Marketing Interactions

Design B2B Marketing Content in Pursuit of Inquiry

In writing my new book, Digital Relevance, I spent a lot of time thinking about how a digital approach changes a lot of things, including the opportunity we have to become more relevant to our audiences.

An obvious line of thought, given the title of the book, right?

But here's the thing. Most marketers have gotten so tied around the axle about wanting their content to perform from an audience perspective that they've not given much thought to how it can perform as an inquiry to improve that very relevance and engagement that they're after.

The big question to answer is - What is my content designed to help me - as a marketer - learn about those who engage with it?

What I see mostly is the assumptive stuff based on format, such as:

• If the audience engages with an ROI calculator or views a demo they're late stage
• If they complete a form they may be a "lead"
• If they attend a webinar they're in the evaluation stage

But, how do you know? Because someone said so? Hmm.

We need to be better than this. We need to develop a rousing curiosity about what our audiences are interested in and what engaging with a specific piece of content could mean to them.

Based on the information in the content, not the packaging.

Content must be designed to have mutual value. It must deliver something your audience cares about AND it must deliver an answer to a line of inquiry that can help you improve relevance in a way that leads to additional engagement.

Part of the issue with this is that, as marketers, we're conditioned to think in a perspective based on one-to-many rather than one-to-one. I'm not saying that we yet have the tools or skills to excel at the latter, but I do think we have a huge opportunity to move in that direction. We may as well start now, because that's what's coming.

Think about nurturing for a moment. The point of nurturing is to create continuous engagement based on enticing prospects to take steps toward purchase over the course of their buying process.

This doesn't mean sending out an email with a link to your latest blog post every two weeks.

It means unfolding a story that creates curiosity and anticipation for what's next in the journey to solve the problem on their plates - aligned to their perspective (persona).

So what can you learn if you design your content both to serve prospects and as an inquiry?

Start simply by considering how the dots can be connected to reveal insights you can act upon to find improvements.

For example, if they read A, what's the propensity for them to read B? Or do more of them skip right to F? If they do skip to F then perhaps your content is out of order for how the problem presents to them. Perhaps a change to the way you connect your storyline would improve response and next steps.

As another example, let's get to the meat of the content. Let's say someone reads a content article about determining whether to build or buy the solution to a problem and they share the content with their colleagues. What can you learn? Obviously, if you're selling the "built" version, the slant of the content would be toward that choice.

So could you discern that the person who forwarded the content is trying to convince others involved in the decision that buying is the better option? Or, is that too much of a leap and maybe the group is still wrestling to answer that internal question? If you have a "see also" about how to make that choice and the person also clicks to read that, you may have an answer.

But, more importantly, what you also learn is that where they are in the buying process. They're still considering whether or not to move forward with buying as a means to solve their problem. Until that question is answered, they won't move forward. They are early stage. Does that tell you how to move forward with engaging them? It should.

However, if you're only looking at the format or the number of content assets they've engaged with, you really have no idea about what stage they're in or what they truly care about. The content of the content is what can tell you. If you design it in pursuit of inquiry. The way in which you connect the content about a topic together can also tell you which way they're leaning.

What does your content and the way you share it help you to learn about your audience?

B2B Marketing Content Must Address "Soft" Factors

For some reason, in B2B content marketing, we seem to forget about the "whole" buyer. More and more marketers are embracing buyer personas and the idea of becoming customer centric, but we often only focus on the business side of the buyer, as if they walk into the office and leave the rest of themselves outside.

In the personas I help my clients create, a lot of research goes into what I call "orientation." Orientation is an attempt to identify commonalities across the personalities of people who tend to hold the roles that our marketing and sales programs pursue. These traits can tell us a lot about how to structure content to make it more appealing.

For example, an engineer who is detail oriented would likely prefer content that backs up a premise with research and fact, rather than relying on the company's credibility for it to be believable.

But a report released by Fortune Knowledge Group, in collaboration with Gyro, makes it very clear that there's much more to be taken into account. In Only Human: The Emotional Logic of Business Decisions, 720 business executives clearly reinforce the notion that "soft" factors, such as trust, relationships, and reputation still hold sway.

I have heard this first hand in customer interviews during persona projects where the response to why a vendor was selected was a version of "we just felt they 'got' us and what we're trying to do more than the others." Or "we felt more comfortable with them." And "they made us feel like a big fish in a small pond."

While it's undeniable that insights from data are being used in decision making, the final factor that cements the deal or decision could be intuition or based on a gut feeling. And, marketers may be part of the problem.

You see, the business executives strongly agreed that as information grows and decisions become more complex, they are relying more on those "soft" factors to decide the way forward, including the vendor's culture (53%) and reputation (70%).

Notable highlights from the study:

• 71% say short-term financial sacrifices are worth more than long-term gains
• 65% believe subjective factors that can't be quantified increasingly make a difference when evaluating competing proposals (only 16% disagreed)
• 61% agree that when making decisions, human insights must precede hard analytics
• 52% say ambition, admiration and potential rewards outweigh fear of failure

So how do we, as marketers, use these insights?

First - add a cultural assessment to your persona development. Review the cultures of your best customers and learn what they have in common. Then correlate those qualities to your company's culture. How can some of them be woven into your content and messaging wtihout skewing the content back to a company focus? Think of this as a style factor for the way your content is written or created. What words emulate the values that your company shares with your best customers?

Second - use more carrot than stick. Take a positive path with your content, rather than the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) approach that content takes in an effort to build urgency to change. Help your prospective buyers see the success, rather than avoid the failure.

Third - become better storytellers. Stories engage intuition and help people think for themselves. A well done story invokes emotion in the reader/viewer and helps them to anticipate what their future will look like with the objective met or the problem solved. Stories are meant to engage humans - they've done so for thousands of years.

Finally - take a serious look at what it takes to build long-term relationships, not quick wins. The study finds that trust is a key soft factor for decision making. Earning and sustaining trust and credibility were proven to trump analytical intelligence. This means it's even more important to create consistent experiences across the entirety of the relationship, not just during part of it. And this goes for everyone involved - marketing, sales, customer service...

How is emotion manifesting during the buying process at your company? 

Cut Through the Red Tape of Consensus for B2B Buying Decisions

This headline caught my eye - 53 Percent of B2B Fortune 500 Companies Use Marketing Automation - so I clicked through to read it. Mathew Sweezey wrote the post based on his research into the State of Demand Generation. Mathew presents three reasons for why this increase in the use of marketing automation foretells good things for the industry and his first one got me thinking.

Reason #1: Lots of Red Tape

Mathew makes the point that these enterprise companies are not light in the wallet, but that the process of getting through all of the red tape to get a deal done is exhausting. The fact that this obstacle is being removed bodes well for giving marketing automation the visibility it needs to gain more market share.

I agree. Even though I find it curious that only 53% are using it so far.

But what it made me think about is how many companies I work with where the sales team is convinced that losing deals is about price. We've all heard this argument, but we've also heard the repetitive push back that value overrules price considerations. Both marketing and sales are told to go prove the value.

And I agree with value playing an important role in the decision - perhaps a critical role.

But what if we haven't looked far enough?

When I think of red tape, what I think about immediately for a B2B complex sale - and marketing automation is definitely complex - I think about consensus.

Consensus is hard to get. With the growing number of people (43% increase in stakeholders per IDC) involved in a B2B buying decision, 34% say it's so, getting all of them to buy-in to a decision is requiring more effort.

But are B2B marketers tackling this? Or are they leaving it up to sales? It appears that neither are doing a stellar job as Sales Benchmark Index finds that 58% of typical pipelines are stalled or end up as no decision.

Here are a few reasons marketing needs to get the jump on this:

• 58% of buyers say they spend more time researching
• 53% rely more on peer recommendations
• 34% say purchases were initially unbudgeted
• 65% said the winning vendor's content had a significant impact
• Non-executives view more content than executives

B2B marketers are very concerned about reaching decision makers. This is primarily because this is who salespeople want to speak with. But we need to start thinking about consensus. For without it, we have no deal.

If your marketing content is focused on engaging the decision maker and/or economic buyer, what about the other 3 - 7 (or more) people who can argue against the decision and stop it cold?

What are we doing to convince them that making the decision is the best answer to their problem, issue or achieving their objective?

Context and Conversations

One-size-fits-all content won't get this done. The context, care abouts and decision criteria are different for every influencer involved. In order to promote consensus, marketers need to figure out what the "overlay" conversations are amongst the stakeholders and provide ideas and insights that can be used to aid in their discussions about solving the problem. The key here is that you want them to use your ideas.

By addressing the context of each of them, we can help them to understand the opportunity that exists for them, specifically, as well as how these all culminate to be the best way to solve the problem for the company as a whole.

Establishing value is of course important, but relevance will determine its impact and this means it needs to be "personalized" and based on context.

The shift required here is for marketers to think beyond trying to getting their salespeople into the conversation. By working to facilitate conversations among the stakeholders based on our ideas, we'll find that getting invited into these conversations follows more easily.

What are you doing to ensure your content and nurturing programs are stimulating conversations among stakeholders that build consensus?

Shameless Plug - Mathew and I will be co-presenting a charged-up session on Advanced Nurturing at Content Marketing World in September. I hope we'll see you there.

Manipulating B2B Personas is a Bad Move

Over the last three years, I've helped more than a dozen clients develop 75+ personas. Considering I work mainly for tech companies, and no two of those personas are interchangeable (believe me, I've tried) this is an example of the depth that needs to be achieved to create active personas that contribute to the development of specific messaging that will resonate with each one.

But every once in a while, I run into a situation where marketing executives think they know better. They want to manipulate the personas to a place where they feel back in control of the situation. And this just screws up all the research and effort that's been expended to create them in the first place.

Before I go further, it's important to understand that a B2B buyer persona is a composite based on the commonalities of a defined segment of your target market. I cannot emphaize emphatically enough that a buyer persona is not a real person.

Buyer personas are a guide. They are an active tool used to help you understand what's important to people with similar responsibilities and objectives in similar situations. Personas are serving their purpose when they are used to inform content strategy, messaging, value propositions and ideas that mesh with the perspectives of that specific audience. Well constructed personas contribute to producing engagement that motivates activity toward the intent of buying that can be quantified.

Here's where buyer personas start to go off the rails:

• You try to impose a specific order on priorities based on what you want to say or promote or to emphasize what your product does
• You inflict individual experiences you've had with individual buyers or customers onto the personas, changing what the research identified, because it makes you more comfortable (remember the commonality part - this is no time to let one-offs come into play)
• You decide that the personas aren't quite accurate because they don't agree wtih what you "know" - so you change them to align with YOUR perspective

No matter how long we've been marketers or how much we think we know about our buyers, what we think doesn't matter in the face of buyer interviews and intensive research to understand them as a group. No matter how much we'd like to think that what appeals to us will appeal to them, it may not.

When's the last time you actually participated in buying what your company sells? I've worked with many people who've come over after being a customer to work for a vendor whose product or solution they fell in love with. But the kicker is that they're still only representative of one buyer in one situation with one company. Some of what they know will definitely come into play for personas, but some will not. Knowing which characteristics to use is key.

Here's the rub. Marketers are usually working to engage and motivate a group, a target market segment. If we let the experience we have with one buyer or our own perspective influence the development of personas in conflict with the interviews and research, we may push our messaging off enough to limit our success.

And one more thing. We must never forget that we have the curse of knowledge. We know much more than it's likely our prospects do about what we're selling. It's very hard to go back and unlearn that knowledge to the point where we're truly on level ground with our buyers.

Depending on the complexity of what you sell and how often your persona changes employers, it's possible that buying your solution may only be something they do 3 to 5 times during their entire career. Think about how much the technology and market environments may have changed from one purchase to another. One purchase will be significantly differnt than another. There are many factors in play.

If you want to test a modification, by all means do so. Personas evolve over time and should not remain static. Use the metrics, do follow-up interviews, talk to your salespeople about the conversations their having to find opportunities for tuning. Testing is okay - manipulation based on your opinion as the determining factor usually doesn't turn out well.

So be fair to your buyer personas. Try to remain as unbiased as possible and let the research and the commonalities of the actual people they're modeled to represent hold sway. The success of your programs will reinforce your hands-off position.

Even ONE B2B Persona Can Bring Benefits

Last week, Steve Rayson wrote a blog post over on Anders Pink, B2B Buyer Personas - A Waste of Time? I'm honored that he wrote about a post I published and shared a few metrics I'd not seen. Steve's blog post is solid and pulls in other research and points to be considered - you should go read it.

But Steve concluded with one point that I'd like to counter. He wrote:

"The challenge for B2B companies is to create content that addresses the questions B2B buyers are asking and helping buyers make better decisions. This is complex with multiple people involved as the buying process progresses. Thus it seems to me that buyer personas are more essential than they ever were. However, single buyer personas are probably ineffective and could well be a waste of time. What is required is a full understanding  of the buying process, multiple buyer personas and a clear identification of their requirements at each stage of the process."

[Note: emphasis moved to make my point]

I don't mean to be rude, but I disagree with this kind of thinking. Although that last sentence in his paragraph is right on the money, it's the one I highlighted that has me stirred up. It's the equivalent of thinking "this project is too big (expensive, complex, difficult), so instead, I'll do nothing."

Quitting before you start when you know improving the relevance of your marketing programs will bring rewards is a huge fail. Yes, B2B companies buy with committees. Yes, to do this optimally would require more than one persona.

But a HUGE misconception is that buyer personas are an all-or-nothing proposition.

Sometimes taking an iterative approach to a complex program can be the best way to tackle it. Think about the value you can reap from just one persona. With personas this can be especially valid considering that what's at the end of a persona project is content strategy and development. Sometimes, it's not the persona creation that's the problem, but the execution that goes with each one.

So let's say you can only produce one persona.

First - select the primary persona that sales is clamoring to get into conversation - provided that marketing can influence them. This is important. For example, many salespeople want to speak with CXOs but what we learn is that someone at the director level is doing the research, evaluation and creating the short list for their CXO boss. So take a good look at your choice.

Now let's look at the benefits that one persona can bring:

• Relevance: There's always one persona who is a primary target over the others for each company - one that is better as a way in than the others. If you look at your database, this persona likely makes up a bigger group of contacts than the others. Wouldn't you rather be highly relevant to this major audience than to be serving up good, but not really compelling content, to all of them?
  
  
• Your Ideas in the Room: The thing about B2B personas is that they're part of a group - a buying committee. They talk to each other. They eventually need to reach consensus. If the persona you target is influential, then he or she is capable of bringing your company's ideas and expertise into those conversations.
  
  Considering that short lists are created today - often without speaking to the vendor - this is a critical consideration. But to be motivated to do so, your content must be so relevant that your prospect thinks he came up with them. A persona can help you get there.
  
  
• Pass-Along Value: During the interviews you conduct for developing your ONE persona, you'll learn a lot of things. Asking the right questions is critical. But, if you know you're only creating one, then make sure to ask about the others involved, who can push back and why. What obstacles did this persona have to overcome to gain consensus?
  
  Armed with this information, you can generate content that will help your prospect answer these questions and respond to pushback introduced by others on the buying committee. He or she will pass along your content to help validate the answers.

These are only three benefits, but they should be good enough to get you to consider why even one persona is better than none.

But consider the learning benefits for your marketing team, as well.

One persona is a test bed for:

• Proving increased relevance will make a quantifiable difference
• The opportunity to tweak and refine and learn what works
• Quick wins that earn the ability to ask for more budget and prove it's a good investment
• Developing a process and workflow for content development
• Developing a persona-driven engagement program for better execution
• Creating one solid story across the entirety of the buying process tha can serve as a template as you add more personas when you're ready.

One of the things I always ask clients at the onset of a persona project is if they have the resources to actually put the personas to work. If they don't, then creating them all now isn't the best choice.

Why?

Because personas are never once and done. They need continuous updating and refinement. Three or six months or a year from now they will be different - depending of course on fast fast the market you serve is moving.

If all you can do is create one persona, I say, Get moving! The payoffs will be worth the effort.

If you want to get your feet wet, try the Up Close and Persona app that's featured over to the right. It's a free, simplified process, but it will get you started thinking about what's involved in creating one persona.

Take a Collective Approach to B2B Personas

My friend and colleague, Carlos Hidalgo's blog post, Why Buyer Personas are a Potential Obstacle to Demand Generation Success, got me going this morning. He makes some excellent points and I'd like to add a few of my own.

I agree quite a bit with his assertion:

"The Product Marketing team begins to create this persona and lo and behold, the persona is the exact model of the person who would want to buy their product - not an actual picture of the market."

What marketers do to personas is often fantasy. What's worse is that I see agencies jumping on the bandwagon and using templates where they switch out a few words but much is the same across the slate of personas. In my opinion, they should be shot. Yep, I feel strongly about shoddy work.And it gets old cleaning up the hot messes they leave behind.

The problem is, as Carlos points out, marketers see buyers as we'd like them to be, not as they are or how they see themselves.

A few reasons:

• They create personas in a vacuum - persona creation involves extensive interviewing, internal and external research
• They model personas after a customer they know well, missing all the variables that come into play across a market segment - we're looking for commonalities and a composite sketch - not replicating an individual
• Sales is left out of the project - and so is customer service
• They decide which personas to create before they conduct any research, discounting what doesn't agree with their plan
• They don't understand the role personas play in fueling a content strategy

Carlos states:

"The days of selling to the decision maker are over. B2B buyers buy in packs and have buying committees - understanding the roles within that committee, the unique views and how they intersect will be key to defining the demand generation content that is developed."

The days of selling to the decision maker are over, B2B buyers buy in packs and have buying committees – understanding the roles within that committee, the unique views and how they intersect will be key to defining the Demand Generation content that is developed. - See more at: http://annuitas.com/2013/12/03/why-buyer-personas-are-a-potential-obstacle-to-demand-generation-success/#!

Absolutely. But here's the kicker that I think many marketers miss. In the example used in the blog post, the group of personas includes VP of IT, CIO and CFO. I'd argue that unless the purchase is really strategic, there is a manager or director doing the research and evaluation and building the business case that will be presented up to his boss, let's say the VP of IT, who will take it to the C-level.

This doesn't mean those personas aren't relevant, it just means they need to be approached differently.

For example: When looking at the buying process, you can't do this well if you only look at it one persona at a time. There are many intersecting conversations between the personas on a buying committee - as Carlos points out - but the thing you're really looking for is when each of the personas get involved.

So, for a C-level persona, consider that the more aware of your company and your expertise, the better for when the conversation is brought to them. Or they assign a staff member to do a bit of research about your solution in relation to an objective they want to accomplish. But, then explore when they may next be involved. It may not be until after your salesperson is involved.

This is important due to the challenge marketers face for a lack of resources dedicated to content development. Some personas need to be engaged from beginning to end in a progressive fashion. Some at specific milestones that matter most to them.

What personas need to help you determine is who needs what, when. And how will you get that content into their hands? In other words, how do you use personas to inform a pass-along strategy? This requires that you determine how to put content in front of the people doing the research that will answer another persona's questions that they can forward along to keep the conversation moving.

Carlos made a point in his post with a graphic that showed a convergence of topics across the three personas and indicated that, at this point, one track of content can be used.

I'd like to disagree. Here's why.

There are different levels of information desired and different perspectives about the same subject depending on the role of the persona. Some of them will require only high-level information, some more detail and some of them will need the information at the "in the weeds" level.

There are also different interpretations on goals. Take for example, ROI. While the CFO will care about time to value realized and putting numbers to that, the CIO may be more concerned about TCO due to budget constraints. The VP of IT may be responsible for interfacing with line of business executives, so his take on ROI will need to be about what they see as "ROI" and he will need the ammo/content to convince them to reach consensus.

Any number of different scenarios could exist, depending on what you're selling and who you're selling it to. This is what personas should help you to determine.

Finally, if personas can be served by the same content, I'd argue they aren't really personas. A true persona will have a different orientation than the others. They will have different goals and objectives based on their specific responsibilities to the company.

One of the key things to consider is who marketing can effectively reach and engage. This is who should be the focus of their demand gen programs. The personas that get involved late-stage, should be targeted for a sales enablement or late stage program.

There is often a difference between who sales wants to speak with and who marketing can reach. We need to focus on both, but differently. All Personas are not created equally. But they must be created as tools that inform content and demand generation strategy as a collective whole.

The Product Marketing team begins to create this persona and lo and behold, the persona is the exact model of the person who would want to buy their product – not an actual picture of the market. - See more at: http://annuitas.com/2013/12/03/why-buyer-personas-are-a-potential-obstacle-to-demand-generation-success/#!

The Product Marketing team begins to create this persona and lo and behold, the persona is the exact model of the person who would want to buy their product – not an actual picture of the market. - See more at: http://annuitas.com/2013/12/03/why-buyer-personas-are-a-potential-obstacle-to-demand-generation-success/#!

The Product Marketing team begins to create this persona and lo and behold, the persona is the exact model of the person who would want to buy their product – not an actual picture of the market. - See more at: http://annuitas.com/2013/12/03/why-buyer-personas-are-a-potential-obstacle-to-demand-generation-success/#!

Getting Content Caught by the B2B Buyer's Filter

There's so much information available today that we've been left no choice but to filter the fire hose. I use Google Alerts, see mostly what people I'm connected to post on LinkedIn, belong to specific groups on LinkedIn based on relevance, use longer-tail keyword phrases to find specific information, have a specific group of people I monitor on Twitter because they provide information I find valuable. There are many other ways I filter information, but these came top of mind.

I'm working on a client project right now that's presenting a challenge for which channels to select to get the attention of the personas my client needs to sell to. One of the keys to persona development is to make sure that those you select can actually be reached and attracted by marketing. If you can't, then focusing your marketing efforts on that persona isn't going to get you very far.

When we realized this issue, we started asking our interviewees where they spent time online and how they did their research. One of the things we learned was that quite often, their filter was team or staff based. They engaged with content that was forwarded to them via email by link or attachment from a peer or colleague. They also relied upon associations they belonged to for insights on topics of interest.

So we started looking into the composition of their teams. Not only is the challenge to catch their attention, but to provide content that they perceive their boss or colleague would be interested in. That's a tall order.

What we really need is a pass-along strategy. Content designed to provide value for the team member with easy access to related information most relevant for the person they'd pass it along to coupled with easy sharing options (email to a colleague).

The other approach that holds promise is getting involved with presenting webinars through the associations they belong to.

One finding that was startling was that even after this hard-to-reach person was involved in the conversation, they never visited the client's website. At least not that they remember.

We did, however find LinkedIn groups that they belong to. Although they don't actively participate in discussions, we have found evidence that they "Like" posts, showing that they do monitor the discussions and content shared.

By compiling a list of discussions that they "Liked" we've been able to create a topic list to help us understand what ideas they're showing interest in which is helping with the design of a storyline.

The findings from building personas during this project has obviously changed some of the assumptions we'd had about where we'd invest marketing budget. Creating content without the capacity for getting it found by the right audience would have been a colossal waste of time, effort and resources.

How sure are you that your content is getting caught by your B2B buyer's filter? What have you seen change lately?

Are B2B Marketing Priorities Out of Whack?

A few months prior to Content Marketing World, I ran an online survey to help direct the session I created on Customer Retention. I'm compiling an eBook with insights, but in the meantime, I wanted to discuss B2B marketing priorities.

Below is a summary of how marketers ranked 11 different priorities:

As you can see, I've highlighted three of them. These three, taken together, will actually help marketers achieve all the other priorities on the list - but not like this.

Let's take a look at why.

Content Strategy

Thankfully, content strategy ranked fourth. At least I hope this is evidence that marketers see that content marketing and achieving performance outcomes requires more than just publishing. It requires publishing with intent.

Content strategy is about creating consistent, engaging experiences that help prospects and customers learn what they need to know to take steps to doing (more) business with your company. Publishing without a plan for how that progression will occur will not make this happen.

Content strategy must address marketing goals across all the channels in play, must focus on increasing attention and interest and, most importantly, must motivate progressive action by your intended audience. This means it also must include the elements of customer engagement and personalization to be most effective.

Customer Engagement

I found it disconcerting that customer engagement was #6. In fact, I'm not quite sure that marketers can achieve lead gen, brand awareness, customer retention or lead nurturing without it. Not to mention any of the other priorities on this list.

Engagement is a word that has been bandied around to the point of meaningless drivel. But the concept of gaining attention and increasing interactions with prospects and customers is still critical. For without it, you have the tree falling in the vacant forest syndrome. And that doesn't help marketers to accomplish anything.

Although arguably a component of content strategy, marketers need to spend more time determining what they want each interaction to achieve with their prospects and customers. What is the goal of each content asset and what will it guide them to do next? What outcome will help to move the needle? Of course, all things considered, it's pretty hard - nigh impossible - to engage anyone effectively without personalization, let alone your target markets.

Personalization

Personalization coming in at #8 makes me sad. Before I start any project with a client, the first thing we must do is get to know our audiences (buyers, influencers, champions, end users, detractors). What objectives do they have? What do they care about? What gets in the way of them achieving their goals and responsibilities?

For marketers who still believe that personalization is about Dear <firstname> in an email - get over it! Personalization is about relevance. It's about providing value and I'm unclear how any marketer can do this without knowing their audience (buyers) and marketplace intimately.

Content strategy based on personalization is what results in customer engagement that drives business relationships. The three go together hand-in-glove.

Now, I know that marketers are reacting to what they get graded on - lead gen, brand awareness and customer retention, for example. But without putting the fundamentals ahead of the outcomes, how will we reach our true potential of achieving them?

What do you think? Are marketing priorities out of whack?

Is Social Selling in Need of Sales Enablement?

In my last post I wrote about some of the ways Marketers could benefit from LinkedIn in relation to the report Jill Konrath and I released recently, Cracking the LinkedIn Sales Code.

Today, I’d like to write about some opportunities that surfaced during our analysis of the data that point to the need for sales enablement that can help your company’s social selling initiatives, as many salespeople appear to be struggling to find the value.

• The fact that only 4.9% of the 3,094 survey respondents are identified as Top Sellers is a wake-up call.


• The idea that gaining access to InMail is critical for being able to “pitch” more people directly – as expressed in many comments from the survey – is a wake-up call.


• The conclusion that, since prospects don’t like to be pitched to via LinkedIn means that LinkedIn is not a valuable tool for the sales process is also a big, fat wake-up call.

Comments like these sum up the need for a bit of intervention:

“[I] don't have the right content and approach yet to really engage with potential customers on LinkedIn to gain new prospects, thus new sales.”

“I send InMails ongoingly and the majority [of them] are ignored. I'm beginning to think it's a waste of time....”

LinkedIn Has a Bit of a Learning Curve

I’ve been using LinkedIn so long and so much that the idea it’s not easy to grasp and use effectively was a bit of a surprise to me. Although it shouldn’t be. I see crappy stuff posted out there all the time. But I also see great stuff!

The thing that’s bugging me a bit is that the majority of marketers asked in numerous research studies say they’re using content marketing. Many of them say they know their prospect audiences well. Many of them maintain blogs for their companies. And, many of them participate on social media. Heck, social media has been in the top 3 for marketing priorities in most research reports I’ve read for the last couple of years.

If marketers are actually doing all of the things stated above, I’d submit that they are  in the perfect position to create a “social sharing” support program for their sales teams.  And it doesn’t have to be difficult.

Create a weekly primer that includes:

• Relevant groups for sales reps to join based on who they sell to, what they sell and their specific area of expertise or industry knowledge
• A list of appropriate content resources based on the above point; include links, a summary of key points, and suggestions for discussion prompts they can use
• Ideas that promote sharing expertise or asking questions to stimulate discussions

Include a tips section that includes ideas that will help them gain proficiency with the tools that LinkedIn has to offer. Just one or two tips per week that they can master quickly is plenty. I’d start with Signal and give them some keyword phrases to set up so they can easily keep track of what’s going on in their area of focus so that they can more easily join in on relevant discussions.

For those of you thinking – wow – that weekly primer thing is going to be a lot of work, stop and think about it.

• You know what content you’re publishing and online events you’re scheduling
• You know what the key points are
• You have the links – or you should

If you’re using other social networks you’re already curating content that aligns with the story you’re sharing, right? So include those links, too. After all, social sharing isn’t just about your company’s content.

Sure the group recommendations will take a bit of effort, although not so much if you’re already tracking them for insights that inform your marketing programs. And I’d stipulate that you should be doing this.

And the tips for tools may also take some thought and experimentation if you’re not using them, but you should be doing this, too. The benefits are profound.

So, ultimately, creating a social sharing support program is a win-win situation in the end, right?

Both of you can learn together and you can help to ensure that the story being shared in LinkedIn by your sales team aligns with the story marketing is sharing. And that’s pretty huge!

Once you get the primer format down, it’s a simple process to update it each week to ensure your sales team has fresh content and ideas to share. And, it’s important to remember that appropriate sharing and participation are two of the habits that Top Sellers rely upon to drive the generation of opportunities on LinkedIn.

If you haven’t downloaded your copy of Cracking the LinkedIn Sales Code, go get it!

And don’t forget to download the companion eBook (Link in the report) to read the stories that top sellers shared with us about what’s working for each of them. You may find some ideas you haven’t thought of.

And, for fun, see my Madlibs post on Funnelholic where I predict that sales enablement will be the next hot thing for marketing. Seriously!

B2B Buyer Personas Don't Belong in the Closet

Many of the projects I do for companies start with buyer personas. After all, it's a logical place to start as it's next to impossible to develop a content strategy without a keen understanding of the people involved in buying complex B2B product offerings. But I'm noticing a trend I hadn't foreseen.

Marketers are keeping buyer personas in the closet. Yep, it's true.

I talk with a lot of marketers who insist they have buyer personas and some who have no clue that they do, but find them lurking in a file somewhere once they start looking. In the latter case, it's usually because a past marketer had them created.

What's curious to me is that the personas aren't being used. At all. I even had one marketer admit to me that she had no idea what to do with them, but she'd checked the box since she'd heard all the gurus telling her she needed them.

That's a plain disservice, in my opinion.

But here's the real kicker. In nearly every case, once I saw the personas in question, I understood why they were in the closet. They were simply unusable in a B2B complex sale situation.

A perfect example of this is found in a blog post by Vince Giorgi that I've been thinking about since I read it. In the post, Confessions of a Buyer Persona Skeptic, he writes:

"Ever worked through a persona exercise and found your team spending inordinate amounts of time arguing over whether to name the primary persona Jane or Joanne? Have you seen examples of buyer personas and wondered how somebody decided Jim owns the Jack Russell terrier, but Jasmine has the three cats and two kids (or was it two cats, three kids)? I have this nagging sense that, when personas do get developed, many end up being more suitable as backstory for an actor preparing for a movie role than as firm footings on which to base strategy and creative work."

Which is my point about unsuitable personas in a nutshell.

Let me ask you this: When you develop content for a buyer of a complex B2B solution, how would the knowledge that your buyer had a Jack Russell terrier apply?

Don't strain yourself, it doesn't.

What does apply are insights to the worklife, objectives, orientation and obstacles your buyer faces that could be addressed by whatever you sell. I don't care if he lives in a tent, a sprawling rambler in the suburbs, or a cramped apartment in the city. That's not going to influence how he builds consensus with his team to buy cloud storage, beef up his network to enable mobility or decide to virtualize his company's call center.

The problem with personas is that people don't understand what to do with them, so they create them based on their interpretation of getting to know someone and what you might learn about them as you become acquainted on a personal basis. They may look pretty once completed, but they are utterly useless as a tool to inform content strategy.

For personas to become useful tools, they must be based on interviews gathered from salespeople, customer service interactions and the buyers (customers) themselves.

And not just any kind of interview will do. The conversations must be focused on what the buyer is trying to achieve.

• What's important to them and what's driving the change?
• What's impeding or speeding their need to change?
• How do they go about change?
• What do they need to know to embrace change?
• Who do they turn to for advice or information?
• What's the value they visualize once they make a decision?
• Who do they have to sell change to in order to get it?
• What could cause the need for this change to lose priority?

In essence, personas must help us identify how we can help buyers manage and expedite change. That's really what buying is all about.

If we build personas in this way, then they become instrumental in the development of our content strategies and marketing programs. But there's another bonus to be had from the intentional development of buyer personas as a tool.

They're useful to customer service, to salespeople, to lines of business, to product development and R&D. And, if you involve them in the process, they'll have an investment in helping to apply them to the business in ways that count.

As Vince questioned in his post:

"Is 'personas' one of the buzzwords we toss around to feel and sound like cutting-edge marketers? Or are we cutting to the chase, doing the good and hard work, and making the investments of time and resources necessary to research, refine and buy into meaningful, actionable buyer personas?"

Very good questions, indeed.

Are your personas in the closet? Or are they front and center driving your content strategy and customer-facing business processes?