Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Jan 29, 2010 @ 10:31 AM
While more and more companies understand that a response to a campaign or program is not in itself a lead, the question still remains: when is a lead a lead? Marketing often interprets a prospect’s characteristics and actions as those of an ideal buyer, but sales refuses to act, believing the prospect requires more nurturing. In the end, the only way to view reality through a common lens is to develop a language that defines a “lead’s” place along a continuum.
Developing this language can be achieved when sales and marketing begin to understand and speak each other’s language, and build a common taxonomy that describes the state of a prospect. One way is to agree to gather necessary information about a prospect’s attributes. As a group, you must agree whether the information can be collected, and whether specific pieces truly contribute to lead definition (or are just nice-to-knows). This information can then be used to build a scorecard to help determine whether a lead is qualified or not based on a threshold of criteria that must be met. This needed information will be different by product or solution, but often contains the following:
- Demographics: Not only company data such as revenue size, industry, sub-industry, geographical region and employees, but also the prospect’s individual demographics, including title, function, power level and buying role.
- Attributes: What helps to determine the viability of one lead vs. another, such as functional budget allocations, parent vs. subsidiary or competitive situation.
- Activity: Specific activities that a prospect engages in, such as downloading of a white paper, attending a live or online event, or submitting a survey.
- Buying Status: This may include BANT (budget, authority, need, timeline) characteristics, but a critical consideration is agreeing what (if any) of this information can be reliably collected by marketing, and what needs to wait for interactions from either inside or field sales.
Even though sales and marketing often hear each other, that doesn’t mean they’re listening to what the other is saying. In the case of demand creation, without a jointly developed lead taxonomy, good opportunities (and revenue) will almost certainly be lost. Don’t lose ground to your competitors because you find your sales and marketing functions in a war of words; get working on your own lead taxonomy today.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Wed, Jan 20, 2010 @ 09:22 AM
Social media monitoring is a popular topic these day, and deservedly so. From our perspective monitoring is one of the four cornerstones of an effective social media strategy, which consists of Monitoring, Engagement, Awareness and Demand Creation. But where vendor functionality regularly outpaced a B2B organization's skills and process capabilities, users are finding such monitoring tools lacking in some key areas. This is not unlike the the marketing automation platforms (MAP) space; it's only in the last couple of years that B2B marketers have evolved to the point where they can take full advantage of MAP capabilities.
Let's look at what we're hearing from clients on two fronts:
- Integration: Again, not unlike MAPs, ease of integration of social monitoring platforms with other enterprise systems will become a differentiator for many customers. And we mean true integration, not just importing and exporting data. If you're only interested in tracking mentions, keywords and sentiment, as well as some indication of your level of engagement, then a standalone monitoring tool will be sufficient. But most B2B organizations look beyond communication goals to social media marketing, which requires tracking all customer and prospect interactions (what we call "following the social media breadcrumbs"), and integrating this data into MAP and CRM systems is critical. This explains why social tools are finding their way into such systems, either through partnering, acquisition, or the vendors building such functionality themselves.
- From reporting to analytics: Most clients tell us that social media monitoring platforms are good at reporting what people are talking about, where they're doing that talking, and offering some indication of sentiment, but many B2B marketers are disappointed at the lack of analysis they get. To be fair, agencies are still a significant user base of monitoring tools and many provide this analysis as a value-add to their customers, but more and more marketers are interested in leveraging these tools themselves. If monitoring solutions don't provide the analysis customers need, they'll need to integrate with systems that can such as a web analytics or business intelligence solution.
Social media monitoring is a still a relatively new market and growing pains are to be expected. While some users complain about usability issues (whither the concept of robust online help?), B2B organizations realize they must continue to evolve from a skills and process perspective to best take advantage of social monitoring tools. But these solutions also need to evolve from data aggregation to a solution for insight and action, providing not just activity information (read: who, what and where) but some indication of the impact these activities.
How would you like to see social media monitoring evolve?
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Jan 15, 2010 @ 09:55 AM
More and more B2B organizations recognize the value of having a clear strategy when it comes to social media to optimize returns and resources. According to our research data, over 60 percent of B2B organizations are doing something with social media (if only a blog) but of those only 30 percent have a documented strategy that seeks to interlock these activities with other marketing efforts. Given this reality, B2B organizations are looking to their peers but aren’t necessarily finding the answers they need. But there’s a good reason for that; most of the well-publicized success stories regarding social media are clearly in the B2C space. This really isn’t surprising since with such short sales cycles (i.e., transactional sales) it doesn’t take long to develop a critical mass of success stories and best practices. What becomes a stumbling block is when B2B organizations expect such quick hits. Well, sorry to say, it’s not going to happen. With the longer and more complex sales cycles that typify B2B, it takes a fair amount of time to be able to gauge the influence that social media is having on the business.
But this shouldn’t be an excuse to do nothing. Most likely your customers and prospects are already participating in social media (whether in online communities or Twitter) and may even be talking about you and your market. So even if you have no great social media aspirations at this time, or it’s not the way your target market consumes content, you should be monitoring to find out if people are talking about you, your competitors and market, and where these conversations are taking place. If you’re already participating you should be tracking all of these interactions. Without collecting such data you’ll never be able to determine what part social media plays among the series of interactions that typify the b-to-b buying process.
At the same time we regularly tell our customers not to ignore the internal value that social media can bring to the organization from a collaboration and best practices sharing perspective. Such internal uses, particularly between marketing and sales, can provide the quick hits you need to justify further investments that both internal and external uses of social media require. But remember that while social media may be inexpensive from a money perspective, it will require a large investment in time and money.