Driving Sales and Marketing Alignment

Evolving Analyst Relations: First Steps

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According to our research, vendors are the least trusted source for information when it comes to B2B buying, while industry analysts are one of the most trusted, making it more critical than ever that your AR function is able to communicate messaging and positioning to the analyst community effectively. The collective experience of SiriusDecisions has sat through thousands of vendor briefings across every industry. Based on this understanding we’ve identified four areas where AR can optimize their activities to influence the way the analyst community perceives you and impact the way they communicate about your organization:

• Know your target. Executing AR is really no different marketing your products; just as you target your messages to different audiences, make sure that you communicate with the right analyst firm as well as individual analysts.
• Analysts aren’t PR. While AR should do their best to make sure an analyst has all the content and collateral needed to influence their positions, it’s not an analysts job to do your PR and marketing for you. Few (if any) analysts will take your messaging and simply communicate them out to their customer base; they must analyze competing solutions to help them identify the the most appropriate matches based on a customer’s requirements.
• Empty claims. Many vendors tout claims that rival the statements made by politicians in an election year. You can say that none of your customers have any serious support issues, that your customers achieve ROI quicker than with a competing solution, or that you had the best quarter ever but don’t expect an analyst to be convinced or repeat that assertion without proof.
• Prepare adequately. Too often analyst relations doesn’t adequately prepare the staff who are going to give a briefing. It is the job of AR to make sure that the most appropriate resources are used in a briefing and that these resources are adequately prepared.

Beyond these first steps, AR needs to ultimately to evolve to influencer relations, a topic we'll cover in a future post.

Social Media and Pipeline Acceleration

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Instead of focusing exclusively on generating yet more new leads that may or may not qualify, an effective way for marketing to impact the elongated B2B sales cycle is to help move deals that (for whatever reason) have stalled in the pipeline, an activity we call pipeline acceleration. While marketers have many tools to help prospects buy, and sales sell, there are two ways that marketing can drive late-stage pipeline: stimulus offers (specific programs extended to a prospect to increase the velocity of customer buying processes) and enablement/knowledge (internal programs designed to help sales build competence and neutralize roadblocks when dealing with stalled selling opportunities).

Social media can play a key role in stimulus offers. Giving a prospect controlled access to your online customer community shows that prospect the experience of what it would be like to be a customer. This lets the prospect see how customers interact with each other and your company; select prospects can browse and search community discussions to match their interests or concerns. Having the prospect see how issues and negative experiences with the company are resolved goes a long way in giving  prospects evidence of how you treat customers. Also on the stimulus front, tap your subject matter experts to focus the critical content already available in whitepapers and other collateral into concise, customized podcast, blogs or tweets that align your message directly to known prospect pains. Podcasts can also be effective in distilling down case studies that can have direct relevance to prospect needs.

On the enablement/knowledge side, the inclusion of social media features within sales enablement platforms continues to gain steam as a more organizations leverage internal communities built around knowledge sharing and best practices; this is especially valuable for leveraging the group experience of not only other sales reps but also subject matter experts that reside in other parts of the organization. The use of podcasting as an internal training and communications tool continues to grow and is a proactive way in helping arm reps with the talk tracks and selling points to help accelerate prospects, particularly if they include the experiences of reps that have success accelerating their deals.

Remember, marketing is not just about new leads. You already have prospects in the pipeline that have a strong interest, now do what you can to help them close.

The Secret Weapon of a Marketing Dashboard

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I am about to reveal the number-one, top-secret tip for successful marketing reports and dashboards. The one CMOs ask for every time. This is the big one. I mean it.

Here it is...

Include a summary at the Beginning.

Feeling let down? Saying “duh” out loud? Sure you are. Now take a look at your report. What’s the first thing you see? It’s data in charts, isn’t it? Most marketers, in their quest to deliver credible performance numbers, go right for the charts. But what most dashboards skip is what marketers should be best at: telling a story. When numbers are all that is shown, the report makes it too easy to focus on minutiae and not the bigger picture of what happened and why. Worse still, when too many numbers are shown without context, it is impossible to tell what matters and what’s really happening. The numbers and charts become an end in themselves and not a diagnostic tool.

Why is this a problem? Because lack of context for numbers results in unconstructive dialog about the numbers themselves, and not about what’s being done to improve them. The numbers-only approach leaves senior managers frustrated that they don’t know what marketing delivers, despite so much data. It leaves marketers wondering why no one uses the report when they provide such detailed numbers. The fix is simple: Senior marketing leaders tell us that, while they appreciate and need numbers, what they really want is a summary upfront that simply tells them what it all means.

Here’s the action item: Before you get to the numbers, add a summary. Put numbers into perspective so the rest of the report backs up the headlines. Include what happened, why, and what is being done to fix the bad and do more of the good. Caution: A summary will not fix bad data, or cure the fact that a report has the wrong metrics, or too many metrics, in it. A summary will require careful thought about what the numbers mean, and which ones are most valuable to determine past performance and future requirements. Marketing reporting should be more than a litany of available facts. It serves to illuminate facts with diagnosis and insights that support better decision making.

What’s in your dashboard?

Podcast: Optimizing the Use of Channel Incentives

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