Marketing Interactions

Extend Your Content's Reach within the B2B Buying Committee

B2B marketers know there are a number of people involved in a complex buying decision. What often goes overlooked is understanding not only who the marketing programs can reach and engage but how content gets shared among the group. It's common sense that the more people within an organization your content gains exposure with, the more opportunity your ideas and expertise has to gain sway.

But, it's not as simple as we could hope for. The CMO Council report, The Content Connection to Vendor Selection, finds that there are three nearly equally weighted scenarios for content sharing among B2B buyers:

• 35% from the middle out
• 30% from the bottom up
• 29% from the top down

While the study arrived at definitions for 6 "personas" - two for each type of researcher, influencer and decision maker - for how people source content and what types they favor, the problem I have with establishing "grazers" or "authority leaders" is that they're nearly impossible to identify through online behavior in a way that's meaningful.

Rather than aiming for one type of content sharing, B2B marketers need to take into account all three, as well as all the different types of content people choose to source. From the projects I've helped my clients develop and run, there are a few things I've found to be helpful for getting content into more hands of the folks in the buying group:

Suggestive Prompts:

Present ideas that are relevant to one buyer persona along with why another persona in the group would find the idea valuable. Prompts can be subtle influencers that become conversation starters and promote content sharing. Make sure to do this without breaking the context of your content.

Statements along the lines of: "While [persona 1 - your target audience] will find value in this capability, [persona 2] will appreciate this outcome as it helps them to achieve objective X."

Content Asset Balance:

Hat tip to Shelly Lucas (@pisarose) for this term.

While marketers tend to focus on pre-sales content that builds awareness and informs short-list selection, they need to focus on an asset balance that addresses all stages of the continuum buying experience. People on the buying committee will come in and out of the process depending on how the decision will impact them, their role and their workflows.

Different levels of depth and formats of content are more valuable at different times. By relegating marketing content to the pre-sales or even to the very earliest stages of the buying process, we're leaving a lot of opportunity to impact the decision up for grabs with our competitors. Map the entire process for each persona, as well as the overlays that may drive further interaction.

For example, in the case above, if Persona 2 becomes interested and comes looking for more about how your solution can help her gain the outcome mentioned in the content that was shared with her, will you have it? Will your salesperson know where to find it if she asks the question?

Assess Access First

During the development of buyer personas is when you find out how easily you'll be able to reach a specific persona. In every project I work on, one or more of the people marketing needs to engage and influence for sales conversations isn't an easy target. By figuring out who invites the most open access, you can then tailor your strategy for how to ensure your content is spreadable once access has been granted. Think of it as a Trojan Horse approach.

The whole point is to get your company's ideas and expertise used to set the agenda for how to best solve the problem. And it is doable. It just takes a little finesse.

Shameless plug: One of the main concepts of my new book, Digital Relevance is The Continuum Experience. If you'd really like to understand its value, the book will help. It comes out on January 6th.

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? 

Are Salespeople Screwing Up B2B Marketing Performance?

I sat pondering another in a burst of self-serving emails sent last week by salespeople who obviously lack any discipline in prospect research or the energy needed to attempt meaningful personalization. As one of the emails was from a company I'd thought "got it," it occurred to me that the salesperson just screwed up my perception of the company they work for.

This made me wonder how much salespeople may be screwing up marketing performance now that more marketers are being tasked with proving contribution to revenues and business objectives, not simply lead generation.

Before sales-oriented, progressive types take issue with me, let me explain.

First - why there's need for concern:

• Buyers are self-serving content for a longer portion of the buying process. This means, if marketing is doing its job, marketing content and strategies are helping to attract and engage those buyers, building their perception of the company as helpful, credible and experts in their field.
• Buying cycles are lengthening and the size of the buying committee is growing. This means that content must be produced to engage more people with differing perspectives and responsibilities. For example, a technology purchase is often driven today by business executives, not just IT executives. Marketing is tasked with engaging as many on the buying committee as they can in the most relevant way they can.
• The amount of content buyers engage with during buying is also growing. Marketing is working hard to help increase the amount of content their prospects engage with. If they're reading yours, that's less time to read the competitor's - just saying.

Given those three reasons and assuming that a buyer has been nurtured and qualified before being handed off to sales (although research shows this doesn't happen for most companies who toss form completions to sales - but ignoring this) then it's up to the salesperson to capitalize on the work that's already been done. Or to screw it up.

I'm seeing more and more sales communications that are screwing it up.

In my work I do a ton of resarch which usually includes submitting a lot of forms to download white papers and reports that help me learn about an industry, market or solution. I get a lot of email as a result. Just this last week, I received a dozen or so examples.

I'll share a couple them to illustrate my point:

The first is a bucket approach. I hate this type of email. This is the lazy email that tries to make you feel bad by saying you're non-responsive and then asks for you to expend effort because the salesperson can't be bothered to do it themselves. Below is the email copy with only the brand name removed to protect the guilty party.

Hi,

Good Afternoon. I have tried contacting you in regards to [brand] software.

Would you be so kind as to provide me some guidance, as I do not want to be a bother and will gladly follow your direction. Which of the below describes where you are at:

A - You have made a decision regarding [brand] and want to chat now. Great End of Month Incentives.

B - You want to schedule a call at a future date

C - You are no longer interested in [brand]

I appreciate your feedback and hope all is going well.

Thanks.

This same email was sent three times in one day. It was also sent by a salesperson who works at a company that I've talked about as having a truly engaging marketing approach. I assume that I was subjected to this salesperson because I downloaded a bunch of content to see what they were doing. I will not be inclined to mention them again as their marketing processes don't seem to cross over to their sales processes. And, I'm irritated.

The first problem with this approach is that the salesperson couldn't even bother to include my name in the salutation. The second is that it puts the onus of effort on me. The salesperson is obviously cutting and pasting a template. A poorly written template at that. Or, God forbid, it's automated. And, until he sent the above three times in one day, I'd never heard from this salesperson before - so the first sentence is a lie. He hasn't been trying to contact me.

The second problem is that 5 seconds on Google would've told him that I'd never be his customer. As a consultant, I don't buy 5 figure BI systems. But because he did no research and sent a lazy email, not only did he waste his time, but he cost his company an advocate. Advocates don't come along every day.

But here's what's worse. Imagine if I was a buyer. I can tell you that their marketing content is very good. It's informative, well written and interesting. It's a considered purchase so what if I'd been a prospect for months, learning what I need to know, getting all my questions answered... and then I receive that email.

There's nothing helpful. It's like the anti-experience of the company in question. And I, as that primed buyer, decide to move on to my second choice, thinking that the quality of what I'd seen so far is a smoke screen. Could this be happening in your company?

Here's another example:

Hi Ardath,

I had a note you registered for the recent webcast, “Name of Webinar I Never Registered For”, about [XYZ] in the  enterprise. I’m not sure if you were able to attend, but I’d like to avail myself as a resource in case you were interested in learning more.

We've helped clients find great efficiencies for business users, reduce complexities for the IT organization, while mitigating risk for the organization as a whole when [doing XYZ]. 

If you're open to a brief conversation, I'd love to learn about your business objectives in these areas. Would it make sense to speak? If you’d like, test the system with your own [trial]

Thank you.

Best Regards,

First off, if he thinks I registered for the webinar then he should know whether or not I attended. That data is in every webinar attendee report. But, in reality, my one interaction with this company was to download a white paper, so his information is faulty. And, you can tell it's a template he lifted because of the double sign off. He pasted it in and didn't even take the time to notice.

Now, if this was a one-off, I'd just delete it and not pay attention. But, I received this email twice plus a voice mail. And I took a look at his company. Once again, five seconds on Google would have told him not to bother with me.

So this is when it really hit me. Because of the repeated irrelevance, I will automatically delete any email from this company. If I was a potential prospect, marketing wouldn't have a shot. No matter how good their content or communications. In fact, the next day, I received a marketing email and immediately unsubscribed.

If your salespeople can't even be accurate about the type of interaction had with your company, what will your prospects think? And why, after one white paper download, do salespeople pursue leads? And, if they're going to do so, they'd damn well better figure out something more relevant that the email above. Which actually could be from any company, it's so vague.

So I ask you: How much damage are your sales team's practices doing to your marketing performance?

And, I'm not putting this all on sales, either. Marketing shares responsibility, in my opinion. With sales enablement that teaches salespeople how to effectively engage prospects based on a continuation of the story marketing is telling, this can be avoided.

If we want our marketing performance to contribute to revenue, we need to help salespeople have a better shot at not screwing it up.

And to all the salespeople out there who do "get it" and do their research and work hard at relevance, bless you!

B2B Marketers Must Stay In the Game to Prove Business Impact

I was reading an interview with Laura Ramos, VP and Principal Analyst with Forrester, and a couple of things she said caught my eye:

“The ideal model for understanding how B2B buyers buy is a life cycle, not a funnel.”

“When your sales involve multiple buyers in a complex, highly considered process, and when there is a distinct hand-off from marketing to sales—it can get a bit murky when figuring out where marketing’s influence ends and sales’ influence begins.”

The question that came up for me (and has for some time) is: Why is there a distinct handoff?

If you look at the first quote above (which I also agree with very strongly) there’s no stop and start for marketers. A life cycle indicates a continuum, not a campaign-type focus. There shouldn’t be any stopping. There shouldn’t be a pause.

What marketers should be doing is addressing each stage of the buyer to customer to advocate life cycle as it happens and in relation to what’s relevant at the time.

If marketers are to prove business impact, they must be able to show influence at every point and pivot.

This doesn’t mean that they need to own it as a “marketing” function, but that they empower the relationships held by buyers and customers with the company – no matter how or with whom they happen.

Marketing has a brilliant opportunity to become the support system for the customer experience lifecycle - across the organization.

Think about all the ways customers play in your business, including:

• Marketing to Sales
• Customer support, service and training
• Product development
• Branding, reputation, credibility
• Advocacy and referrals

Marketing, as the organization responsible for attracting, engaging and initiating relationships, must expand beyond that early role to sustaining and growing those relationships over the entire continuum of the life cycle.

Here are a few reasons why:

• Marketing collects a lot of data about customers and the marketplace their companies serve. They are the ones positioned to provide the most value by integrating other sources of data and feedback from other departments to evolve the big-picture view used to drive business.
• Marketing is on the front lines;, they are often the first “face” presented for the company. If they stop there the story stops with them. Then the organization has to count on whatever story sales shares is complementary and that the story also makes the transition through to customer service and support. Good luck – did I mention that “hope is not a strategy?”
• Buyers and customers are clamoring for higher relevance and vendors who can help them set the vision, realize it and move gracefully forward into the future. This requires consistency in experience and the story that’s started to continue to develop and expand over time. Marketing is in the best position to facilitate this.
• Social media has shoved everyone into a marketing and potentially customer-facing role. Someone needs to provide some orchestration for how the story is shared from those differing perspectives in a way that honors both the brand and the customer.

By staying in the game, marketers can enable every touch point with customers with the parts of the story needed to build a longer-term relationship. With the technology available today, all the points and pivots can be tracked. Proving business impact doesn’t mean marketing must close deals, it means they must be able to show influence across the continuum of the customer life cycle and relate it to business-driving metrics.

It will take time. But I firmly believe a continuum approach is what’s next given the changes we’ve seen so far…

Curiosity and Context: Keys to Engagement for B2B Buyers

Many B2B marketers have jumped on the bandwagon about answering their buyers and customers' questions. There's a bit more strategy involved to do so in a way that drives momentum, but what I'm not seeing is marketers attempting to promote the curiosity that motivates their buyers to ask the questions they haven't thought of yet.

Campaigns are dead. Even Forrester says so.

Curiosity and Context are the fuel for engagement. And in B2B, you're going for the long-term - not the one-off. Consistency and longevity critical. The story must build across stages, pulling buyers forward by building anticipation for what's next - for them to understand how they get the outcome they want with your help.

So what drives engagement?

Curiosity. A desire to know more. Ideas that reshape the way people think about a concept, inviting them to ask new questions in exploration.

Context that uses stories based on how problems and priorities might be playing out for prospects and customers.

Perception of low effort that makes it stupid simple and appealing to create a dialogue with you.

A sense of empowerment that comes when buyers feel they are driving the conversation, not your agenda.

Anticipation to get what's next because your story (content) has motivated them to "turn the page."

Simply making a list of questions and answering them is not the solution to creating lasting engagement that drives revenues for complex sales. Why not? Because there are hidden questions, subconscious needs that buyers don't think to ask until their curiosity is aroused.

Reasons why content doesn't create curiosity:

There's no Open End.

Much of this has to do with corporations thinking that they need to be the definitive answer to prove their expertise. There's no room left for discussion without the risk of the buyer looking stupid or presenting an outright challenge. Let's just admit that we don't know everything - never will - and get it over with already.

It's not Novel.

A lot of content is a restatement of stuff other people have said so many times that there's nothing new. If this is a constant, these are the responses you can expect. People will either scan and see they've read the same stuff before and leave. Or they'll finally reach their breaking point and either mark your brand off their resources list or post a comment expressing their irritation. Either way, your value to them has diminished.

It's trying to talk to Too Many People at once.

When you don't know your audience well enough or you have limited resources, you try to do too much with one content asset. This usually means that it's so high level that it doesn't speak with meaning to anyone.

The Context is Skewed.

You are still using gut instinct to tell you what your audience cares about. But you've missed the points that matter to them. Perhaps you nailed the topic, but the angle you've taken tells them you really don't understand their situation or what they care about. In this scenario, there's just no motivation to engage because the buyer knows you don't "get" them.

It sounds Too Good To Be True.

You know your Whizz Bang solution is the next best thing to sliced bread. But you've emphasized so many upsides without the details, struggles or whatever else it takes to get them that the outcomes sound too good to be true. This immediately arouses disbelief about all the stuff that's been omitted or the veracity of what you're saying and results in diminished credibility - even if what you say is true!

I could go on, but I think I've made the point. What it comes down to is being human and highly relevant. But it's also a sense of mirroring - or being seen as a peer. No one likes to be lectured to by someone who thinks they're the smartest person in the room. If you want to create engagement with an upside, you have to be curious, too.

Buyers are looking for expertise, certainly. But they're also sure that their situation is unique - which it is. And they want to know that you're flexible and agile enough to adjust to it while still delivering what you promise.

B2B marketers need to tread the line between using their expertise to mentor buyers and curiosity that shows you're interested in them and what they need and want. Sometimes this means showing them that you didn't have all the answers when you started helping a customer, but that you helped them figure it out and overcome the unforseen challenges encountered along the way. In other words, revealing your humanity.

B2B complex sales have inherent risk - both for the company and the buyer. In many of the interviews I do for persona projects, what I hear repeatedly is that buyers want to work with people/companies who they feel care the most about them. I've heard many customers say the equivalent of "They just seemed to "get" us."

When I probe deeper it comes back to an alignment with context and the quality of interactions that the buying team had with the vendor they chose to solve their problem.

What are you doing to show your buyers that you "GET" them?

 

Crossing the Chasm: The New Obstacle for B2B Buyers

I've come to the conclusion that evolution is lopsided. Especially when it comes to B2B marketing vs. sales. It seems to me that either one or the other is evolving, but much of the time it doesn't seem to be both. At least not within the same organization.

The best marketers are on a quest to get to know their buyers. They're doing the hard work to create personas, develop content strategy and execute content marketing in a way that moves the needle by building relationships.

On the other side, salespeople who are in tune with their markets are spending the time to do research on prospects, learning how to apply the content that marketing is developing to supporting relevant dialogues with customers. And with all of this in hand, they're adding value to keep the progression established earlier in the buying process moving toward the decision to buy.

Then there's everyone else. What the heck happened?

Why is it that in so many companies these two ends of the buying process never join in the middle? It's like buyers need to cross the chasm on their own to get from one side to the other.

What makes you think they have the motivation?

I'm hearing a lot lately that marketing is doing great getting leads into the early stages of the buying process, but that there's a bottleneck in the middle that is somehow keeping them from moving farther.

Take a look and see if any of the below sound familiar:

• Marketing doesn't have a content strategy so what was appealing once, has nothing to build on so prospects are left to languish
• The attempt to get prospects into sales conversations goes something like this: "I see you downloaded a white paper. I'd like 30 minutes of your time to give you a demo of our solution..."
• You don't have a nurturing program with any real chutzpa. It's more of a keep us in mind when you decide to do something worth our while type of email series.
• Salespeople decide the lead that marketing sent over isn't the right contact so they try to go around him to get to someone more important. Only that someone more important tasked the contact with building the business case. Or he was the champion without whom you will never get the deal.
• Sales contacts the lead as if this is the first time they've interacted with the company and starts the conversation over - paying no attention to what the prospect has expressed interest in previously
• Inside sales is still trying to qualify on BANT, but the problem is new, so there isn't any budget defined, nor timeline because they don't know what that looks like yet; and the person evaluating is not the actual buyer / decision maker.
• The nurture process stops when sales gets the lead but they don't keep in contact by providing more parts of the story. They just "check in" from time to time.

There are a ton of things that could be represented in those bullets above. But each of them has one characteristic - the focus is on the company, not the customer.

When are we going to learn that it's not about what we want, but what our customers must have?

Our customers do not want:

• Irrelevant follow up
• To educate our salespeople
• To waste their time
• To start over as if they've learned nothing during the 8 months they've been engaging with your content when sales comes into the picture
• To experience Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as part of their buying process

What they do want is:

• Information that helps them solve a problem
• Credible expertise that can take them beyond the content
• Reasons to keep moving forward
• Confidence that they're making the lowest risk decision possible
• Proof that the outcome they'll get will do what they need it to

Relationships are the highest currency we can build in today's "social" business environment. I spend a lot of time failitating introductions for my clients to vendors who can bring expertise to the table that's not in my wheelhouse. They like this. It makes them feel important and they get darn good treatment from those I recommend.

Why is it that marketers don't facilitate introductions of highly qualified prospects to salespeople? Why is it that we don't help our sales team see the value in pursuing the leads we've worked hard to nurture to a readiness for conversation?

Why is it that marketers don't share the background of prospects with salespeople? Sure, marketing automation can help improve visibility to what they've seen or clicked on up to now, but do your salespeople know what other content you have that would enhance that prospect's experience moving forward?

There's a wide gap in B2B companies between the marketing and sales organizations. What are you going to do to close it?

Or are you relying on your prospects making the leap across the chasm on their own?

Feeling confident about that?

Why B2B Marketers Need a Ping-Pong Plan

Let's say that the above is representative of a B2B buying process. Yep, it gets a little messy. All the people involved, the back and forth. The side discussions that you're not part of as you're returning a lob from a different contact. The bystanders who are observing your every smash and volley.

I've been working on scenario planning in my projects with clients. It's amazing how many variables there are today than just a few months ago. There will be more tomorrow.

But here's the thing: Most marketers don't think about the interplay or ping-ponginess (yes, this is a new word) of the B2B buying process. We still have campaign mentalities. We still care mostly about what we want buyers to do - whether we're accommodating what they want, or not.

We still sit down to plan a campaign and focus on the deliverables. "Okay - let's publish a couple of blog posts to drive registrations for a webinar, then we'll follow that with a white paper and a sales pitch. How many leads do you think we can generate for sales if we execute this program in Q2?"

Why don't we ever think about it like Ping-Pong®? There's a rhythm to Ping Pong (which I know is table tennis, but it doesn't have the same ring and you know what I mean), a back and forth.

Playing Ping Pong is like having a conversation.

And this is what your content should be designed to do. It doesn't mean that the program above won't work if rethought, but the problem is that it stops dead in its tracks when planned this way. It's a snippet of the conversation that will need to be held over a complex B2B buying process. As it stands, there's no connection to anything that comes before or after.

It's like having a great conversation and suddenly, in mid-sentence, the other person gets a text, glances at his smartphone and steps away to deal with it, never returning and leaving you to wonder if you're really that boring...

That's exactly how a campaign treats our prospective buyers.

Think about it:

Buyer: I wonder what my peers are doing to address X?

Marketer: This blog post talks about 6 different ways people are dealing with X.

Buyer: That was great information. Oh, look, they're having a webinar with more examples. Think I'll sign up.

Marketer: Thanks for attending our webinar. Here's a link to the replay.

Buyer: I was there. I don't need to see it again. What else have you got?

Marketer:

Buyer: Hmm. Those examples got me thinking, butI wonder if there are any industry best practices emerging about X?

Marketer:

Buyer: Where'd they go?

Salesperson: Since you attended our webinar, Marketer thought you might want a demo of our solution. Got 30 minutes?

Buyer: What? I'm not even sure this will work for our situation. I need to talk to Kathy and David and Harvey and Sam...

Salesperson: I just sent you an email about a demo, thought I'd leave you a voicemail, too. Want a demo?

Buyer: I wonder who the experts are who can help me learn more about dealing with X? Maybe I'll try a #hashtag search on Twitter for X...

Marketer:

If you think I'm exagerrating, I'm not. You may be shaking your head, but this is what so many B2B marketing campaigns look like that it makes my head spin. As someone who does a lot of research to learn about industries and solutions to work on client projects, I get subjected to them every day.

The problem with a "campaign mindset" is that you're missing the Ping to go with your Pong. And your buyers are very aware of the lapse.

But, not to worry. They won't be waiting on you to fix that issue. They've already moved on to someone else who is more helpful and concerned about what they want and need over the longer term. Someone who's dedicated to playing the game all the way through.

It's one thing to map content to the buying process. It's quite another to plan for the Ping-Pong scenarios that will keep the ball in the air.

What new considerations are you adding to your content strategy to account for the back and forth of extended conversation that won't abruptly leave your buyers hanging?

 

Are You Pandering to the B2B Lead Slave Trade?

I just read the State of B2B Lead Generation report from Buyer Zone and I have to say that my heart sunk a bit. That nearly 50% are sending inquiries directly to sales as "leads" was disheartening enough. But when asked where they'd spend budget if they had money to burn, the answer from 31% of B2B marketers was to buy more leads. The majority of marketers said that increasing lead quantity was the key to their success.

If you haven't guessed - the remainder of this post is a bit of a rant. Fair warning.

Have we learned nothing? Do marketers walk around with blinders on? Or is it wishful thinking that force feeding our funnels can solve all of our problems?

Somehow this notion makes me feel kind of slimy. Like marketers are pandering to a B2B Lead Slave Trade where buyers are bought and forced to endure marketing and sales hell until they can break free of the shackles of this inhumane treatment.

Okay, so I'm being a bit dramatic. But, do you like it when you end up on the receiving end of emails from companies you've never heard of or given permission to hear from about stuff you have no interest in?

Do you enjoy downloading a paper and getting called from a clueless salesperson to "follow up with a demo" when you were simply interested in the topic of a white paper?

I thought not. So why is it we still feel like this is the way to go? It's kind of one of those "do unto others" things. But, for some strange reason we act like it doesn't apply to marketing.

So why?

I'm going to start by blaming the CMO, CSO and executive team. Until marketing performance is graded on quality, rather than quantity, you're driving the B2B Lead Slave Trade.

What the Buyer Zone report found is that B2B marketers are actually getting pretty good at generating their own leads but feel that they've exhausted their internal skills to amplify the volume, so they resort to buying them. You're selling yourselves short; taking the easy way out.

I'd argue that if the leads generated were really leads, marketers wouldn't have this problem. Although marketers in mid to large companies say they're tracking qualification and close rates, it appears they're doing this more as bystanders than as active participants with accountability. (See the immediate turnover of leads to sales above)

So now it's time to assign blame to marketers perpetuating the crime. It's not okay to abdicate yourself from your participation in the B2B Lead Slave Trade by taking a hand's off approach as you toss leads over the wall and rely on sales to sentence them to hard labor as they seek to reach the number. Your hands are still dirty.

Set Your Slaves Free

Buying leads is lazy. It's all about you and nothing about them. The hard part about marketing in this noisy world is that attracting attention and then sustaining it isn't for the faint of heart. It takes hard work, dedication and a buyer-first mindset. But it's worth it.

When you create and share ideas that your target audiences need and want, they will opt in willingly to get more. They'll be interested in dialogue to learn more about the expertise your company brings to help them achieve elusive objectives. A lead isn't created in one touch - not usually. Just like you don't become best friends when you meet someone the first time.

In the report, the company website barely eked by lead generation services as the number one source of leads. I guarantee you that you have not exhausted the potential of that property to generate leads. You're probably not even close. The same is likely true for email, social media, SEO and word of mouth - ranked 3 - 6.

Instead of buying your way to lead quantity, it's time to focus on improving your skillsets and market approaches for gaining attention and sustaining engagement to improve lead quality. Roll up your sleeves and get to know your buyers. The buy and toss method doesn't help you do this.

There May Be a Bit of an Upside...

B2B marketers were asked, "Looking ahead, what will be the key game changer for the future of lead generation success? 

First response by 21.1% was increasing the quality of leads. Lead nurturing came in second with 12.8%.

Kudos to one fifth of marketers for at least knowing they're not hitting the high notes. The remaining 79% may be in serious trouble as buyers continue to fight for their freedom.

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.