Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Sep 10, 2010 @ 09:43 AM
With social media, it’s no longer a question of can you measure, but do you. And measurements that merely communicate the number of followers and fans, and how much they post, does little to demonstrate the impact social media is having on your marketing efforts. It’s time to roll up your sleeves and start collecting the data and connecting the dots to find this impact; what I like to call "following the social media breadcrumbs." We advocate a three-phased approach to developing an effective social media dashboard as well as outlining the metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs) and financial measures appropriate to each phase.
Phase One: Required. The first phase of a social media dashboard is typically defined by the web data collection tools and habits that an organization already has place, which in most cases will offer mostly quantitative information along the lines of numbers of follower and the amount of content they (and you) are producing. The value of a dashboard in this phase is to communicate trends in the amount of followers and subscribers, and if there is a correlation with specific social media activities.
Phase Two: Recommended. The next phase of a social media dashboard moves beyond reporting glorified web analytics and begins to show the impact that social media activity is having on driving engagement and awareness. Organizations can start to consider how social media is impacting demand creation efforts in this phase, but don’t expect to be able to report on anything other than a lift in response rates.
Phase Three: Best Practice. The most advanced social media dashboard will provide insights into the ways that prospects use social media throughout their buying process and how customers use it to engage more fully with your organization. At this phase you should be able to determine the impact of social media as part of your marketing tactic mix, as well as the impact it has on sales enablement.
Posted by Joe Galvin on Fri, Sep 03, 2010 @ 10:01 AM
Social media continues to be a rapidly expanding area of interest and untapped potential for sales and marketing leaders. We have published and presented on social media primarily as it impacts branding and reputation on the marketing side. When it comes to B2B sales organizations, its impact has been less profound. Sure, there are some Sales 2.0 advocates citing the value of social media in terms of identification and intelligence gathering for prospecting. The concept of social calling, using social media capabilities to improve the connect and conversion rates in cold calling is a good one, but any real impact from social media has escaped attention of the sales VP.
Social media’s greatest potential value to sales will be internal; enabling sales organizations to develop their own internal digital communities for sales reps to access and share knowledge, strategy, and tactics beyond their existing personal knowledge networks. Personal knowledge networks have always been important to sales reps. Over time they develop relationships with product, marketing, technical, finance, support and other internal resources to help them get what they need. That’s in addition to their network of other sales reps and managers they go to for strategy, tactics and real-time intelligence. In fact, sales organizations that went to virtual sales kickoffs in 2009 budget crisis cited the loss of the networking opportunities at the sales kickoff meeting as justification for returning to the live event. It’s not what you know, its who you know in sales and is a big part of what makes experienced sales reps successful and why new hires struggle to get up to speed.
Enter social media. A number of organizations are already using Facebook-type capabilities for subject matter experts, product specialists or even competitive intelligence teams to provide all sales with 24/7 access to the most current news, intelligence and content. They can maintain running commentary through blogs on their products, markets and competitors that allow any sales rep to tap into as needed. Moderated forums are being used to create discussion communities on important topics like product updates or pricing/negotiation tactics. Sales reps can customize individualized information portals pulling together and monitor the “nuggets” they are interested in. Sales communications functions are adding social media capabilities to portfolio to broaden their reach and impact to sales. Salesforce’s Chatter is another example of social technology being integrated into the SFA platform to allow greater levels of communication and broader capabilities for collaboration. With all the attention focused on how and where social media can impact customer interactions, it’s the ability to foster collaboration within sales that should be the focus.
And oh yeah, collaboration needs to be included in your sales enablement strategy. For many starting out, sales enablement is about content management and that’s a good starting point, but to maximize knowledge transfer to sales, social media and its undeveloped potential must included and a strategy for its execution needs to be created. Leveraging these social technologies will require new skills, capabilities and behaviors on the part of knowledge providers. Sales rep behavior will need to change as well. Collaboration is a two-way street. Being part of a community means giving information in addition to getting it. The strategy to develop this knowledge exchange needs to be considered as part of a broader definition for sales enablement.
Posted by Alden Cushman on Fri, Aug 27, 2010 @ 10:37 AM
We've all suffered through one of those conversations with an endless series of questions: “What are you doing? Why? What are you doing? Why?....” As many know, sometimes the only way to end the cycle is to answer with: “Why not?” Well, during the past year we've noticed a somewhat troubling trend in marketing data reporting questions that sounds a lot like “Why not?”
We start by identifying the drivers of this behavior. Four market forces are pushing most marketing organizations to improve and increase their reporting of marketing metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs):
- Increasing focus on marketing ROI
- Improving marketing processes and skills
- Increasing implementation of marketing automation platforms, and related systems and tools
- Increasing number of marketing service agencies that report campaign and program ROI measures
One of the interesting, and some might say unfortunate, consequences of being able to track the results of marketing campaigns, programs and tactics is the desire to search for answers by analyzing and reporting as much data as possible as often as possible. Senior management demands better information and intelligence to make better business decisions and improve results. However, since many companies (especially public ones) run on a quarterly cycle of reporting financial results every three months, many marketing groups have adopted the same reporting mentality.
The biggest problem is that most of our B2B clients have marketing and selling cycles that last well beyond three months, so they are reporting on marketing lead generation and nurturing activities that do not fit neatly into a quarterly view. The result is usually a potpourri of misleading conversion ratios between program response rates, inquires, marketing qualified leads, marketing sourced pipeline, marketing influenced pipeline, and a handful of other measures. We don’t advise that marketing groups refuse requests for quarterly or even monthly data, but do yourself (and senior management) a favor and put it within the context of the company’s regular marketing and selling cycles.
Begin by uncovering the decisions senior management is wrestling with and use those to determine which marketing metrics and KPIs impact them the most. Don’t measure and report on everything you can. Generating pages and pages of marketing activities only confirms what many senior managers believe, that marketing has no idea how to prove its return on investment. Report on fewer items and make sure to compare last quarter’s marketing metrics and KPIs to the same quarter of the previous year; don’t compare them to year-end numbers. Prove to senior management you understand their underlying business issues, you are investing in campaigns and programs designed to address those issues, and you can report the right indicators in the right timeframe to show concrete positive results.
Posted by Jay Gaines on Fri, Aug 20, 2010 @ 09:00 AM
For most of my childhood I was certain that flying cars (or at least personal jetpacks) would be a common part of everyday life by the time I was an adult. To this day I often feel a twinge of disappointment when I see my car sitting like a lump on the ground with its horribly old fashioned tires.
I feel similar disappointment each time I see a B2B website sitting there like a lump spouting platitudes about how great its products are, and hoping some poor visitor will fill out its annoyingly long forms.
For many years I thought that seeing a B2B website optimized for demand creation was as unlikely as seeing a flying car. If we could, we’d develop rich content libraries aligned with the needs of our buyers in specific buying cycle stages and dynamically deliver that content to targeted visitors based on the origin of their visit, their behavior and their profile data. We’d create rules and algorithms for activity-based triggers that would automatically launch timely offers with the right message to the right visitor at the right time. We’d monitor, test, tweak and always improve. We’d build lead scoring models based on not just profile data, but on activity, recency and frequency. We would convert unknown visitors to highly qualified leads, and deliver them seamlessly and continuously to our grateful and admiring friends in sales.
Yes, we have the vision, but we’ve lacked the technology. Occasionally, the very brave among us dared to voice our web optimization dreams and humbly asked our IT colleagues to build the tools and technology to enable our demand creation dreams. Some tried, but most failed. That is, until recently. A convergence of critical factors has begun to finally make true B2B website conversion optimization a reality. These factors are:
- New approach. B2B marketing's focus has shifted from sales cycles to buying cycles. We understand the information needs of buyers at specific buying cycle stages, and we’ve realized that high-value content is the fuel that drives demand creation. We’ve also adopted multi-touch portfolio marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring and inbound marketing. We’ve come to understand that good B2B marketing is not a one-and-done affair, but instead is defined by our ability to attract, engage and qualify targeted audiences over time with value.
- New technology. As marketing's approach has evolved and became more sophisticated, new technologies have emerged to support such efforts. These include marketing automation platforms (MAPs), increasingly robust analytics, and web content management (WCM) systems specifically designed to help B2B marketers engage and qualify leads through dynamic content delivery, progressive profiling, lead scoring and much more. We’ve also realized the imperative of integrating these technologies with each other and our CRM systems.
- Powerful catalyst. B2B marketers have become very adept at attracting targeted traffic to their ebsites, and most of us have been quite vocal about our search engine optimization and inbound marketing success, which has led to the inevitable question “how much of that traffic converts?” For many organizations the focus on driving traffic has shifted to a focus on converting traffic.
The combination of these three factors has led to a renewed focus on making corporate websites the true center of demand creation efforts and many are experiencing unprecedented success. How is your website performing?
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Aug 13, 2010 @ 08:13 AM
IBM has announced that it has entered an agreement to purchase Unica in a cash transaction worth approximately $480 million. As followers of SiriusDecisions are aware, we've been predicting the consolidation of the marketing automation platform (MAP) space for some time. While other acquisitions have occurred, albeit it on a smaller scale (even taking into account Oracle's purchase of Market2Lead's IP), this could be the tipping point we've been predicting. It's easy to overstate the potential for consolidation, given the relatively small size of the MAP market, but other vendors have certainly been shopping themselves and have most likely been pricing themselves out of consideration.
So what of this acquisition? IBM has been using Unica internally, and standardized on it as their MAP worldwide in 2009. While the timeline to complete such an enterprise implementation is long, IBM clearly saw the value of Unica's capabilities and the opportunity to enter the marketing automation game. In addition to its marketing automation solution, Unica is one of the leaders of what we call Marketing Operations Management (others call it MRM), which handles planning, budgeting, scheduling, asset management, and a host of other operations capabilities. Unica also has a Web analytics product, but IBM already has solutions in this area. According to IBM, it's the operations and MAP functionality they were after to bolster its own ability to offer an automated, cross-channel marketing solution along with key marketing process and operations capabilities.
This acquisition is positive and gives MAP customers a strong choice; it remains to be seen whether this is an enterprise choice only or if it will be palatable to smaller customers as well. The implementation portion of adopting a MAP (whether on-demand or not) is something few marketing organizations have the stomach for. Given that the MAP market consists of relatively small vendors, who have had to rely increasingly on their emerging partner networks as the pace of clients they need to install has outpaced their internal resources capabilities, the combination of Unica/IBM technology along with IBM's vast services groups could help accelerate MAP adoption, certainly for larger organizations. So will this acquisition start a domino effect? Most likely, but the row of dominoes is fairly short. The real question is will those seeking to acquire a similar vendor buy one that offers the full complement of operations, analytics and MAP capabilities (such as Aprimo or Neolane) or one that focuses on the MAP side (such as Eloqua, Marketo, Silverpop or Manticore Technology)?
Posted by Jonathan Block on Wed, Aug 11, 2010 @ 10:42 AM
We've seen it happen in the realm of demand creation; marketers have realized that being more analytical about their activities has led to more measurable results. Understanding your marketing data leads to better targeting, segmenting and the more optimized pairing of tactics and offers to drive better results throughout the waterfall. More and more organizations are realizing the importance of the marketing operations role to make this a reality.
Now it's time to see a similar role (and more) that applies the same analytical discipline to the seeding of demand, typically the responsibility of the reputation function in driving engagement and awareness. When it comes to social media specifically, we continue to see a lack of insight and analytics both in the processes companies use to measure and in the capabilities of the technologies that are designed to assist in defining, collecting and analyzing metrics without employing expensive services. You may gain some depth of information regarding your share of voice, sentiment and engagement, but how wide does this knowledge go and what is it telling you about moving the needle for driving business?
Organizations need to take the solution into their own hands. Whether social operations becomes a specific role or a responsibility spread across a number of employees, the key is to take all the data and metrics you can collect to follow the social media breadcrumbs and connect the dots in ways that existing technologies and agencies can't provide beyond traditional brand measurement. Sure, it's useful to understand the demographics, habits and preferences of your networks and communities within Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, but you need the insights that go across these multiple communities (and more) to not only better understand and serve your customers and prospects, but to be able to market to them more effectively as well.
So, who is responsible for social operations within your company and how do you see such a role evolving?
Posted by Marisa Kopec on Fri, Aug 06, 2010 @ 09:18 AM
SiriusDecisions estimates 55 percent of B2B enterprises go-to-market primarily leveraging their solution marketing function, either through a horizontal solution or industry vertical orientation. As enterprises shift their focus from product to solution, the need for highly qualified solution marketing talent is on every CMO’s agenda. SiriusDecisions recommends that you think of a solution marketer as the “subject matter expert for a defined customer segment” and put the right people in the jobs. The primary objectives of solution marketing are:
- Contribute to new solution innovation
- Increase the productivity of sales
- Drive successful solutions marketing programs
Although the role of solution marketing and product marketing are fairly similar there are three essential differences in the role and required skill set.
- Solution marketing requires greater cross-functional leadership to bring a solution to market. Solutions are enterprise-wide initiatives that require a high degree of organizational calibration and collaboration across multiple teams. The biggest difference between solution marketing and product marketing is that the solution marketing role is typically an overlay function that needs to work cross-functionality across business units to bring a solution to market.
- Developing solution messaging and positioning is more complex than for a point product or service. Solutions require more sophisticated messaging and positioning and deeper subject matter expertise because they need to describe the value in terms of how a customer can leverage their company’s strengths to solve a business problem. Product level messaging is focused more on the features of functionality while solution level messaging has to describe the customer segment or industry landscape such as the business processes, industry trends, key issues and personas.
- Solution marketing demands broader and deeper domain expertise. While the product marketing leader is a product expert and has intimate knowledge of the point product’s capabilities, the solution marketing professional needs to have broader domain expertise around a larger set of knowledge including more products and services to know, a deep understanding of the solution market, as well as staying current on key industry trends and hot topics.
Solution marketing functions that don’t collaboratively drive solution innovation and have exceptional domain expertise will be seen as a low-value overlay function. If the solution marketers are spread to thin, they will not be able to maintain the depth of knowledge or stay current on industry or customer trends. Fund and resource the solutions marketing function to ensure its success so that it’s not only a lever of change for the organization but also raises the visibility of marketing’s overall contribution to the enterprise’s financial growth.
Posted by Megan Heuer on Fri, Jul 30, 2010 @ 09:00 AM
Are your marketing programs attracting the right kinds of prospects? Only your data can tell you. While it’s tempting to stop at reviewing email response rate, opt-out percentages or unique visitor growth on the website, understanding and optimizing B2B marketing tactic effectiveness requires a little more digging. You need to look into the details behind those numbers and how tactics impact the overall health of the contact database. Here are some guidelines for using the contact database to shed light on what works and what doesn’t.
Define Who You Need to Attract. It’s hard to know if a tactic is encouraging interactions with the right contacts if a clear goal has not been set as to who the desired audience is. Who exactly is your desired audience for the tactic and what goal are you supporting with them? One this is defined, if you are pursuing an outbound tactic, take a look in your database to see how many of these individuals you already know. If the universe in there is smaller than you know it to be, consider targeted contact acquisition. If the tactic is inbound (meaning not sent out to specific names but positioned where the right kinds of contacts go to encourage them to respond and identify themselves), then define the baseline of contacts that meet your criteria so you know when additions are made. The initial goal is to estimate a rough size for the segment you want to reach and what percentage of it you already know so it’s clear when gains or losses happen in the database.
Build a Segment Data Snapshot. For your target segments, track overall contact gains and losses monthly to see what the net impact of marketing programs is on building the contact database. As part of your normal database reporting, compare the number of names and the percent of total database added each month (de-duped from existing contacts) to the number of contacts lost or no longer usable. This not only shows whether the database is growing or shrinking, but at how rapid a pace movement is taking place. The calculation also can be used to determine incremental return on investment for specific addition efforts; for example, a demand creation program might contribute 100 leads, but if it also added 500 new names to the database and helped with the completion of 250 more records as well, there is incremental value that should be identified and reported.
Put together, these elements provide a warning system for changes that could hurt down the road. They’re also a way to identify highly successful approaches that should be shared and emulated to boost others’ contact acquisition results.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Jul 23, 2010 @ 10:52 AM
Research analyst Jim Ninivaggi joins Jonathan Block for a podcast on the benefits of applying a time and motion study to B2B field sales (14.7 MB; 16:00).
To listen to this podcast, Click Here.
Posted by Tony Jaros on Fri, Jul 16, 2010 @ 09:47 AM
One of the most common inquiries analysts within our Demand Creation Strategies (DCS) service conduct is to evaluate — and troubleshoot — lead scoring schematics being used by B2B organizations to “improve” the quality of leads fed to sales. We put the word improve in quotations because it often only takes a few minutes to see that the manner in which these schematics have been created not only won’t help lead quality, it will hurt it.
Mathematical errors. Overweighting individual demographic characteristics at the expense of the organization the individual represents. Scoring scales that barely differentiate prospects with vastly different characteristics. Ignoring activity-based scoring. Straight, linear scoring vs. taking a more curvilinear approach. Relying too much on BANT (budget-authority-need-timeframe) attributes when it’s inappropriate to do so. These are just a handful of the types of fundamental errors in schematics that we’re seeing virtually every week.
When marketing works with sales to score leads, it is implying that it will be able to deliver better leads at a more reliable rate. When a scoring model is broken, marketing will almost certainly break this implied promise, and disappoint sales (yet again, in the perception of many sales leaders).
A large number of B2B organizations that have purchased a marketing automation platform (MAP) over the last several years have yet to score leads in any meaningful way; perhaps they’ve heard some of the horror stories, or the lack of experience with scoring has made them hesitate. There’s nothing wrong with this hesitation, but it shouldn’t devolve into fear and inaction.
Your organization’s first forays into lead scoring will certainly be works-in-progress, and mistakes will be made. That’s OK, as long as the organization commits to evolving the way it scores leads over time, and vigorously pursues best practices.
As planning season arrives for many of you, now is a good time to either evaluate scoring schematics already in place, or to start to draw up prototypes for testing. Either way, we’d love to help.