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 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 Fri, May 21, 2010 @ 10:42 AM
We'd like to thank all the attendees and sponsors for making our 2010 Summit such a success. I had originally planned on providing a recap of some of the content we presented, but a number of folks have already done a fantastic job at that so I'll just provide links to the summaries out there.
Adam Needles (@abneedles) has written the most comprehensive report on the Summit, which we encourage everyone to read:
Click here for Adam's summary
Here's a few more links to other insights:
From Kate Maddox (@kate_maddox) at BotB Magazine Online:
Click here for Kate's first article
Click here for Kate's second article
From Andrew Gaffney (@agaffney) at DemandGen Report:
Click here to read Andrew's article
From Bill Lee (@bill_lee) of the Customer Reference Forum:
Click here to read Bill's blog post
Thanks to all who took the time to write down their thoughts and if you know of any other, please post a link in the comments below. We look forward to seeing you in 2011!
Posted by Joe Galvin on Tue, Apr 27, 2010 @ 10:46 AM
When Salesforce.com (SFDC) announced its intention to acquire Jigsaw on April 21, 2010, it marked its entrance into the data services market. Jigsaw’s SaaS-based, crowdsourcing model of company/contact data collection and validation appears to be a logical extension of SFDC’s cloud computing infrastructure. What is unclear is if SFDC really wants to compete with the D&Bs, Hoovers and ZoomInfo’s of the world for this market or if this, like their other acquisitions, becomes the technology foundation for their next cloud-based application. Just as Korel turned into SFDC content and Groupswim became Chatter, does Jigsaw become SFDC Contact at some point in the future attempting to leverage the millions of contacts currently stored in SFDC by their multitude of clients? I struggle to believe that the SFDC sales force is going to make plan by selling Jigsaw as an add-on into their client base as they attempted with SFDC Content before making it free. Or that they will direct/distract their sales force into the complex marketing data buying centers where vendors like Harte-Hanks and Acxiom make a living.
Does this also ignite the dreams of all those App-Exchange vendors that they may be next? Does this signal SFDC’s intention to get serious about marketing automation? At DreamForce last November, many thought the “mystery cloud” that later revealed itself to be Chatter was going to be the announcement of an acquisition in the marketing automation platform (MAP) space, as had been rumored. SFDC’s marketing capabilities are notoriously lacking when compared to the functionality we see with MAPs like Eloqua, Marketo and Manticore Technology. Combining the data services capabilities of Jigsaw with an established MAP vendor would give their sales force a powerful 1-2 punch to sell add-on seats into marketing, leveraging their SFA infrastructure and growing their contact value.
The increasing volume of announced and soon-to-be-announced vendor acquisitions/mergers in the sales and marketing automation markets suggest that in anticipation of the next growth cycle, the vendor community is quickly adapting to user demand for value-added applications that drive performance and sales productivity, and that these are the requirements that will rise to the forefront of funded initiatives. With more than 88 percent of organizations having already deployed core sales force accounting (SFA) applications, it seems only logical that the next wave of user investment will be directed toward sales and marketing 2.0 applications — those that focus on selling, not just measuring sales.
For SFDC users this can only be viewed as good news. Jigsaw, like Content and Chatter, represents the first truly new functionality we’ve seen from SFDC, enabling it to move beyond being a sales force accounting tool and becoming the integrated sales and marketing suite that users are building for themselves today.
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 02, 2010 @ 08:28 AM
Based on our most recent research, developing an internal community is one of the fastest growing uses of social media, accounting for over 20 percent of B2B social media budget (program and personnel) in 2010. While the benefits of such an internal platform are often easy to identify (such as increased collaboration and knowledge sharing between sales, marketing, support and other functions), developing and maintaining a vibrant internal community for your organization involves not only a measure of serious forethought but also dedication to ensure the community continues to grow and evolve once the inevitable initial enthusiasm ebbs.
An often overlooked component is to clearly identify the goals of the community, as this will be important in determining needed roles, technologies and processes. Start with a pilot, using a smaller group to test features and validate approaches. Measurement is key to demonstrating the overall effectiveness of the internal community. While metrics such as time to value, quicker development of content and collateral, the emergence of new subject matter experts, and faster internal support and training time can be determined through a combination of included platform technology and employee surveying, organizations should also take a disciplined approach by individual function.
With the limitations of static content portals forming a major barrier to collaboration within an organization, the rise of an internal community continues to gain traction. One prevalent argument against such a community platform is that email is the most pervasive communications mechanism within the organization and should be adequate; however, email is not effective for those who aren’t part of a discussion chain nor is it easy to socialize and catalog emails for further use. While an internal community can provide a more effective platform for collaboration and best practices sharing between sales, marketing and the rest of the organization, well-socialized strategy and guidelines, as well as improvements to drive the continued health of the community, are the critical success factors.
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.