Marketing Interactions

6 Ways B2B Marketers Can "Listen" Effectively

One of the things B2B marketers are being told to do is to "listen" to communities and get to really know their prospects. The best reason being because your prospects are controlling how and when they engage with vendors, so it's become very critical that our content marketing efforts are highly relevant to the needs of the audiences we seek.

One thing that's not exactly obvious is exactly HOW to listen—or even what you should be listening for that you can actually apply to your content marketing efforts. Social media has given marketers unprecedented access to the thoughts, perspectives and musings of their potential customers. Unfortunately there's a lot of noise out there that can make listening more of a chore than a productive exercise.

Here are 6 ways to get applicable takeaways from listening:

1. Phrasing: One of the best ways to increase relevance with prospects is to use the language they use to talk about their problems. If they talk about bottlenecks, discussing performance improvements may not get you the same level of engagement as you can get by using the words they use intuitively. When you listen to prospects make note of how they describe issues of importance. Remember that listening to your customers may not produce the same results as you've already indoctrinated them with some of your company's terminology and language.


2. Webinars: One of the ways I get up to speed when I start a new client project is by attending webinars their prospects attend. Sure, it's helpful to hear other experts talk about the issues, problems and solutions, but what's really valuable to me are the questions at the end. Given what information the webinar covered, what went unanswered or left attendees confused? Addressing those things can help boost your content's relevance, as well as the company's credibility.


3. Blogs: Following the most active blogs in your industry is a great way to listen to your prospects. The lesser read blogs can be great for ideas, but what you're looking for is not just timely topics of interest but comments. How people respond to the blogger's point of view can provide a lot of insight to the concerns, beliefs and interests that are top of mind for your prospects (or people like them).


4. Twitter Streams: What I mean by Twitter Streams are hashtag searches for keywords or solutions. I use TweetDeck and dedicate 2 or 3 columns to hashtag searches pertinent to each project I'm working on. Not only does this concentrate how many Tweets I have to plow through on a daily basis, but I gives me a quick study of phrasing and provides links that are being shared and thought to be important sources of information. I want to know what people like my clients' prospects think is important enough to Tweet or re-Tweet.


5. Bit.ly Links: Many of the links used on Twitter are created by the URL shortener Bit.ly. If you copy and paste the link into a browser and add a + (plus) sign at the end, then hit enter, you can see a stream of who has tweeted the link. Then you can click through on their Twitter handles and learn more about the people participating. But this also gives you a good reading on the interest level as it shows how many clicks and Tweets have happened over time. Plus, you can learn levels of influence about the participators. This may be helpful when choosing who to follow and try to engage on Twitter.


6. LinkedIn Groups: Using profiles of people like your prospects to get a baseline about the segment is a good start. But to get a feel for their sentiment about a topic, monitoring and participating on groups they belong to can provide great insights that translate back to improving your content relevance. There's a lot of noise on many groups, but the daily email digest will help you to judge what's getting a lot of responses so you can allocate your time effectively. Make sure when you participate that it's never to sell, only to provide valuable insights and answer the questions asked.

Hopefully this list has added something you can use to get started with how you listen effectively to help you apply your insights to improving your marketing content relevance.

What would you add?

B2B Marketers Need to Look Beyond Decision Makers

Yesterday I attended the webinar Inside the Mind of the B2B Buyer - New Data on the Path to Purchase. The webinar was based on data collected in a survey conducted by DemandGen Report and sponsored by Genius.com.

Marketers tend to describe their prospects based on the traits of the decision maker. But, what the survey found was that there was a pretty good spread of people involved in the purchase selection.

When asked what role the respondent played in the final solution selection, these were the responses:

• Recommender - 34%
• Influencer - 45.4%
• Decision Maker - 50.5%
• Buyer - 17.5%

Yes, the responders could select all that apply, which is why the scores add up past 100%.

The point here is that marketers need to create and distribute content that reaches beyond the decision maker if they want to build the types of relationships that shorten time to revenue. The way to do that is with the appropriate content strategy and platform for execution that provides marketers with increased visibility about who's doing what. (e.g. marketing automation)

Here are a few discoveries about why content is so darned important:

• 95% of buyers said that the vendor they selected provided ample relevant content during their buying process.
• 66% of buyers said consistency in messaging by vendors influenced their buying decision.
• 59% shared the information they learned during research with others. 

So start thinking about how you can not only be consistent with your content storylines, but also how you can get to know all the types of people involved in the buying decision so that you can create the relevant content needed to build extended engagement with each of them. 

Oh, one more thing. Eighty percent of buyers said that timeliness of response was influential in their selection of a vendor.

This is where strategy comes into play. If your content motivates responses from prospects, you'd better be ready with answers that are consistent with the messaging, information and communications they're interacting with. And it can't just be consistent with one buyer type, but must resonate when shared with the entire buying committee. Remember that stat about sharing information...

With an editorial calendar, you can map your content across both buying types and buying stages. Without one, you're relying on instinct and reaction. That's hard to keep on track over time.  

There's a lot of good stuff coming in the final report. In the meantime, go view the webinar to learn more about what's influencing your buyers' decisions to purchase. When you do, you'll be added to the list to receive the report when it's published.

Content Marketing is for Customers Too!

Most conversations I have with marketers revolve around how to feed the top of the funnel and help prospects become sales-ready leads that their salespeople willingly pursue. It's one of the things I help them focus on doing.

The problem happens when that becomes the sole focus of marketing.

I was catching up on my blog reading and came across this statistic in a post over on Copyblogger in the second in a series of posts about lessons learned by Dan Kennedy, who - in case you didn't know - is one of the most highly paid copywriters of all time.

You ready?

"A staggering 68% of customer loss is due to indifference."

Wow. I have to say that set me back.

It's not that they're angry, dissatisfied or looking for something new. They simply don't care about you and have no reason not to leave except for inertia and status quo.

That's frightening. Go look at your revenues for this year and see where they're coming from. Is the majority from net new customers or from existing ones?

I'm betting that the majority is from your existing customer base. Right?

What would happen to your business if 68% of your existing customers went away? Bet that would be ugly, huh.

Marketers need to create content and nurturing programs specifically to transform indifference into engagement. Actually, the best case is to continue engaging them seamlessly as they become your customers—without ever stopping. Engagement is not just for pre-sale initiatives. And I have news for you, memory doesn't last long. You have to continuously provide valuable ideas to push the needle on affinity.

The issue I see most is that marketers with limited resources are trying to employ prospect content in their customer communications. Not to be harsh, but really, why should they care?

Even if it's content about another product or solution than the one your customer is currently using, the way they think about it will include tie-ins with their current situation - which is already being impacted by the solution you provide.

The secret to customer marketing is to realize that they know more than prospects. You've got to go up-level to add value. And, just because they've pulled out their wallets does not mean they've lost their perspective. They still care more about what your solutions enable than the feeds, speeds and features. It's just that now they care about those benefits as an expansion to the good stuff they're already getting from being your customer.

If you think about it in this light, your customers require content that's different than what your prospects need to choose to buy in the first place.

So, how do you know what kind of content customers need?

• Go ask your customer service reps about the questions they're getting. Then go ask your sales reps what needs they're meeting with cross-sell and up-sell.


• When you do customer interviews for case studies, ask them where they want to go in the future and figure out how you can help. Those are the kinds of customer stories your customers are interested in hearing about.

I talk a lot about creating buyer personas and mapping content to buying stages. Don't limit yourself to only doing this exercise for prospects—do it for customers, too. As you extend the way you look at customers from pre-purchase across the lifecycle, you just may start to get that 360 degree view of the customer that's been bandied about for awhile, but has remained so elusive for most of us.

Just as answering one question can open the door for a new question to arise, solving one problem (original choice to buy) can illuminate a new opportunity or challenge the customer may now be prepared to address. It's just a new problem-to-solution scenario begging for content to show your customers the way forward. Whether that means buying more from you or perfecting the way they use your product to get even more benefits than they thought possible.

Consider that a monthly customer newsletter is not enough.

• Are you offering webinars designed for customers with "insider" tips and tricks?
• When's the last time you created a video just for customers?
• How many "advanced" educational articles do they have access to?
• What kind of online dialogue can you stimulate based on their interests?

What are you doing to shift your content to engage your customers and abolish that 68% indifference that can tank your future growth potential?

CSO Insights eBook: Sales Management 2.0

I'm pleased to be able to share the new CSO Insights eBook: Sales Management 2.0 - Optimizing Sales Performance Volume 2 that's hot off the presses with the conclusion of their 16th annual Sales Performance Optimization Study (SPO).

It couldn't be better timed as we roll into 2010, focused on exceeding our hard-won accomplishments in 2009. In fact, the 8% drop in sales plan attainment from 2008 to 2009 has put many of us under the gun to turn strategy into results.

This year's SPO study found that the top sales effectiveness issues for 2010 include:

• Revising/enhancing our lead generation programs
• More closely aligning sales and marketing
• Enhancing sales team communications
• Analyzing our customers' buying process

[It goes without saying that all of these are near and dear to my heart.]

This eBook showcases four companies, sharing real-world experience about how they're finding success by optimizing their sales processes. Here's a taste:

Joe Demmler, from Aon, shares the story of how his company consolidated 30 different CRM systems to, "create one way of doing sales and marketing, and implement one system to support this way of doing business."

Dave Zuchowski, from Hyundai, reveals how the company managed to increase sales by 6% during a time when the automotive industry as a whole was seeing a 23% decline in revenues.

Tom Blondi, from Spin.com, discusses how companies get the performance they reward. He applies the impacts to performance to 3 categories: compensation, recognition and involvement.

John Williams, from StorageTek, talks about how improving productivity gains enabled the company to grow from $700M to $2.2B in annual revenues over four years—and they did it without adding a single sales person during that time. 

These stories are all rich with detail and can provoke innovative ideas to help all of us improve and innovate our sales and marketing strategies. Thanks to CSO Insights for allowing me to share the eBook with you. Download your copy.

Cheat Sheet for Marketing Content Consistency

In my last post, Issues with Corp-sourcing Marketing Content, I suggested the idea of creating an editorial style baseline to keep your content on track with solution developers, brand stewards and legal folks. I thought it might be useful to show you why you need one and how to get started building a baseline to help you better connect with your prospects.

Marketers are starting to embrace the idea of nurturing over the long term. It's becoming obvious, as buyers take charge, that we have to engage with them across the entirety of the buying process. If your cycle time is 9 to 12 months, that can necessitate the development of a lot of content. Chances are that it will be created over time.

To more easily enable the creation of a consistent storyline when content is created over time, you need a guide—a cheat sheet, if you will.

An editorial style baseline can be thought of as the pro vs. con list you reference during content development to ensure consistency of storyline. It's your double-check list to make sure you've used the terms and ideas the same way for each part of the story you're telling your prospects. It's also the way you make sure your content doesn't slip back into company-focus which can diminish the levels of engagement you're working so hard to build.

Here's a simple example of an editorial baseline to get you started:

You can add elements to this list and include as much detail as you need. Add to it as you learn more about your prospects and refine your messaging over time. It's a good idea to create a baseline for each segment or nurturing track.

This helps you to train yourself and your writers about not only how to focus on your prospects' perspective, but also on adding value with each content asset you develop.

Make sure that before you publish your content, you've done a run through to make sure you've included the Pros and eliminated the Cons.

Issues with Corp-sourcing Marketing Content

As you may know, I work on a lot of B2B marketing content projects. I also work for a lot of big companies that have a lot of people working on the solutions and services I help them sell. And, let's not forget the brand and legal people. Each one of them has an investment in how the content represents their area of expertise.

But should each of them have the last "word" on your marketing content?

Not exactly.

These corporate sources should have some influence and input. But with the final approval stamp, they can cause a lot of confusion that they really believe they're helping the company to avoid.

Here's what I mean:

Legal is very literal.
I was once told I had to include the phrase "with an Internet connection" whenever I talked about accessing an SaaS product. Think about this. Would someone without an Internet connection even be reading about or interested in acquiring a solution only available through Internet access? And, since the content was to be distributed online, would they even have access to it?

Because the nature of the product required that we talk about online capabilities, you can imagine the creativity required to try to write the content in a way that didn't necessitate using that phrase in every other sentence. Was that necessary? Would the content have been better if it could have been written more fluidly by working under the assumption that our audience was indeed savvy enough to realize that anything "online" required an Internet connection?

Solution developers love feeds and speeds.
These are your experts. They know everything about the products - how they operate, how all the parts work together, and how to use them to get the best results. To them it's obvious. They want to talk about all those feeds and speeds. It's what they're passionate about. But solution developers don't realize that your prospects don't know and likely don't care about that stuff until they get farther along in their buying process. Some of them will never care as that part is the job of someone else.

The other issue is that it's virtually impossible to get solution developers to unlearn what they know to get to the prospect's perspective. They think they can, but not very many of them can do it well.

Brand stewards are bound by the big picture.
Corporate marketers are wrapped up in the brand. This can be either useful or limiting depending on how closely aligned your brand is to your prospects and customers. If the way the brand is presented is continuously evolving to meet your markets on their turf, then it's good.

If the brand is after a space too wide to be relevant to the specific niche your content is aiming to reach, then some compromise needs to be made. I'm not saying that content should go against brand. I am saying that the more marketers are able to focus on segmentation and personalization with content, the greater the need for flexibility in brand representation.

Marketers need to take proactive steps.
Since it's unlikely that marketers will ever get complete control over content creation—often a good thing—here are a few steps you can take to give your content the best opportunity to do the job you need it to:

1. Create personas for your most ideal prospect segments.


2. Map content to buying stages - build a storyline for routes to purchase for each product or solution to each persona.


3. Get salespeople in the room to confirm or help modify the personas and maps until you both agree you're on target.


4. Present the personas and storylines to your legal, solution and brand people and work together to create a style baseline that matches up. 

Once you've all worked together to create the foundation for content creation, marketing can work to create a continuous flow of content that matches up to prospect needs from the start. This also streamlines the publishing process to enable marketing to fuel the content engine you rely on for lead generation and prospect nurturing.

Using this proactive approach makes a lot more sense than spending time and resources to draft content that can turn out differently every time when you're reliant on random corp-sourcing to get your content approved for publishing. Plus it just takes too much time.

Oh, and the style baseline can also be helpful in establishing how your company interacts consistently through social media. Something to be considered since they're probably doing it anyway.

What do you think?

Put Your Marketing Content on a Maintenance Plan

Don't you just hate it when you get an email offering what looks like a juicy white paper only to discover after filling out the dang registration form that it's several years old? Do you feel duped? I do.

It used to be that information was scarce, so your content lasted longer, had less competition. That's definitely no longer the case.

Companies may think they've gotten around the dating issue by not putting the year on their copyright notice. But they haven't. All a prospect has to do is right click on a page of your PDF file and select document properties to find out when the file was created and/or modified.

Content is a big investment. Companies that want to maximize their investments need to  consider methods for culling the most longevity they can out of that investment. Unfortunately a lot of great content past its prime gets relegated to file-server heaven. Although that's better than when they just ignore it and leave what was once a great paper in a prominent place on their websites with a hyperlink like "Hot New Tips for..." when it hasn't been HOT since 2006.

Instead, marketers need to put their content on a maintenance plan.

Based on how rapidly the type of information changes, schedule time to review and refresh your content. This doesn't just mean PDF documents, either. If your web page information stays static for too long, people notice. 

But focus first on your meatiest content. The content you use as juicy offers for lead generation or at crucial buying stage transitions needs to deliver on your prospects' expectations. The best part is that refreshing content is often cheaper than creating new content.

Consider the following options for refreshing your content:

• New Title: Can you update the title to give your paper more relevance based on how your market has evolved?


• New Section Headers: Headers have impact as directional guides as well as in carrying your theme throughout the paper. List your current headers to see what story they tell on their own and see if you can take a new perspective - likely in line with the ideas your new title evokes.


• Update Statistics: Many papers used statistics as validation for assertions made within them. Do yours need to be updated to current numbers? Can you draw inferences between the old and new stats to add new insights to the paper?


• Switch out Your Sidebars: Can you switch out quotes or call outs to highlight different information that will catch your readers' attention? Maybe add a new list or update the wording used in the old one.


• Edit the Content: What about tightening sentences, updating phrases and even looking for ways to change the wording a bit to get the focus closer to your readers' perspective?

Those are just a few simple ways to consider refreshing your most valuable content to help it keep on doing what it's supposed to do—engage your audience by providing recognizable value. Don't let a date limit the use you can get from your content assets.

Is Your Marketing Content Wardrobe Complete?

A short time ago I wrote a post, The Focus of Content Marketing is Not Format. I've been thinking about that and trying to come up with a way to help B2B marketers understand why the way they design their content is more important than format (white paper, case study, article, etc.). I came up with a correlation to fashion. Yeah, I know. Stay with me.

But first, I'm giving credit for the spark of this bizarre brainstorm Friday fun to a post Kelley Robertson (@fearlessselling) wrote - The Dangers of Sales Casual - about follow-up calls.

The tone and style of how content is written is as important as how it is spoken. Content serves as personality signature for your company - especially if it's the person's first impression of you. Depending on the purpose of your content and the audience it's created for, the "fashion-sense" of your content can either propel the response to it beyond your goals, or miss the mark and fall flat.

Consider these content fashion match-ups:

Flannel Pajamas - Customer Stories
I know, seems like a strange choice. However, when a prospect reads a customer story I want them to feel comfortable. I want them to totally relate to the customer and the company as they realize that success can actually be theirs based on this example of how your customer solved a similar problem with your help. Although the writing itself may not be "warm and fuzzy," the reaction from your audience should be that they feel an increased level of comfort about choosing your company as a partner for solving their problem.

Jeans - Blog Posts
The conversational nature of a blog makes it more casual. Blogs enable inanimate companies to let a bit of their personality shine through. Although, like denim, the content in your blog posts needs to be sturdy enough to catch and keep the attention of your intended audience. Similarly, blogs are also strong enough to stand up to and embrace the comments and opinions of readers.

Shorts - Twitter
Not only due to length, but the even more personalized and casual stance that can be effective for engaging people with 140 characters or less. Just make sure you don't burn your legs by focusing only on yourself. Twitter is really where valuable concise ideas and sharing the great stuff of others (along with your own) can make a lasting impression.

Khakis - Articles
Articles are the business casual of content. They're not too long and are usually focused on a specific topic. They're great for educational insights and good ones are not so formal that you need to expend a ton of effort to get through them. Articles are a good fit for limited-attention audiences who need meaty insights without expending more than 3 - 5 minutes. They're more approachable than suits...and they should also drive conversations about the subject matter or at least plant the seeds for them.

Suits - White Papers
These are the full-bore business attire of content. They're about 6 - 12 pages and usually more professional in tone than their shorter-form counterparts. White papers are about expertise. People have high expectations from white papers that match the amount of effort they'll expend to read them. Great white papers provide supporting evidence for the arguments they present and are backed-up with research. With a white paper, I want the audience to walk away with insights that increase their consideration about building a business case for solving the problem. I also want readers to find them valuable enough to pass along to other influencers.

Tuxedos - eBooks
I gave eBooks the tuxedo match-up because they tend to have more style than white papers. More graphics, more white space, more color, more font embellishments. eBooks not only deliver valuable information, but often play a bit with us visually. I want the audience of an eBook to be as engaged by the environment the information is presented within as they are about the takeaways from that information.

Sweatpants - Solution Briefs
These are the workhorses of content for later-stage buyers. The best ones not only present some feeds and speeds information but solidify the discussion about the usefulness of the solution. I want a solution brief to validate that the prospect is making the right choice based upon what they've learned about solving the problem to date.  

So what do you think? Would you change any of these? Can you come up with additions to fill out the wardrobe? What about video, podcasts, webinars, slide decks or other types of content?

Post your additions/changes in the comments below and I'll randomly select 2 of you to receive a copy of my book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, on Monday.

What's the Cost When Sales Tries to Do it All?

I just saw some of the results that @Gerhard20 posted after reading an advance copy of CSO Insights' new 2010 Sales Effectiveness Study. I had a really strong urge to bang my head on my desk.

Let's talk about three of the research findings:

Research fact: Forty-seven percent of the companies surveyed (1,600 companies participated) reported that their salespeople generate their own leads.

Research fact: Nearly 62 percent of all sales leaders surveyed say that their ability to generate new leads needs improvement.

Anyone see anything askew in this picture?

Now look at this:

Research fact: Thirty percent of all forecasted deals that didn't materialize were lost to the competition. Why? These competitors either had a better relationship with the customer or received a better price or terms.

Why is it that sales thinks they have to do the whole enchilada? Even if they're not the best suited for the task at hand?

Let's talk about lead generation for a minute. More than 750 companies said their salespeople generate their own leads. What the heck is marketing doing? Or are salespeople just discarding the leads marketing gives to them? If so, I'm guessing it's because marketing isn't nurturing and qualifying the leads to give sales what they need.

But, consider that salespeople should be having worthwhile conversations with short-horizon buyers, not generating leads. Unless of course your sales cycle is weeks, instead of months. Salespeople are after the sale—not the nurture. They want to work with folks who are actively buying something, not spinning their wheels with contacts who aren't even sure they're "looking." Salespeople are mostly hunters. It's just the way they're built—at least the good ones.

And, if salespeople were talented at generating a volume of leads, not just contacts, then the need for lead generation improvements would be far lower than 62 percent.

All of this said, the statistic that really frustrates me is the loss of forecast deals to the competition because they had a better relationship. [For the sake of this post, I'm ignoring price and terms because if you're losing deals based on that, you haven't added enough value to overcome commodity status.]

Relationships are the name of the game. For marketing, for sales and for customer retention. How is it possible that so many companies still fail to "get" this? How is it possible that companies still haven't woken up to the fact that selling is really all about BUYERS and providing whatever they need to make the purchase decision in your favor?

The key point is that building a relationship can't just be a trick your company drags out during sales interactions. Relationships are built over time. Value perceptions take more than a couple of conversations and a white paper.

Building relationships should be an ongoing process that serves as a lead generation process because people come to rely on your company for insights, education and expertise. That's what brings referrals, gets your company in conversations that include your buyers and helps convince them you're worth considering ahead of other alternatives.

Then again, only 51% of salespeople are making quota. Yet companies are living with that.

Can you think of any better reasons that marketing and sales alignment should be at the top of the priority list for 2010?