Marketing Interactions

B2B Marketers Need a Fresh Perspective

In response to my last post, Product is Not the Hero of a B2B Company’s Story, Michael Webb asked a great question. I started to answer it and then decided the answer deserved its own post.

Michael asked:

I can't help wondering what you (and others) think about the "Why-why-why?" of the things you've written about?

For example, take the issues you addressed in your last five articles. Why is it so easy for marketers to focus on:

• Products, rather than the customer as hero? (Product is Not the Hero of a B2B Company's Story)
  
  
• Shiny objects, rather than the thinking work required to support the outcome? (Shiny New Tech: Content Not Included. Proceed With Caution)
  
  
• Generating "leads," instead of working with sales and service to help customers solve problems? (Crossing the Chasm: The new Obstacle for B2B Buyers)
  
  
• Creating content and events, instead of orchestrating for momentum? (Is Your B2B Content Just a Pt Stop?)
  
  
• Building campaigns that end, instead of encouraging dialogue (Why B2B Marketers Need a Ping-Pong Plan)

Do you think there might be some sort of common cause underlying these? If so, what might it be?

My gut response is short-termism and a failure for companies to get out of their own way. But that would be too easy. The real issue is that change is hard.

Factors at play include, but are certainly not limited to:

• Marketers are evaluated on lead generation, not the stuff that I've talked about in the posts Michael mentioned. The same is true for sales. They work in short windows of time to meet "numbers" set for them. Marketing is supposed to feed this goal. Until companies can look at both short and longer-term goals based on customers, this perspective will continue to limit potential - especially in complex sales where the buying process takes longer than one quarter.
• Culture is still very much inside-out, no matter how much lip service is paid to being "customer centric." Change is hard. And I'm not sure companies really know what to change. They still think they are in control of the process. No matter how much this shouldn’t make sense, given the changes we can plainly see, it is true. Marketers are told to go out and get leads. Sale teams are told to sell more. The pressure to perform is immense. But the tools and skills to do so in today’s environment are lacking.
• The curse of knowledge is also a factor. We simply know too much about what we sell. We believe in it and we see the value. This causes us to not relate to buyers in parallel with what they need to learn to develop the confidence to buy. Marketers and sellers are often out of sync with the marketplace.
• We haven't developed trust. Buyers see vendors as biased in their own favor. They don’t know whether to believe us or not. There are many buyer surveys that basically reflect buyers as saying, don’t call us, we’ll call you; stop pitching us; quit trying to go around my staff to get to me and give us more substance in the information you provide. Marketers and salespeople have got to focus on value delivery, not feeds and speeds, but features and functionality are what they know best, as I stated above.
• Most vendors are still analog in a dynamic world. Real-time responsiveness is nice to think about, but it takes an immense amount of planning and strategy. An example everyone knows is the Oreo Dunk in the Dark Tweet during the super bowl. But if you read the articles about it, there were teams of people in the room, including the executives who had to approve the Tweet before it could be sent. This needs to change. We need to figure out how to become more agile without all the red tape.
• Lack of process, at least for marketers. Heck, the majority (66%) of marketers report that they don’t have a strategy in place. Ad hoc campaigns based on meeting this quarter’s numbers are a symptom of short-term, tactical thinking. The same thing happens to sales when they have a few weeks left to close deals to make the “number” and everything except the most promising deals are pushed aside.
• My favorite: “But we’ve always done it this way.” This is a big one - not only for us, but for our buyers. Why should we expect them to change if we can't change?It’s perceived as safe to stick with status quo. Many decisions put people’s careers on the line. Sometimes it’s easier not to make them or not to stick with them if it looks like the outcome won’t be there in time. But in all fairness, there are a lot of dependencies. One decision can have a ripple effect that affects other departments and outcomes. Consensus for change is sometimes even harder to get than consensus for a purchase decision.

The factors I’ve stated above are not news. We know this. CMOs admit it. They worry about it. Their biggest fear is becoming irrelevant to the markets they serve rendering them unable to reach customers. They know things have changed. Change has become the elephant in the room that appears too big to tackle.

But we must. We don’t have a choice. Those who take on change will win and those who don’t will flounder. We’ve also seen this. We saw it in NetFlix vs. Blockbuster. We saw it with book stores and Amazon. We’re seeing it now in Telecom and Communications with Over The Top (OTT) providers like Google and Amazon stepping in to take chunks of their business away.

We see it in hardware becoming virtualized and running in the cloud, rather than on premise which is challenging managed services providers to reinvent themselves to stay in the game. IT can spin up a server in minutes instead of spending weeks to order the hardware, install and provision it. We’re even seeing it in space exploration with private corporations replacing NASA programs.

It won’t happen overnight, but change needs to happen. We need to take the time and make the effort to start making the shift. Our teams need new skillsets and processes for continuous improvement. If marketing has changed more in the last two years than in the last 50 years, what do you think the next two will be like?

This is only my opinion. I’d love to know yours. Please chime in!

Product is Not the Hero of a B2B Company's Story

Despite the shift in the B2B buyer landscape that puts them squarely in the power position, I still hear marketers insist that the product is the hero of the story. Well, I'll just rip the bandaid off and say it straight up - You Are Wrong.

As a level set for this post:

The hero of the story is the protagonist or main character. The protagonist has a goal; is impeded by the antagonist/villain in achieving the goal; seeks knowledge along the way from a mentor to vanquish the villain; and achieves victory to accomplish his goal successfully at the end.

Does this description of the hero represent your product? Nope.

Instead, B2B marketers need to make their buyers and customers the hero of the stories they tell.

Try this:

The buyer has a business objective (goal), is impeded by problems or issues (villain) that get in the way of achieving it. The buyer seeks knowledge along the way aided by vendor expertise (mentor) and achieves his objective with the help of your product to enable him to resolve the problems and issues keeping him from achieving his goal.

Nowhere in here is the product playing the starring role in the story.

Now try this:

A CTO and founder of a startup SaaS company that's the subsidiary of a global enterprise is building a new application with a business model dependent upon low price, high volume sales. He knows that, at launch, the delivery and support of his application must be rock solid, the site unwaverable - regardless of how much traffic hits it. This is a key product launch for the parent company with a lot riding on it - including his career.

He's formed a great core team focused on the development of this leading-edge application. He is trying to decide how to support taking the application to market.

He can:

• Build the infrastructure in house - hire the team, buy the hardware, develop the network, co-locate the servers, etc.
• Build it in house and spin up the servers from Google or AWS to host it in the cloud - but this also means hiring the team to build and support it
• Outsource the infrastructure to a managed services provider and keep his team's focus solely on core product development, delivery and service
• Employ the services of his parent company's IT division to support roll out - which is what his parent company would prefer and his board is pushing for
• Use the vendors his parent company uses to try and find economies of scale - which could be easier for his parent company to swallow than new, unproven vendors

Some of his concerns include:

• A move up of launch date that means he has to get the infrastructure up faster than he'd planned
• Concern about security and compliance in the cloud - his customers will be all over this
• A reluctance to split his or his team's time between innovations for the new product and managing the infrastructure
• Scaling the infrastructure if volume grows faster than forecast
• He's been burned by managed services vendors in the past and has low trust that they'll do what they say they will after the contract is signed
• Controlling costs to keep slim margins in the acceptable range for the board - they're already slim in the best of scenario forecasts
• Minimizing any perceptions that will get in the way of his potential customers embracing this new application

If you are a managed cloud services provider, how will you build the story for this buyer?

Will you tell him that the cloud will save the day because you're the leading provider of cloud services?

Or will you:

• Share deep insights about the challenges of taking a new SaaS product to market and how cloud compares to an on premise deployment for scale, uptime, responsiveness and rolling out product updates?
• Produce content that talks about the role a managed services team plays in collaborating with the core team to make sure the infrastructure supports new product developments and customer demands?
• Help him to understand how the security and compliance measures you can provide will be a selling point for his customers - and his executive board?
• Show him how a pay for what you use model will help him keep margins where they need to be?
• Share your insights about how the future trends you see for the industry will be easier to address with a cloud infrastructure and why this is important for his app and his customers?

There are many angles your story can take and a number of chapters to unfold that will be integral to helping the buyer build the trust and credibility he needs to take the risk of choosing to use an outside vendor, let alone the cloud. There will be a lot of information he'll need to build the business case and drive consensus with his board and parent company. But only if you can convince him first.

None of the stories this buyer needs revolve around your product or solution as the hero. Your solution is simply one component of the business the buyer is building. The story you need to tell is one that builds the buyer's confidence that he's making the best, lowest risk choice that will lead to his SaaS app succeeding in the marketplace and help to elevate his career.

Do you see the difference?

Is Your B2B Content Just a Pit Stop?

B2B marketers have taken up the challenge to create great content. They're investing time, effort and money into content marketing. People are reading their content. But, effectiveness remains elusive.

Only 9% strongly agree with the statement: "I know our digital marketing is working."

That's only 92 of over 1,000 marketers. Yet, 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing.  Does this scare you? It should.

What's the problem?

Well, it would be easy to say that there's a lack of strategy,but let's narrow it down to something you can do right now that will help to improve your efforts. One of the biggest failings I see is a lack of orchestration for momentum.

You can write the best content in the world, but without a plan, it's only a pit stop for busy prospects who may read it but then quickly move on. Content must build interest that translates into intent.

In other words, your content must do more than appeal to buyers. I read a ton of content every day. Some of it is a waste of time, some of it is interesting, but very rarely does any of it make me want more. And, if it does, quite often getting more related content isn't easy to do.

If you want to get past your content being just a pit stop for buyers, here are a few things to think about:

Take a Serial Approach

Serial publishing is nothing new. In fact, Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers was serialized in 1836. The reason I bring this up is that short-form content is in demand. For B2B marketers with a complex solution, it's impossible to share all the expertise and guidance needed in short form. But unfolding the story a bit at a time can work very well, especially if you have a very long sales cycle and a number of people who must become engaged to reach consensus before a decision can be made.

Tell Your Audience What to Do Next

One of the things that drives me a bit crazy is when good content is produced without connecting to what comes before or after. It just sits there like an island. And it doesn't count if you have "sign up for a demo" or "contact a sales rep" as the only options for the audience. Marketers need to embrace a guidance approach. Prospects are busy. They aren't going to hunt or search for related content. It's up to you to tell them what to do next. Those who are interested will take action. Reading more than one piece of content on a topic should increment lead score and even trigger more to test the level of that interest.

But we tend to leave our prospects hanging because we don't think about "If they're interested in this subject, what else do they need to know?" We don't create content with follow-ons. Marketers still tend to create content as one-off ideas. This is a missed opportunity.

Provide Cross-Persona Perspectives

In B2B buying there are multiple people with a stake in the decision. Yet, I very rarely see content designed for, say, a Director of IT, that includes an offer of content that speaks to the VP of IT Operations as a "sharing" opportunity. Take a look at all the personas on your buying committee and figure out how to help get your ideas shared among them. This is really helpful in situations where you have problems reaching a persona online, such as those farther up the ranks who may not spend the amount of time on social media as their subordinates do, for example.

Have you thought about how you'll get them involved? Or are you using "hope" as a strategy and just publishing that content online into an audience void?

Go Deeper

Marketers are often told to go create awesome, helpful content. But, what does this mean? If we're going to create content that drives business, we need to speak to what our prospects must have, not to what they merely need.

While "grow your revenues" or "cut costs" are always objectives, the phrases don't mean anything. Take a look at your persona and see what it means in the context of his or her roles and responsibilities.

• A product manager who can get her product to market three months faster than they do now to gain first-mover advantage that could result in larger market share will pay attention to how that can be made to happen.
• A service desk manager who can equip his team with the tools to close out service tickets 20% faster at higher first-response resolution rates while working to reach higher levels of ITSM maturity will want to know how to make that happen.
• An oil field asset manager who can increase proven reserves with a tool that gives his geophysicists greater visibility to the subsurface will have visions of career advancement.
• A start-up CEO who needs to focus all his team's energy on developing enhancements for his SaaS application and onboarding customers who learns that managed services from a cloud provider can relieve the stress and cost of hiring an in-house IT staff while bringing additional expertise he could not afford otherwise.

You get the idea. Specificity wins hands down against ambiguity. The deeper you can get, the more closely your content matches the context for your prospect's situation and objectives, the more interest your content will generate.

You've got to move them beyond the "So what?" to "That was interesting" to "Tell me more!"

Easy Isn't Good Enough

Marketers must stop looking at isolated clicks and views for one content asset as the most important KPI for marketing programs. Our content must do more than appeal to buyers one time, it must spur them to action. While it's great to know that a specific content asset attracted an audience, if that's all it does, then it's not doing enough.

One view doesn't make an MQL. Three or four random views of content on assorted topics will also not produce a prospect intent on buyng.

Business buyers buy to solve a problem that has the potential to cause them to fail at something they're trying to achieve. So what is your content designed to do?

How are you orchestrating progression for your content marketing programs?

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.

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.

Why "Who" Sends B2B Nurturing Emails Matters

A lot of marketing emails used in B2B nurturing programs don't have a live person tied to them. Signature lines that reference Your [Company] Team, or no signature at all are the norm. This bothers me. Not only is it impersonal from companies that are trying to prove to you that they're putting your needs first, but it represents a hands-off attitude that is a bit offputting for your buyers. Not to mention it screams "I'm a marketing email."

Even worse is the dreaded "Do Not Reply" email moniker. I cannot believe that marketers think this is effective. You want to talk to me, but you don't want me to talk back? Nice.

Then there are the companies who use what looks like an executive's email and signature. Nice try, but I'm not buying for one minute that the Executive VP from a global company is using his or her personal email to do nurturing sends to thousands of contacts. Do you really think your prospects are buying it? If it's true, good for you, but I wonder what that exec's inbox looks like...

There's a big opportunity with sig lines. Some of the benefits include:

• Building a personal relationship
• Improving your responsiveness
• Inviting replies
• Showing you care
• Giving buyers an alternative to the anonymous contact form that goes who knows where?
• It's really easy to hit "reply"

In fact, I was on the phone with a client the other day and he was sharing some of the latest reactions the inside sales team has had from replies to nurturing emails. Yes, each rep has their signature on the emails sent to leads they'll be speaking to when the time comes. This company has their inside sales team set up as concierges who are helpful, coordinate the introductions and hand offs to the sales team and act as the connective tissue as much as needed during the entire buying process.

Here are a few of the responses they've received via replies to nurturing emails:

From a customer in a nurture stream:

The contact replied to a nurture email informing her rep that she's been promoted to a different area of the company, but she's been sending the emails on to four other colleagues who have asked to be added to the list. She providing all their contact information and faciliatated their request to personally receive content from the client because they find it that valuable.

When's the last time that happened to you?

From a targeted prospect company:

The executive who'd been receiving nurturing emails forwarded one on to a staff member and requested that he set up conversations to discuss their upcoming project. With the contact information on the email, the process was super simple and he also acted as if a relationship was already established because of the way his boss forwarded the email and request.

From an active prospect:

This contact sends his rep suggestions for what he'd like to see in the content we're sending to him. This helps to evolve their content process and editorial calendar. Mostly, what she wants is for the client to connect more of the story so she can keep following the thread. How's that for engagement?

Responsiveness is Critical

It's bad enough that many companies never respond when a contact form is submitted from their websites. But when marketers are actively trying to engage prospects and retain customers, responsiveness isn't a maybe, it's a must do!

Why in the world would you want to make it difficult for prospects and customers to start up a dialogue with your inside sales team?

Oh, I've heard the excuses - bunch of wimpy stuff in my opinion that includes stuff like:

• We don't know which rep they'll speak to
• We have a lot of attrition - why set up a relationship with someone who might not be here when they call?
• Field sales doesn't want inside sales building relationships with their leads

Change your processes. Hire better people, train them better and keep them up to speed about the content your prospects are engaging with. I don't know one inside sales rep who wouldn't be ecstatic to have an interested prospect reach out to them!

And if field sales has a problem, put their signatures on the nurture emails.

Just get out of your own way and set the stage. Let the dialogues happen as they will. Otherwise, what's the point in creating great content that promotes the urge for prospects to continue the dialogue in the first place?

Is Your B2B Content Tipping the Effort Scale?

I do a lot of work for technology companies. One of the challenges with marketing technology is simplifying complex systems into understandable business enhancers that B2B buyers must have to reach their goals.

I just reviewed a paper written for a technical audience. You know it's tough when you have to keep backing up to re-read paragraphs because your mind wanders or because comprehension is elusive. And I read a ton of tech stuff - given my projects - so I should be a slam-dunk reader.

In the Age of Impatience and short attention spans, we've got to make even technical content fun to read. I don't mean rolling laughter or big entertainment - I mean easy to understand so that your ideas become compelling enough to diminish the urge to click on to somewhere else.

Here are a few of the biggest effort triggers that cause your buyers to flee from your content due to the perception of effort:

• Run-on sentences. Fifty word sentences are not normal. They're hard to focus on all the way through. That's what was causing me to back up when I was reading the paper I mentioned above.
• Alien grade-level competency. I tend to run the content I develop through the Flesh-Kincaid readability tool in Word. In case you're wondering - this blog post clocks in at 8.1 grade level to this point. The white paper I mentioned above came in at 24.1 grade level when I checked it. Can you imagine the difference in effort?
• Big-word syndrome. A big word here and there can add interest when used well. Stringing them together in those run-on sentences and tossing in a bit of jargon to top it off can create twitchy fingers on the back button. We may think it sounds cool to use them, but it's like an assault on comprehension. And, as soon as you lose the thread of what the content is about, your mind wanders...and so will your buyers.
• Abrupt transitions - no context. One paragraph we're cruising along and then we come to a new header and we're off in a new direction, unrelated to the path we were following. A header is not an excuse for a 180 shift. A header is a marker along the path. If you remove the text and string headers together, they should provide a synopsis of your content.
• Abrupt transitions - from compelling idea to forced sales pitch. One of the things that bother me the most is when I'm reading about a compelling take on something and then I'm confronted by the equivalent of a solution brief for the last few pages of the paper. Or a bunch of hyperlinks to product pages embedded within the part masquerading as thought leadership. There's a time and place for everything - forcing the issue is not working in your favor.

There are others I can list, but these are the worst of the bunch. Of course if I don't say it, someone will comment - spelling and grammar should be a no brainer.

I didn't bring all this up to leave you hanging. Here are some simple ways to test your content before you set it loose on the rest of us:

• Read it backwards. Seriously, this works. Why? Because when you read forward your mind has expectations and will try to compensate for words that don't work well with what it expects to see. If you've ever published something you know you proofread to death and discovered a typo after the fact, this is likely what happened. Start at the end and read it backwards. This will help you catch words that have different versions based on context (their, there, they're, for example)
• Read it out loud. This is great for the run-on sentences. Have you ever noticed that you read about the same way you speak? You'll often adjust your breathing when you're reading as if pausing to take a breath when speaking. If you have to gulp for air when reading your content aloud, I'll bet you your sentence is over 50 words.
• Have someone else read it. And then take it away from them and ask them to tell you what it's about. Can they identify the key points you wanted your audience to take away? What did they like about it and what did they not like so much? You'd be amazed how people interpret content. Their reaction may be totally different than what you expected to hear.

About that last one - don't take it personally. If people are afraid to tell you what they really think, they won't. And then you'll end up publishing stuff no one wants to read.

It's the beginning of 2014. I invite you all to take the pledge to make sure your content is not tipping the effort scale in the wrong direction. Writing to be easily understood is difficult. It takes thought and practice.

It's a good place to start in the New Year.

In case you're wondering - the overall Flesh-Kincaid grade level for this post is 6.2 with a reading ease of 73%. Only 3% of the sentences are passive. That's another tip for your content. Passive sentences allow the mind to wander. They're boring.

 

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?