answers and every multiple choice answer is "A."

If you're using a scoring method that counts clicks, you might think this is a "hot" lead. However, if you hand this lead over to sales, they are going to shake their heads and grumble in disgust because this lead is so far away from being a short-horizon sale, it's not funny.

That doesn't mean you disregard the lead. What it means is there's some interest being expressed, it's just not developed enough for a conversation. It also means that only using lead scoring is not going to improve marketing's ability to deliver "hot" leads to sales without human evaluation. Unless, of course, your measurement tools can adjust for nuances.

So, what transforms this lead into a "hot" lead that sales would be happy to get? Start thinking in combination of activities your leads take and what that overall behavior can mean. Below are a few "hot" indicators, that taken together can mean a great deal:

• They spend the appropriate time on each web page they view to actually READ the content. You need to have an idea of how long it takes to read your content in order to evaluate what the time spent per page actually means. Skimming is not as impressive as time spent reading and considering your ideas. That's assuming, of course that you've written compelling content that's meaningful to your leads.


• They have a pattern of not just opening each communication you send, but clicking through. If they don't click on a communication, check to see if that topic is different from the others they've expressed interest in. Evaluating a lead's interest and acting to extend it can make a huge difference for building a relationship.


• When they sign up for a webinar, they actually attend - and stay until the end.


• They have viewed information on your website, in depth, about a specific product.


• Their open rates and click throughs begin to multiply, evidencing that they are forwarding your communications to their colleagues.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but if you see patterns like this developing, you've got hot leads who are worth a conversation. I'd go as far as to say that marketing might even want to facilitate the first personal contact to learn if they can provide more information on the topic of interest--a soft qualification, if you will. Then pass the lead to sales once they've been determined "sales ready." And, that "sales ready" definition should be agreed upon between marketing and sales.

I think that the handoff to sales needs to be pushed out beyond qualification. Qualifying leads comes in different flavors. Just because a lead is "qualified" does not mean they are ready for a sales conversation. Especially in B2B sales where knowledge gathering and strategic thinking are longer term processes in the buying cycle.

Marketing has got to reach farther downstream into the funnel if they are going to evidence that they deliver value beyond the surface. By helping sales do what they do best, close deals, marketing can prove they've got muscle behind their efforts.

What tone is your marketing?

Have you ever considered the tone of your marketing communications? I'm asking this not so much from your perspective, but if you've put yourself in your lead's and customer's chairs and read your messaging like it may impact them.

Are you the kind of company that spreads fear and hopes the upset will send leads running to purchase your products? This tactic is often referred to as "stick" marketing.

Or, do you present them with the opportunities they can achieve with the added benefit of your products? This would be the "carrot" approach.

Most marketing is a combination of both - presentation of problem followed by outline of solution and the opportunities your customers capitalize on, given the use of your products. However the way in which messaging is done can evoke quite different responses in your audience.

A few things to consider:

Humor is tricky - what is funny to you, from your side of the fence, may not necessarily make your audience laugh out loud. It may even make them cringe. If you're attempting to use humor in a B2B marketing situation, make sure you put yourself in the audience's shoes first. Seriously. What might work here is metaphor.

Fear isn't fun - Being a bit scared in business is pretty normal. In fact, at the speed business moves today and the mounting array of goals set in front of us, fear is likely hovering in some form or another. Do we need more of it? Fear adds pressure and stress. Think about how much more you'd "enjoy" adding more of that to your day. Business is risky enough. If you're going this route, think about how you can emphasize mitigating the risks your leads and customers encounter. But, do it nicely - take a long hard look at impact.

Possibilities are inspiring - learning about problems - their causes, outlying effects followed by a presentation of viable options for solving those problems can be motivational. It can instill a sense of power in people that makes them want to take action. This is where expertise is a good focus.

Opportunities generate power - if you're a company faced with overcoming a hurdle to get to the next level of growth and competency, the wall you need to scale to get there may look huge. This is where thought leadership gets huge play. Helping people envision not just possibilities, but the opportunities that become available once they can move past whatever challenge is holding them up, today. By becoming knowledgeable, people develop confidence about moving forward.

These are just a few ideas about how you might evaluate your message context and shift it to create better connections that evoke the responses you want. Using a carrot is often better than using a stick. At least in my experience...

Are You Living in the "Value Age?"

I've just read Sam Richter's new book, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling, and I have to tell you that he sold himself short. He wrote this book for salespeople, but it's absolutely valid for adding resonance to marketing efforts in complex sales where the relationship needs to be established prior to a sales activity—as well as to extend loyalty after the sale.

Sam defines today as the "Value Age"—an environment "where the difference between organizations that thrive and those that fail will be the ability to provide value in every customer interaction...the ones that provide value beyond what the customer expects on a consistent basis." Which is spot on.

Personalization is a concept that has many marketers grappling to wrap their minds around for both strategic and tactical applications that increase value. Sam tackles how to actually get to personalization, and though marketing often cannot hone their focus to one individual, his points are well made and he actually shows you how you can research broader areas like industries, trends and the competition. By incorporating richer and relevant insights to your marketing content, you can accomplish more customer centric approaches more easily.

By expanding the depth of information your content embraces about the industry challenges your customers face, their problems and trends for the future you will be able to develop a content strategy that can dovetail with the efforts of your sales team and provide a consistently valuable experience for your potential and existing customers.

Marketers spend a lot of time on lead generation, but ongoing nurturing is becoming more important than ever—throughout the entire customer life cycle. In order to make sure your marketing content is focused, relevant, and valuable, you'll need to turn to the Internet for what Sam calls the Fourth R - Research. Which we all know can be really frustrating, not to mention time consuming.

Those of us who groan at the thought of research will be pleased with the Research Guide Sam has included in the book. He gives you a variety of search techniques to finely tune your queries and bring back information that helps you quickly learn what you need to know to focus your marketing content, gain insight about your competitors, or learn more about a problem you know your product can help customers solve.

It's absolutely amazing how much fun research can be when you have the techniques to get the right answers to your questions from that overwhelming array of returns most of us are used to seeing. Although Sam includes a slew of ways to do streamlined searches more useful to salespeople, his insights on industry search, website, product or brand-specific searching and news searches can enable marketers to add a tremendous amount of personalization and relevance to their directed campaigns.

Go get Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling - you'll be amazed at how streamlined research can impact your marketing & sales efforts.