Marketing Interactions

The Left Brain Model for B2B Demand Gen

I had the chance to spend some time last week speaking with Malcolm Friedberg about what he calls The Left Brain Model (TLBM) and learn about the driving factors for its creation. 

Essentially, Malcolm wanted to create a way to help marketers articulate a bottoms up structure that removes the mystery from what's meant by integrated marketing. Marketing has changed so fast that the skill sets and comprehension of what's needed to keep up have made marketers and companies afraid to step up to the plate.

By creating a stair-stepped model, Malcolm's intention is to provide an intuitive and logical framework that marketers can use to construct their marketing strategies based on applying different techniques at each stage of the process.

He defines TLBM as a blueprint for marketing program development and intends to address all the needed components with additional papers devoted to exploring the nuances of each of them. This includes marketing content, lead scoring and lead nurturing and more. It also builds the process a step at a time instead of asking busy marketers to do it all at once. I like the incremental approach - it tends to have more stickiness over time.

This blog post details Malcolm's rationale for The Left Brain Model.

The model works starting from the bottom left with prospect engagement, moving up toward the right to closed/won deals. I'm stongly in favor of a marketing process that covers the entire buying process (and beyond). Marketing programs must do more than toss contacts at sales to be effective. We all know this, but figuring out the "how" can be the biggest challenge to change.

Adam Needles has written two great blog posts describing the process, so I'll leave that in his capable hands. Go take a look...

Elements of a Modern Demand Generation Plan: Part 1    Part 2

In my opinion, The Left Brain Model is on the right track. Many of my clients contact me because they realize they need to become more strategic with their online and content marketing, but they just don't know where to start. This may be evidenced by a recent poll conducted during a BtoB Online webcast that showed 70% of attendees spend 25% or less on content marketing. Although they may know they need it, it appears that many haven't wrapped their arms around how to use it effectively given the change in how buyers buy, and the need to use content to address their preferences and informational needs during the purchasing process.

Numerous surveys indicate that B2B marketers are expanding their investments in digital marketing, but it remains unclear just how many of them are succeeding with content marketing strategies that drive demand generation that contributes to downstream revenues.

The Left Brain Model begins to put together a framework that's aimed toward helping marketers add science to the art of marketing. With the increasing need to be accountable for marketing's contribution to company objectives, this is a needed skillset marketers need to develop.

This excerpt from Malcolm's TLBM for Demand Generation just may inspire you to take the next steps in developing your demand gen model:

What’s the most basic statement a Marketer can make to his or her CEO – the empirical presentation of which is both profound and persuasive?

“In order to achieve next year’s company revenue goal, I need $X for Y-specific programs.”

Imagine having the ability to show a formula for how you’ll achieve that goal. You’ll need a variety of data points. Initially, some will be based on industry-benchmarked conversion rates and yields. Over time, they’ll be validated by real data, your data. And, if at any time in the process you decide to look backwards―not to justify your existence but to apply this knowledge in order to improve performance―using TLBM will facilitate the Marketing metrics to do that as well.

 Go download your copy today.

I'm interested to see how the model develops. It's definitely a Brave New World out there for B2B marketers. Lots of possibilities and opportunities for those up to the challenge.

If Content Marketing is Important to You...

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Send Your Marketing Content to Med School

Much too often I hear B2B marketers say that their prospects already know they need the solutions their company sells. Quite frankly, if every prospect in your database isn't beating a path to your door—check in hand—this belief is a costly delusion.

Face facts. You know too much.

Just as you know all the reasons why purchasing your solution should be a no-brainer, that without your solution, your prospects will struggle longer and unnecessarily to attain the business objectives they desire, they don't see it that way.

Nope. Your prospects are hunkered down in their situations, dealing with their reality. From their perspective, the workaround that employees are grumbling about is getting the job done. They're eyeing that new compliance requirement, trying to modify existing processes to address it as efficiently as possible. They may not even realize that this is an issue that could be addressed more productively with outside intervention.

The truth is that most of your prospects just aren't prepared to discover another way. They need help diagnosing issues and framing resolutions that deliver more value to the company than the way they've always done things.

Ultimately, this means B2B marketers need to create Diagnostic Content for the pre-buying stages. Yep, that's right. You need to provoke ideation and motivate the desire to change. Marketing content needs to start before prospects raise their hands, prompting them to recognize that there is value in further exploration.

Diagnostic Content addresses:

• What: Issue Identification
  Develop content that points to the causes of issues your prospect may be dealing with. Why don't they see the issue as a priority to resolve? What would make them recognize that the current situation is an obstacle to results worth eliminating? Issue identification is about helping prospects reach that "Aha" moment that catches their attention and motivates them to want to learn more. Issue identification is where you can plant the seeds of dissatisfaction with current situations, but also provide hope that there's a better way. Think carrot, not stick.


• How: Paths to Improvement
  Once you've helped them identify an issue, you need to help them see a path to addressing it. If you're hoping they'll figure it out on their own, you've missed the point. Your prospects are busy, overworked and short on time. The simpler you can make it, the more likely they'll follow the content bread crumbs you place before them. But, simple is not effective without clarity and recognizable value. Your path to improvement must have all of those facets. Connect the dots by making next steps easy to take. Expect huge leaps and your content marketing will need emergency resusitation. Perception of the effort required to engage with your ideas can either improve the health of your relationship with prospects or kill their momentum.


• Why: Value Quantification
  You must show them how they gain more value with your solution than they can achieve without you, and it cannot be unrealistic. In fact, the more specific you can make it, the more personalized to their specific situation, the better your chances. Remember to match the value to your prospect's objectives. Giving a line-of-business manager financial information valuable to a CIO—while needed for a business case—may lose the attention of the manager who's goal is to reduce a process cycle time from 2 months to 2 days. Relevance rules!


• When: Now vs. Later
  There is a big difference between a "maybe someday" solution and an "I need it now or the world will implode" solution. In today's restained economic environment, you need to help your prospect get to that second conclusion. Urgency must be a factor in diagnostic marketing content. Is your marketing content prescribing chicken soup for the common cold or the antidote to a terminal disease? [Okay - a bit dramatic, but it's all in the positioning.]

Prospects have changed. IDC's 2010 Customer Experience Survey found that vendor content was the most highly influential component of the pre-purchase decision-making process for IT purchasers. Marketing Sherpa finds that 78% of B2B marketers say generating high quality leads is their biggest challenge.

Get infront of your prospects earlier by creating diagnostic content that helps them identify issues, choose a path to improvement and quantify the value specific to their needs. Helping them to recognize it's critical to diagnose and solve the problem now, rather than later will aid in the development of those high quality leads B2B marketers need in their pipelines.

In order to create truly relevant diagnostic content, you need to forget all the stuff you know and put yourself in your prospect's shoes. Marketers tend to start too far down the road when developing marketing content. Back it up and help your prospects diagnose their issues by sending your marketing content to med school.

Buyers Set the Pace for B2B eMarketing

The ability to instantly publish content, send email, and Tweet give the impression that speed is a marketer's friend. Maybe so, maybe not. But, just because we can push content out more rapidly than ever, doesn't mean that your buyer's pace for making a purchase decision will match your stride. In fact, quite the opposite is likely true.

Consider these 4 factors impacting the B2B buying process:

1. More information availability translates to more work for your buyers. It's noisy out there and the volume increases every day. Given all the informational choices, deciding what content to engage with and evaluating which vendors are truly credible and the right match for their companies is increasingly difficult.


2. More people in the B2B buying process means more time to reach consensus. With more people, comes more perspectives that must be addressed. Getting everyone on the same page is a project of its own. A recent Harvard Daily Stat reported that, "Once you've got 7 people in a decision-making group, each additional member reduces decision effectiveness by 10%."


3. More concern about finances and ROI means business cases must be built and validated in order to secure budget. Interestingly, research earlier this year conducted by Demand Gen Report found that 30% of purchases were made via budgets allocated and approved AFTER a business case was built justifying the decision. If you're waiting to find buyers with budget, instead of helping them secure it, you're missing out.


4. More shifting of priorities in line with quickly evolving business landscapes—not to mention a shaky economy—means projects can be derailed or delayed in an instant. In today's marketplace you've got to prove value to drive urgency.

Let's face it, buying today is different than it used to be. Products and solutions are growing in complexity that takes more time to understand, but the kicker is that your buyers don't have more time. They have less.

Marketers must pay for a buyer's time with content and interactions they find truly valuable. This is why I spend so much time talking about buyer personas, profiles and strategies. Just randomly creating content isn't going to get the job done. There's too much of it out there already.

What's needed is content that answers the questions buyers have related to a priority they're tasked to address. Shorter pieces that they can consume swiftly while gaining a meaty insight that helps to shift their perspectives. More examples of how people just like them have found success in similar situations. Win their trust and, by doing so, get them to extend the amount of their precious time they're willing to spend with you/your content.

Your buyers also need content they can share with others involved in making the decision who have different viewpoints about how the solution will impact them. The "what's in it for me" question must be answered appropriately for each of them. Although they may not be able to seal the deal, they can certainly stop it in its tracks if they don't see why they should care.

Even more important is to realize that conversations need to provide just as much value as the content your produce for individual consumption. To provide a very insightful white paper and then follow it up with a sales call to see if they're ready to buy diminishes the progress you may have made. Consider each interaction you have with a buyer from thier side of the equation.

The only reason a buyer will speed up the pace of their buying process is when they perceive that their interactions with your company provide more value to them than to you. So pay attention to the intent that shows through from your side. Are you helping or selling?

All of this means you need an interactive marketing strategy that combines content and conversations to help buyers make the decision to increase their pace. Not just decision makers, but each and everyone involved in the decision. After all, it's up to them.

Is Internal Marketing in Your B2B Go-to-Market Strategy?

As B2B marketers with full plates and a never-ending buffet of programs that need attention, we often forget to consider that internal marketing can be as important as external marketing. This is even more true with the rise of social media.

Internal marketing is about educating everyone involved about how your company is going to market, who your customers and ideal prospects are, what they care about and why they should care about what your company offers. It's about keeping everyone in the loop.

The day when the only employees who interacted with your customers and prospects were those on the front lines, such as sales reps and customer service agents, is long gone. Even the guy in that invisible cube in the back corner who's never invited to meetings can now influence your markets with a few keystrokes and a click.

I've talked to many companies who've insisted that they aren't using social media, only to do a quick search and locate the public faces of their employees, some labeling themselves with the company's name. Just because the marketing team isn't using social media, doesn't mean your company isn't being "seen" as a participant.

If you think your employees aren't on social media, think again.

But beyond the latest shiny object are a number of reasons why internal marketing needs to make it to the top of your priority list, including:

• Consistency of brand. Getting everyone on the same page with what's said about the brand is critical to your reputation in the marketplace. Social media policies can help with that, but if what customer service says differs from what sales says and that differs from what the executive team says, not to mention your marketing messaging, you've got a problem. By sharing your marketing plans across the organization, you'll not only help everyone to be consistent — even when they personalize their interactions — but you may even learn something that could be critical for improvement.


• Connecting the story. With all the efforts we're expending as marketers to map content to buying stages and discern which information to distribute at the right time based on the persona involved, if your employees had a chance to jump into a conversation, would they know what to offer up?


• Listening to your markets. Considering that anyone who works for you can be participating in some capacity online, what might they hear that your marketing team doesn't? You can't be everywhere. Figure out how to help them listen for you and let you know when they hear something that may point to a pivot you need to make in your messaging. Even more importantly, develop a closed loop process so they know their efforts make a difference. Appreciation counts.


• Serving your customers. Marketing to your customers, as well as those that serve them can pay big dividends. When customers speak, their peers listen. When customers ask for help, they expect immediate results. Cross-messages plant the seeds of doubt. If the company promises something that your service reps can't deliver, customer relationships are in trouble. With the payoff for retention and loyalty so high, ignoring these two groups is a recipe for chaos.


• Building momentum. When every experience is an endorsement that your company works as a well-connected team that's responsive to the needs and priorities of potential and existing customers, momentum for buying revs up. Your company's reputation becomes more credible, the consistent reinforcement of value builds trust and more people want to do business with you. Because you've spent time marketing to your sales team, they know about your prospects, their needs, concerns and the next steps to take that will keep them moving toward purchase. In combination, this means better connection rates, conversations that add value and shorter sales cycles.

If marketers aspire to gain a respected seat at the executive table, making internal marketing a priority can help them get there. After all, in today's business environment, it takes a team to win a customer and grow a company.

What are you doing to unify all of the experiences that it's possible for a prospect or customer to have with your organization?

How to Keep Marketing Vs. Sales Alive and Thriving

Earlier this week I wrote a post asking the question Does Sales Care About Alignment with Marketing? Some great comments were made about the fact that sales will LOVE marketing if they get QUALITY leads. But not much was said about what it takes to make that happen.

B2B marketing and sales alignment, sales enablement and integrating the pipeline into one end-to-end process won't occur just because your company needs to give salespeople qualified leads. It takes work. And, often this work requires shifting the culture for both departments.

For those of you making progress - Congrats! For those of you with a healthy Marketing VS Sales mentality, see how many of these scenarios are true within your company:

WE...

1. Don't let marketing and sales speak to each other or share information.
2. Refuse to create an agreed-upon ideal lead definition.
3. Encourage sales to cherry-pick leads and let the others rot in the CRM.
4. Let salespeople tell their own stories and create their own content.
5. Have sales reps pitch everyone who downloads a white paper.
6. Mandate that marketing focus on increasing lead quantity.
7. Consider marketing a cost center.
8. Don't give marketing any technology that improves visibility into the buying process.
9. Only approve short-term marketing campaigns that include sales offers.
10. Give all the credit for revenue production to the sales team.

In case no one has mentioned this, operating your company's marketing and sales efforts as distinct, separate and siloed entities is self-defeating. Not to mention irritating to your prospects, buyers and customers due to the disconnects for them in their relationship with your company.

Alternatively, consider this scenario that can become a reality when marketing and sales work together:

Marketing generates net-new leads. They score the leads based on demographics and put them into nurturing tracks based on how they were sourced (subject matter interest) and who they are (personas).

Every couple of touches, the prospects are asked a progressive question on the landing page to help qualify them based on the ideal lead definition that marketing and sales have agreed upon.

When a certain score is reached, an inside sales rep is alerted to call the lead and provided with a follow-on content offer relevant to their expressed interests. This enables a conversation based on a topic of relevance to the lead. The inside sales rep either routes the lead to field sales as qualified for pursuit, or lets them remain in nurturing for futher development.

And the process continues consistently as marketing and sales work together to help prospects make progress across their buying process until they're ready to engage with sales.

The results?

Sales accepts 171% more leads than they used to.

Sales is able to increase their ability to connect with leads by 200% because leads feel like they know them due to relevant nurturing interactions.

Because the value the company provides is recognized by the leads based on education, expertise and evidence content, there is less discounting, resulting in higher revenue per won deal.

The time it takes to close deals is reduced by 30% from what it took before.

[These results are real as reported by Intellitactics and presented as a case study reported in my book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale]

If these improvements don't matter to your company, by all means, keep that Marketing VS Sales mentality alive and thriving in your company.

But, really, why would you want to?

Does Sales Care About Alignment with Marketing?

In case you're living under a rock, the Sales 2.0 Conference is on Day 2 in San Francisco. I've been following the Twitter stream since I'm not at the conference, and really wishing I was. Craig Rosenberg raised the issue of whether or not Sales cares about alignment with marketing? He said that during his panel discussion, he noticed that only marketers were talking about the issue.

This is an interesting point. Do they?

Perhaps the idea of aligning with marketing is about as enticing to Sales as using a CRM system was first perceived. In other words, Sales is likely saying - What's In It for Us?

There are a number of factors that support this perspective. For example - sales currently spends 40 - 60 hours a month reinventing marketing content that doesn't work for them, but should. They only accept a small percentage of leads that marketing generates because they don't think they're worthy of sales pursuit.

Although this seems to be a shared problem, the sales perception seems to hold sway.

@hoovers: Whether avg or best in class, a minimum of 70% of leads generated by sales or marketing do not close. #SM20

@AnnekeSeley Sales people spend 21% time on admin tasks, [field reps spend] 2.4 days/wk out of office, 11% preparing and researching pre-meetings per Alexander Group. #sm20

@milesaustin: Buyer behavior is changing rapidly du to free info, exec turnover. 20% of sales rep time is spent researching customers. #sm20

Now marketing comes along and says, Hey - we want credit for contribution to revenues. But most marketers' compensation isn't dependent upon meeting a revenue quota, although that may start changing.

@derekgrant: #sm20 - for the second time today, a Marketer (from @sap) noted the need for Marketing KPIs to be based in revenue generation goals.

@LoveMediaSales: "@HeinzMarketing: If you started the org from scratch, would sales & marketing be in the same group? Should they be? #sm20 <<Definitely yes

The point is that if alignment is going to happen, there has to be some kind of payoff for both sides. Marketing gains visibility to see how their programs convert leads to revenues, learns what works and what doesn't, lessens lead leakage through closed loop processes, etc. But sales gets...what? We need to show them.

Strikes me as the need for marketing to "market" to Sales and persuade them that their lives will be better if they work together. So what will it take for marketing to convert Sales on the value of alignment?

If they've been doing the work to develop personas, match qualified prospects to an agreed upon lead definition and develop and execute content strategies mapped to the buying process, it would seem like they'd have the information they need to help salespeople sell more effectively to more highly qualified leads.

But, apparently not:

@jcousineau: Mark Woollen says Mrktg + Sales now dealing w/different funnels. Bridging the gap in handoffs from 1 to the other a big problem #sm20

I'll leave you with this:

@HeinzMarketing: If you started the org from scratch, would sales & marketing be in the same group? Should they be? #sm20

Multiple-Personality Disorder in B2B Marketing Content

With the increase in publishing opportunities and the distribution of marketing across the enterprise (from field marketing to corporate marketing to demand gen to product marketing, and more), B2B marketers are sending a considerable amount of marketing content into the ether. The problem is that all the variations derived by different marketing functions may be creating confusion more than driving interest or delivering recognizable value.

IDC recently conducted a survey of B2B CMOs asking them which "voice" they use to go to market. The six choices included:

• product line
• industry
• solution
• campaign (theme)
• customer segment
• job role

The responses indicate that companies are using all of them pretty evenly.

What strikes me first about the choices is that most of them are company focused. Actually, depending upon the angle of approach, all of them could end up company focused. In fairness, they could also be buyer focused - but, given this remark from a CMO that Rich Vancil spoke with, I'm guessing that's not the norm:

In a recent head-to-head with a CMO I asked: "From a marketing perspective, what is your single biggest challenge for your $20b company?" His reply: "We need to ensure that the marketing messaging that we create here at the top is effectively threaded into our execution all across and down through the organization".

The answer to this challenge is for B2B marketers to unify around one voice — the one that resonates with their buyers. That means it must first and foremost be focused on their buyers' perspectives.

With that in mind, take a look at how one voice can be applied to unify what used to be 6 distinct voices:

Product Line - messaging must revolve around what the product enables buyers to achieve in relation to a business priority.

Industry - address specific industry needs that are related to the issues buyers are trying to address.

Solution - how do product lines combine/integrate to produce a more comprehensive answer to the issue?

Campaign (theme) - based on the priorities and outcomes the buyer is tasked to achieve.

Customer Segment - focused on addressing the reason for creating the segment - which is whatever the people in the segment have in common.

Job Role - IT buyer, business buyer, economic buyer, end user, etc. The messaging used should be specific to helping that role do their job better with your expertise and offerings. To my mind, this one is a sub-set of customer segment, above.

Do you see how a common thread develops across all six? When you're using the one voice that will resonate with your buyers as a foundation, regardless of which of the 6 focuses you incorporate, your messaging will remain consistent. Consistency is the component that builds credibility and trust. Those factors predicate short listing and purchase decisions.

Consider the importance of unifying your marketing voice in order to sustain engagement over the lengthening buying process:

"New IDC research shows that the average cycle time of creating a new tech B2B customer -- from initial marketing all the way through to a closed deal -- is over 17 months."

If your messaging appears to have a multiple-personality disorder, it's unlikely that you'll make it that far.

Cold Calling with Content

In a webinar I did for Hoovers last week, I was asked if I thought cold calling had any value in today's business environment. That's not a question that I, as a content marketing strategist, get asked very often...if ever. But, given my background, a few things popped to mind immediately.

Cold calling will be as effective as the conversation is engaging.

And because I live, breath and think content, it didn't take long for my brain to take me down that track. Content presented to people who don't know you or those who haven't yet opted in to learn more from you is a cold call.

As more publishing opportunities become available to B2B marketers, our content will be doing more cold calling.

Examples of cold calling with content include:

• Email. This is one that all B2B marketers will recognize. This is generally facilitated by buying/renting a list and sending out an email with a content offer to people who don't know you.


• Twitter. Sure, your followers are warmer than a cold call, but what about when they retweet your content to their followers who don't know you? There's a recommendation behind their motivation to click, but those people are still coming to your content without knowing what to expect. 


• Lead Generation via syndication. Howard Sewell just wrote a great post about 2 Mistakes that Cause Content Syndication to Fail. His thoughts tie in to my point about cold calling with content.

The point that I'm trying to make is that nearly everything we do in the execution of sales and marketing is content related. Content includes voicemails, conversations, emails, articles, Tweets, Answers on LinkedIn, status updates and wall posts on Facebook, blog posts, webinars, videos, podcasts, eBooks, white papers, customer success stories, etc.

The "cold" part is about the status of your relationship with the recipient.

I read a great post today by S. Anthony Iannarino over on Sales Blogger Union that discussed how we needed to turn influence upside down. A couple of things he said really reasonated with me in relation to how we can use content to turn cold relationships into warm ones.

• "[Y]ou have to care enough to understand what it is that they want."
  In other words, do the work to create buyer personas so deep that you really get to know your prospects and can apply that knowledge to the way you design your content.


• "If you spend time with them, working to create value before claiming any, you develop the trust that influence is built upon."
  In other words, one-off content won't do much. It's the consistent effort made to provide valuable information over time that moves the relationship from cold to warm.


• By sharing "the knowledge you have gained by helping others in a meaningful way, you will develop the credibility that influence is built on."
  In other words, the more meaningful prospects find your content, the higher the credibility ascribed to your content, and your company. Put your expertise front and center.

So here's the point. All content interactions start out at some degree of cold. It's up to your content marketing programs to increase the temperature through the consistent provision of content perceived as valuable by your prospects.

When this happens, the likelihood of your salesperson's call being accepted is much higher, hence warmer.

Cold calling with content is a skill B2B marketers must become proficient at given the ever evolving publishing tools available and your buyers' instinct to self-educate and push your salespeople to the side of the road until they're ready to talk.

Marketers can help ensure that salespeople hit the ground running with warm calls, not get frozen out by prospects who haven't got a clue who they are, what they want or if there's any value to be had that impacts their business objectives.