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 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 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.
Posted by John Neeson on Wed, Jul 14, 2010 @ 10:06 AM
Well it's that time of year again. Many of you will begin your annual planning for 2011 or are well on your way to creating your budgets. This is the time of year where we do many budget benchmarks to show you trends in marketing spend that are often used to support the changes you are looking for. As we consider the improvements we have observed in sales and marketing alignment, here are three best practices to consider in your plans:
- Create a “menu” of programs sales is requesting. Very often marketing focuses on the top-line programs but not what they manifest into at the sales level. Build out the programs you will need in a menu model for sales. Include a description for each program showing what sales problem is solved with program and written in sales language not marketing. Show what will be on the menu for lead generation for new accounts, existing accounts, for sales enablement, and what will be done for targeting. Also show how the menu might be different by sales channel.
- Reverse the waterfall. Now with your menu created, determine the marketing requirements needed to achieve these sales programs. Establish what the number of leads will be, what marketing will source and what they will influence.
- Brand to demand ratio. Finally, determine what has been the ratio of awareness required to create demand. Look at what you've spent in years past on communications and advertising and see what the ratio has been for every dollar spent on demand generation, what has been spent in driving awareness.
Active dialogue is at the heart of B2B marketing and sales alignment, and fostering this dialogue should be a part of every planning process. Without using such a planning model as we've presented here, marketing is often left with assuming the impact that it can have on sales and, subsequently, the business.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Mon, Apr 26, 2010 @ 11:08 AM
I'll start off saying by way of a disclaimer that this post will mainly be an advertisement for our upcoming Summit, May 12-14 in Phoenix, so feel free to hop off now if that rubs you the wrong way.
With that out of the way, I've heard a number of comments recently about the lack of B2B content at many marketing and social media conferences. This isn't too surprising as it's a lot easier to determine the value of a marketing program that is essentially a transaction rather than the months-long sales cycles that typifies a B2B deal. And when B2B marketers tag either the first or last interaction as the magic tactic, it's tough to get a clear picture of the optimal marketing mix.
Which brings us to our 2010 Summit. We've assembled a great cast of guest speakers that will share case studies and best practices on the ROI of optimizing marketing and sales through function alignment. Our guests are senior-level marketing and sales leaders, including:
- Maxine Graham - senior director, global integrated marketing and operations; Blue Coat Systems
- Peter Johnson - senior manager, marketing operations; Blue Coat Systems
- Heidi Melin - senior vice president and chief marketing officer; Polycom
- Andrew Miller - executive vice president, global field operations; Polycom
- Rene Saltzherr - senior director marketing, global demand marketing services; Oracle
- Doug Sechrist - vice president of demand marketing; Taleo
- David Shirk - executive vice president of global marketing; Siemens PLM Software
We hope to see you in Phoenix! If you can't make it, be sure to follow the conversation on Twitter by using the tag #sds10
Posted by Megan Heuer on Mon, Apr 19, 2010 @ 10:51 AM
One topic dominated conversations during my travels and on client calls the last several weeks: marketing tactic return-on-investment (ROI). This is hotly debated by analysts and consultants, not to mention pretty much anyone who has ever had to run or defend budget for a marketing program. Like any good question for the ages, the answer is “it depends,” but we can offer some clarity around what it depends upon and what can be measured.
Let’s start with the definition of a lead, because that’s where the ROI calculation trouble usually begins. For the record, we don’t believe every inquiry is a lead. It’s an inquiry, which means someone who has raised his or her hand to take some action you have made available. An inquiry can be anything from a newsletter sign up to a whitepaper download to an event registration and more. On its own, an inquiry does not signal readiness to buy, which means it is not a lead (yet). Our years of benchmark data show companies who treat every inquiry as if it is a lead and send it to sales do not perform as well as those who have a process to nurture contacts from inquiries until they are properly qualified and ready for sales. When marketing teams follow this pattern of sending every inquiry to sales, they reduce potential to deliver against goals in the most effective way possible, and by extension this reduces potential for sales to be more effective and efficient. Now in the rare case where an inquiry says “call me I’m looking to buy,” the qualification process is a lot shorter, but this type of inquiry is less common than, say, a whitepaper download. Case in point: this week alone I got two calls from companies after I completed forms to download whitepapers in which I clearly stated I was an industry analyst and not looking to buy. In both cases, a competent and polite sales rep called and asked me about my inquiry. If they had read the form, they would have known the call was a waste of time. Calls are not free, so sending an unqualified contact to sales also wasted money.
Based on this thinking, let’s tackle the tactic ROI question. Specifically, marketers want to attribute dollar return based on closed deals to a single tactic, when no single tactic deserves that much credit. If you know your sales cycle involves multiple touches from marketing before you can consider a lead qualified and ready for sales, then it is impossible to attribute revenue from a closed deal to any single tactic. Some systems are set up to attribute a first or last marketing touch to each lead that is passed to sales and that’s the tactic that gets credit for the close. This results in a flawed view of what really works because all you see is one touch, when in fact there may have been tens of touches over a long period of time that in combination supported qualification of a lead. It’s just not that simple in B2B, and trying to make it simpler can hurt marketers’ ability to allocate resources. Instead, take a more realistic and practical view of the role of tactics by monitoring cost per response (from new or existing contacts) and cost per contact added to the database. Next look at the appearance of those tactics in the buyer’s journey. First look at the number of touches it typically takes to qualify and what those are, then look at the touches present all the way from qualification to close. This will provide a more accurate view of the relative success of various tactics vs. their cost. The key is not to confuse tactic ROI with overall marketing ROI, because doing so sells them both short.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Apr 09, 2010 @ 09:18 AM
This is a post that should lead to a series of questions; questions you should be asking yourself if you have any responsibility for the social media strategy within your company. Whether you're executing on that strategy yourself, have staff to do it, or have outsourced to an agency, there is certainly no lack of social data you're receiving. The problem is that it's mostly quantitative about activity and gives you very little insight. Having thousands of followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook may make us feel good, but it's fairly meaningless if we don't know what the impact of these numbers are on the business.
While we've thankfully evolved away from the notions that social media in not measurable, the pendulum is in danger of swinging too far in the other direction. In other words, too many B2B marketers are being asked to show the direct impact that social media efforts are having on revenue. We continue to advocate that focusing too much on this direct impact goal is misguided; better to focus on the impact that social media is having on the seeding and creation of demand. Many organizations are doing this by tracking the change in response rates when social media is part of the tactic mix, but it's key to discover how it can raise conversion rates at other points in the demand creation waterfall.
And this leads to the questions. Are you using social media for activities beyond the top of the funnel, such as pipeline acceleration or sales enablement? Even if you're not applying social media to these initiatives, are you even tracking these types of activities regardless? Do you know your optimal tactical mix throughout the waterfall? Do you even have any impact beyond the handoff to sales? Without insight into what you do currently (as well as historically), it won't be possible to gauge the impact that social media marketing has on activities beyond the top (or even before the top) of the funnel.
If you're already asking these questions, you're on the path to gain the most insightful measurements of your social media marketing activities. And bonus points if you got the Pink Floyd reference in this post's title.
Posted by Megan Heuer on Fri, Mar 26, 2010 @ 10:20 AM
If data is the lifeblood of demand creation, shouldn’t it have a heart monitor attached? I talk with many companies about their reporting and dashboards, and data is rarely part of the conversation. That should change. The best leading indicator of demand creation throughput is the effectiveness of tactics designed to add contacts to the database. When the focus is only on downstream results, including conversions and marketing qualified leads, it is more difficult to pinpoint problems upstream that clog the flow of data. Adding data to regular reporting allows another level of diagnosis, and some of the problems it finds can have a huge impact.
Take the case of an organization that invests heavily in inbound marketing activities to draw people to its website to request assets. The marketing operations team gathers reports from the web team, which show the number of visits to the site and the pages viewed. What they don’t see is how many of those web visitors hit a form page, completed the form, and were added to the database as marketable contacts. They also don’t see how many of the contacts who came in via inbound tactics fit the most desirable demographics for marketing to attract. Marketing ops may also get reports from the field marketing team or demand center, showing click-throughs and conversions on emails, and all leads created by campaign. They also don’t see how many of the individuals who clicked through an emails and saw a form, but did not complete it and were not added to the database; and if the name came from a list rental, then that’s money out the window. And, there’s no ability with this reporting to monitor on a cumulative basis how many of the most desirable contacts (or all contacts for that matter) are opting out and the impact that has on database growth.
The solution is adding at least one key performance indicator (KPI) plus a few key metrics around database health. Together, they provide the basic foundation:
- Net monthly database growth: Percentage of records gained minus percentage of records lost (opt-outs, bad data, etc.)
- Total percentage of usable records in the database
- Percentage of new contacts added each month
- Percentage of contacts lost each month, separated by opt-out/unsubscribe percentage vs. lost to data issues (bounce, bad address, etc.)
- Percentage of those who reach a form and complete it
If the organization described above was tracking these metrics, then the marketing ops team would identify the fact that specific web forms have low completion rates and need to be revised and tested for better results to improve database growth to take better advantage of good inbound traffic levels. They would also be able to see that specific inbound activities are attracting contacts from a different segment than the one intended. They might also sound the alarm on increasing opt-outs that appear to be tied to specific third-party data sources. This knowledge can save money and improve effectiveness, and that’s the definition of good reporting.
Your action item: Add data health metrics to your dashboard and let it be known the doctor is in.
Posted by Jay Gaines on Fri, Mar 12, 2010 @ 09:22 AM
As I outlined in my previous post Matching Brand Promises To Customer Reality," with the power shift in the business/buyer relationship that social media and unprecedented access to information has brought about, it is more evident than ever that B2B marketers no longer have complete control over how there organization is perceived — rather, much of this power now lies with the empowered customer. So, what robust brand and customer experience management strategies can a B2B business leader use to ensure that their brands match the reality of their company? The following strategies extend beyond logos, words and colors, and should set the stage for a successful re-evaluation of the brand and customer experience management initiative:
- Customer experience management is ultimately a marketing responsibility. Marketing is clearly best suited to understand the expectations their messages create as it is within marketing that the brand and its associated promise is often defined, refined and projected out to the world. Also, customer experience is increasingly defined by marketing touches in the form of content, newsletters, websites, direct mail, email, events, tweets, customer communities and much more. Finally, developing and maintaining great relationships with prospective buyers starts with marketing and is an inherent part of the entire marketing process because relationships are exactly what leading marketers use to convert unknown prospects into engaged and sales-ready leads. The CMO, working closely with counterparts in sales, customer service and product development, should assume leadership of B2B customer experience management due to this intertwined link between marketing success and an exceptional buyer/customer experience — one that marketing is most likely to ensure matches the brand promise of the organization.
- Analyze and understand customer experience. Since the goal of customer experience management is to move customers from satisfied to loyal, and from loyal to advocate, the best place to begin analysis is simple customer loyalty surveys and in-depth interviews. Utilizing open-ended questions along with quantitative questions in surveys and interviews will help establish a baseline and identify specific strengths and issues. Also, identify ways to gather “operational feedback” that comes through the normal course of conducting business, including customer service, sales, CRM data and comments left on your Website. Finally, monitoring customer comments and discussions about your company in customer communities and other online social networks is another relatively easy way to continuously analyze customer experience and perceptions. If you don’t currently have a customer community, starting corporate/executive blogs can open up fruitful conversations between customer and business that can also streamline customer experience research.
- Manage the expectations your messages create. In a business environment defined by social media and empowered customers who expect transparency over-promising has gone from unwise to high-risk as significant promise/reality gaps will be ruthlessly exposed in customer communities or other business social networks. Mapping your primary messages and brand promise to what you learn about your customers’ perception of their own experiences working with your organization goes a long way toward identifying significant gaps. In general, be vigilant to avoid creating expectations that can’t or shouldn’t be met by focusing messages on core competencies that differentiate your organization or offering and matter most to your customers.
- Proactively turn customers into champions with a customer advisory board. B2B marketers should consider initiating a customer advisory board as a crucial component of the customer experience strategy. Customer advisory boards can help to flush out any troubles that buyers might be experiencing with the company, as well as highlight and improve what the organization is doing well. Also, by engaging customers in defining processes and initiatives to improve their own experience they will quickly adopt a sense of ownership, which will help significantly with managing risk and mitigating communications crisis if they come up. It is always good to have customers come to your defense if possible, particularly in the social world.
While there’s no doubt that successful brand and customer experience management takes time and business resources, positive brand awareness and customer perceptions do more to ensure the reputation and success of a B2B company than any short-term initiative. The sooner B2B CMOs takes this to heart, the sooner the business will survive and thrive well into an optimistic future.