Posted by Megan Heuer on Mon, Dec 28, 2009 @ 05:08 PM
What is it about the December holidays that causes fits of nostalgia and list making? No analyst is immune, so cliché as it may be, here’s my addition to the 2009 retrospective: A list of five things that surprised me in the world of b-to-b marketing, and what can be done about them.
- Too many marketers still treat a “response” like it’s a lead. The simple act of responding to a marketing offer is just that: a response. An inquiry. In and of itself, the act of responding does not signal readiness to move into an active buying process. It never has. If you’re still sending raw inquiries to sales and partners, make 2010 the year you fix that. Our benchmark data proves you will be happy you did.
- The gap between marketing planning and buyer preferences is huge. It’s a buyer’s world, baby, and we marketers must embrace it. Trouble is, so much marketing activity is driven by siloed tactic planning and generating one-time inquiries (see number 1, above) that we lose sight of what prospects and customers need and want over the course of a long-term buying process. Embracing buyer focus is even harder when tactic-oriented myopia is institutionalized in the marketing planning process. Remember what assuming does to you and me when we fail to use what we know about the people with whom we want to build relationships. It’s time to change marketing planning to map to the buying cycle, not how we want to sell.
- Twitter is really, really useful. What a great tool for marketers to learn from each other and share ideas. But you can’t win if you don’t play, so if you aren’t convinced about the merits of social media in general and Twitter in particular, I challenge you to follow the #b2b tweet stream for one day. Let me know if you can end that day without learning at least a little something.
- Bad data is the root of most marketing evil. So maybe this isn’t a surprise so much as an inconvenient truth growing more obvious. Data quality, once a frightfully dull topic to most marketers, is now the one I can’t go a day without talking about. The curse of past poor data management is its impact on nearly everything marketers want to implement right now, from marketing automation and lead nurturing to better dashboards. Focusing on data as a strategic asset must become a central marketing effort.
- Marketers want definitive, hard-dollar metrics. It’s the rise of the left brain in marketing these days. So many companies I speak to are looking for more accurate ways to measure the impact of marketing, but they’re frustrated by a lack of quality data and the time and complexity involved in doing that. If 2009 was the year marketers got serious about defining measurement shortcomings, then 2010 should see great progress on fixing them because marketers are determined to make this happen. Not coincidentally, reporting tools are getting better and better to keep up with the demand. My hope is that the biggest surprise of 2010 will be how quickly marketers embrace quantitative analytics as key to improving program performance, not just tracking results.
Posted by Laz Gonzalez on Fri, Dec 18, 2009 @ 08:33 AM
Recently, I read a headline indicating a major hardware manufacturer was concluding its try-and-buy program, which included a full line of servers ranging from $8,000 to $80,000. The article went on to say one reason for ending the program was that some partners indicated it wasn’t performing because end users were reluctant to enter a free trial without having budget.
However, having presented at this specific vendor’s partner conference earlier in the year, I can say partners believed the program was doing extremely well and generating leads for them, albeit with a few glitches. One minor issue was that no one was telling them when the equipment was being shipped to the customer. That was a minor issue that was readily addressed by a company official by means of simply including the partner’s e-mail in the shipment records.
Try and Buy programs in the channel can be very successful; however, companies looking to adopt this tactic should take the following best practices into account:
- Factor in the channel partner. Whether simply notifying them that equipment has been shipped or using the partner’s facilities to conduct pilots, channel resellers can provide the missing ingredient in helping customers through a pilot process where bandwidth is limited and time is in short supply.
- Consider a multi-faceted offer vs. simply shipping equipment to a customer and expecting something to happen. One of the main benefits of a try-and-by offer is that it compresses sales cycles by offering the customer a shortened trial period. However, shrewd manufacturers should also provide a financial stimulus offer at the conclusion of the try-and-buy period so that customers are motivated to act at the end of the trial.
- Recognize that the trial is just part of the process, not the end. Many partners indicate that such a program provides a “door knocker” for them that wasn’t there had the prospect not reacted to the pilot. In times when “no budget” was a line used to keep VARs at bay, try-and-buy programs offered resellers the opportunity to engage with minimal customer commitment. As they nurtured the opportunity and provided value, things quickly changed as budget was freed up for a tested solution.
- Utilize marketing dollars to fund not-for-resale units and let partners support the program through MDF funds. This is a smart use of incentive dollars as it ensures resellers can apply their vendor-supplied resources toward a specific, lead generating campaigns.
While not a panacea, try-and-buy programs have worked in the past and will continue to do so as long as buyers making technology investments insist on seeing technology work with their own eyes rather than believing everything they hear from vendors and channel partners.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Mon, Dec 14, 2009 @ 09:51 AM
Social media marketing should be approached in two ways: as an additional channel to engage your existing target market and customers, and as a way to reach potential prospects that prefer to communicate and consume content through social applications. But organizations that approach social media as merely another channel to get leads will be quickly disappointed. Based on the best practices we’ve gathered from organizations leveraging social media is that while it can be used for demand creation, this assumes a high level of experience using social applications from a customer engagement and awareness perspective.
Social media in concert with more traditional tactics can play an effective role throughout the demand creation waterfall, not just at the top of the funnel to drive responses. For example, selecting key concepts typically distributed in whitepapers and using them as the basis of a podcast series that targets later buying cycle stages can provide subject matter expertise that can be subscribed and linked to. And let's not ignore the internal use of social media for sales enablement.
Social media marketing has evolved to the point where it should be part of every B2B marketers toolkit, but too often marketers want to run before they can walk. Without taking the time and resources to develop a social media presence and build up a network that has any interest in what you have to say, your links and postings to content and events will be ignored.
For more insights into the ways that best-practice B2B organizations are driving demand with social media, including the presentation a sample social media marketing program, please join our webcast on this topic on December 16 at 11:30 am EST.
Click here to register for this webcast.
Posted by Joe Galvin on Mon, Dec 07, 2009 @ 04:43 PM
Sales enablement is about knowledge transfer. Salespeople need to access and acquire constantly changing information from a variety of internal sources to maintain their state of knowledge readiness and be able transfer that knowledge to their customers. That knowledge needs to be in the context of their company, their products and the value they represent to the customer. Newly developed, upgraded, or acquired products need to be absorbed by sales along with new marketing initiatives and programs that are being rolled out. Sales enablement impacts sales productivity by making content and resources available through tools and technology.
Sales enablement is one component of a broader sales readiness strategy. Sales readiness focuses on the sales processes, skills and knowledge requirements of all sales people. This involves the coordination of various sales and marketing teams (sales training, sales operations, field and product marketing) to define and reinforce organizational sales processes (account management, opportunity management), identify and develop individual sales skills (face-to-face call dialogue, presentation, negotiating) and to transfer knowledge (products, market and strategy) to their clients and prospects. Interlacing these three elements into to a seamless customer interaction is the goal of sales readiness.
Sales enablement is focused on knowledge, making it available to sales and powering their customer interactions with customer ready content. Salespeople can manually sift through the range of unique documents, standalone events or optional learning sessions on their own, or an enablement function can rise to meet this requirement scripting, assembling and synthesizing the best customer messages, content and strategies in a format that the sales rep can readily apply to customer opportunities. Sales enablement teams establish the right set of process to bring content and knowledge to the salesperson from a variety of product management, product marketing and field marketing teams in the format and context that they can absorb and relevant to how their customers buy.