Who’s Who in B-to-B 2010? Apparently, I Am …

July 25, 2010 — Laura Ramos

Last week, Bt0B Magazine, published its Special Report on the ”key thought leaders and movers and shakers across a broad spectrum of the marketing industry,”  — their annual “Who’s Who in B-to-B” list for 2010.  As a Forrester analyst, BtoB honored me on their list for three consecutive years starting in 2006, something I appreciated greatly and continue to mention in my bio, resume, LinkedIn page, etc.  In 2009, I didn’t receive mention in the “Business Media” category, bringing my string of recognitions to an end.  Or so I thought.

Imagine my surprise when Buford Barr, Lecturer in Marketing and Communicationa at Santa Clara University Leavey School of Business, and Bernice Grossman, principal consultant and founder of DMRS Group, Inc, emailed me to offer their congratulations on making B-to-B Magazine’s 2010 list.  Even more surprising is the category for which I received the nomination: Direct Marketing.   Me?  A direct marketer? No kidding!   Here is what B-to-B said about me:

“Ramos spent nine years as an analyst and direct marketing expert at Forrester Research before leaving the research world in April to join Xerox Global Services as VP-industry marketing for North America. She continues to be a force in the direct marketing field via her blog, b2bmarketingpost.com.”

Awesome!  My profound thanks goes to the readers, marketing organizations, industry experts, and editorial staff who selected me this year. Thanks, too, goes to Bernice and Buford for cluing me in on the award. I hope to live up to it by keeping true to this blog and sharing my new adventures in services marketing at Xerox.

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Loopfuse Offers A “Free”-View Marketing Automation Solution

July 15, 2010 — Laura Ramos

I have long wondered about the contradictions I see in the marketing automation space. Look at lead management in particular. On the one hand, demand management technology produces measurable benefit for the thousands of marketers who use it. Lead management enthusiasts run more programs, with greater efficiency, and better track results.  On the other, market penetration – while growing – is early stage and many, many more marketers could benefit from adopting automation. Despite this, I have watched technology providers in this space battle heatedly over price and customer replacement.

Part of the problem is the limited collective experience  B2B marketers have with these tools. The idea of marketing automation is very attractive, but the work needed to make execution happen successfully can be daunting. It takes time to input contact information, build email templates, design landing pages, incorporate those pages into the company Web site (while attending to the brand, search marketing, and usability issues that can arise), and build the reports that help to demonstrate the value of this investment.  It seems as if marketers need some sort of open source, or freeware technology – like many developers enjoy – to let them learn and experiment before making a software investment.

Last month, Sean Dwyer, CEO of Loopfuse, contacted me about his plans to offer marketing automation for free. (Full disclosure: Loopfuse is an an up-and-coming lead management automation provider and I have worked with Sean in the past as a Forrester analyst. You can see evidence of this in my prior posts.)  Sean wanted my opinion as an ex-analyst and someone who knows the market.

At first I thought Sean was crazy, but then the idea began to appeal to me. Rather than cover all the details here, I’ll point you to Ardath Albee’s blog post about FreeView. If you are interested in learning more, read her post, because I think she does a fabulous job of covering the news.  What appears to appeal to both Ardath and me is that Loopfuse has made a limited-use (in volume, not features) software tool available to marketers who want to experiment with marketing automation without incurring an upfront financial or contractual commitments. Freeview will not only attract marketers in small businesses and startups, but – much like open source software – it may also create a following of professionals at many levels who use Freeview to become familiar with the technology and demonstrate its value without raising the eyebrows of the CFO or controller.

Will this announcement make lead management automation more pervasive? Or will it simply intensify price competition and customer poaching? As an ex-analyst, I no longer feel compelled to make a call here. So I’ll just watch from the sidelines and see what success this announcement holds for Loopfuse specifically and the rest of the market in general.  Care to make a prediction?  Feel free to post a comment and we can chat about it further.

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Four Ways to Engage Your Socially Active Customers

June 20, 2010 — Laura Ramos

If  I have any (small) regrets about leaving Forrester Research, it’s that I miss working with folks like Augie Ray each day. I found his recent research on the growth in the number of people who update their statuses using social media – tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter – interesting and worth a read.

Forrester has long counseled marketers to follow a simple four-step planning process called POST to set social strategy. POST is an acronym Josh Bernoff coined to remind business people to keep audience first and objectives second on their list of social media priorities.  Understanding your audience involves more than knowing profile information.  In this new social world, marketers must also know where your customers go online and how they interact with social tools already.

Social Technographics is the tool Forrester analysts, including myself during my tenure there, use to categorize online, social behavior.  From a B2B retrospective, I have to say that the tool did not always uncover distinct differences between business technology buyers, IT folks, and technology marketers in various demographic groups. Techies love technology and this fascination produces extensive experimentation with all variety of tools, hence they tend to profile high in most categories.

I found that it was important for marketers to know if the target audience is participating (as Creators, Critics, Joiners, and now Conversationalists), observing (as Collectors or Spectators) or simply inactive socially.  Three categories are easier for B2B marketers to understand than seven, especially since the conversation quickly turns to “So, where do buyers spend their time — on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn?” (BTW, Augie’s report offers some good insight on this question in Figure 1.)

Putting the nuances of Social Technographics aside for a moment, I think Augie offers some solid advice for marketers wanting to engage with potential buyers and current customers through social media. For B2B marketers, I would summarize Augie’s list of ways to engage socially-active customers to read:

1) Listen to social conversations. Listening helps marketers learn how to engage socially as well as understand what buyers think about your brand.  Online monitoring tools – like Google Alerts, Radian6, or Biz360 — help here.

2) Use customers to energize others. Social updates are a viral element of online branding – and yes, there can be risks to the brand of doing so. Read Groundswell for a number of examples of what not to do.

3) Support customers as they support each other. Many companies have begun to support customers by listening to status updates and intervening on behalf of those currently experiencing problems. Most of the examples of what to do – or not do – involve consumer brands. But tech companies adopt this approach with success. The jury is still out about whether responding socially helps to lower customer support costs overall or simply papers over inadequate support processes.

4) Solicit customer feedback and ideas. Those who use your products can be the best source of innovation that other buyers will also want and use.

Most of all, I agree whole-heartedly with his recommendations, namely: listen before you leap, use social tools internally to understand the uses and limitations of each technology, and empower your employees. Marketing alone cannot run the whole social show – it’s definitely a group undertaking.

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Reading “Facebook Marketing for Dummies” To Help Set Social Strategy

June 2, 2010 — Laura Ramos

I attended the ITSMA Marketing Leadership Forum recently and ran into my old friend Paul Dunay. Paul spoke at the event and shared his experiences as the (relatively) new Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing at Avaya. One of his first challenges was to figure out how to reel-in an explosion of social activity at Avaya into something that would create powerful, authentic, personal interactions.

To start, Paul asked, “What are the conversations that we want to join?”  The next step was to listen to the conversations already happening – it helps that Avaya has a distinct company name, so it is relatively easy to search for those talking about the them. Based on those conversations, Paul and team chose the following social objectives:

  • Demonstrate Avaya Thought Leadership
  • Increase Brand Awareness
  • Generate Demand
  • Showcase Innovation
  • Embrace Product Ideas

Facebook became one of the key social tools for achieving these goals. (It doesn’t hurt that Paul is the co-author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies.)  Paul asked a provocative question:  “Why have a Web site when you can use Facebook for free?” Interesting thought, especially when you consider how the amount of traffic on Facebook dwarfs many other online destinations.  For example, Paul stated that LinkedIn is only 10% the size of Facebook today.  But do business people use Facebook for business purposes?  Or will something else become the key social network for the B2B world?

At this point, my new boss, Julie Meyers, Vice President, Strategy and Marketing for Xerox Global Services in North America, turned to me and said, “I’d like to see us have a social networking strategy by the end of June.” So I picked up Paul’s book and started reading.

Many companies have success with Facebook today. These firms: 

  • Use Facebook as a recruitment tool.
  • Advertise using Facebook Marketplace, industry-related groups, and targeted campaigns.
  • Solicit feedback from customers; give them a forum to voice concerns.
  • Energize attendees around an event.
  • Leverage it for internal knowledge sharing and communication.

Yet, despite these early achievements, I have to say that I’m not sure what might be right strategy for our team of professional services marketers at Xerox to pursue. My research at Forrester indicated that LinkedIn is the preferred social networking site in business, but – relative to other media – its use is nascent. Paul’s book offers a lot of great advice on the tools and capabilities Facebook offers – many of which B2B marketers can leverage quite easily.  Yet the question still lingers: “Will we find an audience there?”

I’m still not sure, but watch this blog for future posts to learn where the “search for a strategy goes.”  If any of you have a suggestion or two, please feel free to share it here by posting a comment.

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Don’t Be A Social Media Tool

May 15, 2010 — Laura Ramos

A few nights ago I had the delightful privilege of speaking on a panel called “Tweets, Tags, and Texts: Making Social Media Work for You” sponsored by my alma mater, Santa Clara University Leavey School of Business, Alumni Council.  Panelists included:

Ben Parr provided a most memorable comment, and I could not resist echoing it again. To paraphrase, Ben warned the crowd, “If you think of social media strictly from the tool perspective, you will become a tool…”

The Online Slang Dictionary defines a “tool” as “an uncool person, a loser.”

Focus simply, or too intently, on the technology and your social efforts will fall short of the mark. This advice is what my former Forrester-colleague Josh Bernoff, co-author of Groundswell and (now) Empowered, described in his seminal work on setting social strategy, and which I later adopted in much of my research.  We used the acronym POST to remind marketers and business people to focus on your audience and objective first, and to consider which technology will help you reach your objective last.

P = People                               ”Who do you want to reach socially?
O = Objective                         ”How do you want to change your relationship with them?”
S = Strategy                             “How will you do that? And how will you know you were successful?”
T = Tools… Technology, Tactics     “Which social tools will you use?”

I found it particularly insightful that this little quip came from Ben.  He was, by far, the biggest social media enthusiast on the panel, and the one most steeply entrenched in it as an editor of Mashable. (Imagine, if you will, Ben sitting next to Felix, the General Counsel for TrendMicro.) Ben reminded me a lot of former colleague Jeremiah Owyang, a social media maven extraordinaire who taught me a lot about how to engage socially and successfully.  Both Ben and Jeremiah are quick to encourage business folks to cast off into social waters and start sailing. Yet I find it interesting that both believe that, to have a successful journey, you can’t just hire a boat with the best GPS navigation and sonar systems, but that you have to know where you want to go – and who you want to take along – to have a safe and happy voyage.

Professor Terri Griffin, who moderated the panel discussion, felt that Ben’s comment summed up the evening well. Besides narrowing in on a specific audience and articulating a clear, measurable objective, what are some other keys to success you have found in charting these unfamiliar social waters?

(PS. Yes, for those of you who notice, I am backfilling my blog with old posts.  Let’s just say Xerox has kept me a bit busy of late!)

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Join The “Marketing Challenge!” At Business-to-Business Forum 2010

May 3, 2010 — Laura Ramos

I am attending the Business-to-Business Forum 2010 conference, sponsored by MarketingProfs, on Tuesday, May 4.  In the afternoon (starting at 3:30 pm Eastern) I am hosting a session titled, “Marketing Challenge! Lead Management Automation Systems” which will explore the factors that make marketing automation pay off in higher quality leads and better sales relationships.

Joining me are four executives from some of the top lead management automation providers:
Brian Kardon, Chief Marketing Officer, Eloqua
Jon Miller, Vice President, Marketing, Marketo
Kristin Hambelton, Sr. Director of Marketing, Neolane Inc.
Parker Trewin, Director of Marketing Communications, Genius.com

This discussion will not follow the typical panel discussion format. Instead, I will “challenge” my four colleagues to show how their customers address B2B marketing scenarios in innovative ways. In this format, I will pose common demand management situations to each panelist and invite him or her to describe how — using real-life examples — they see customers handle each challenge.

To be fair, I admit that we gave each panelist one scenario to ponder ahead of time.  For those attending, I thought it would be fun to preview the scenarios with you in this blog post.  Each panelist must answer one of the following, and, I think you will agree, some of these challenges are really challenging.  All are based, in part (and disguised to shield the innocent), on client interactions I experienced during my years at Forrester Research.  Here are the challenge situations I will present to each panelist — and they have only 5 minutes to answer! I won’t tell you who will answer which challenge; you’ll have to join me at the forum to find out the assignments:

Challenge 1: A large business services firm uses territory-based sales pursuit – supported by events, sponsorships, and hospitality — as its primary go-to-market strategy. This multibillion-dollar business generates almost half of revenues from several hundred of its many thousands of accounts. Contracts are multi-year, multi-million dollar and account-based marketing has been key to achieving past success. As offshore and conventional competition increases price pressure, what can your marketing automation solution offer the CMO of this firm to enable sales to increase cross-sell and upsell opportunities and to reinforce the value of maintaining an ongoing services relationship with this firm? In particular, how does your technology help the CMO identify opportunities within accounts that can include as many as a dozen decision makers?

Challenge 2: The wealth-management division of a large, national bank offers investment and equity management services through professional advisors and independent brokers. Historically, these advisors establish personal relationships with clients maintained through person-to-person contact. With the rise of electronic banking and trading, many advisors – especially independent ones — want more branding and demand generation support from the bank but worry that the bank’s electronic presence creates too much of an intermediary presence in these relationships. What can your marketing automation software offer the head of Wealth Management to empower these brokers to pursue new business more efficiently while keeping their personal relationship and brand relevant?

Challenge 3: The CMO of a high tech, 500+ person firm enjoys a collaborative working relationship with sales and strong demand for current product offerings. As a Salesforce.com user and enthusiast, he is satisfied with the firm’s current sales management tools – having made a recent investment in a custom sales portal, specialized reports, and integration with the firm’s separate telesupport system. As the economy turns around, he is feeling greater pressure to pump up the sales pipeline but is unconvinced that a marketing automation investment makes sense. What can you show this reluctant CMO to convince him that your marketing automation solution will deliver real returns on this investment, and will win converts among the sales organization?

Challenge 4: The VP of Marketing for the SMB division of a global high-tech company with offices in more than 20 countries has been using an email services provider (ESP) for many years to send out emails. The firm has extensive investment in sales automation, Web analytics, Web content management, and business analytics. They also have a multi-million record customer database stitched together through several acquisitions and legacy systems. What can your marketing automation system offer to help deliver more targeted messages to SMB prospects, develop the resulting demand, and right-channel qualified leads, all while reinforcing relationships with current business buyers to markedly reduce churn?

After answering thse four challenges, I’ll open the panel up to the audience and see if the attendees can stump the panelists further. This will be a fun, engaging, and lively session full of information to help B2B marketers understand what lead management systems can do for their business and which solution might best fit their needs.  Hope you can make it!

Please feel free to comment on this post with your ideas for other challenges — who knows, I may use the best on on Tuesday during the Q&A section!

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Concluding Our Conversation: Loopfuse CEO Chat, Part III

April 18, 2010 — Laura Ramos

To finish up on the conversation I started with Sean Dwyer in February, I’d like to share a few final thoughts about the ways I’ve seen top marketers implement lead management automation successfully.  In this final installment of our Q&A series, Sean and I explore who are the core stakeholders to involve in lead management automation, what are the key success factors, and the ultimate prize — how lead management automation helps deliver healthier sales pipelines. 

Part III: Implementation and Key Success Factors

Q7: Who should be involved in the implementation of the Lead Management Automation platform?

Lead management automation should include marketing and sales as equal partners in the requirements gathering, selection, and implementation process. IT will be involved, too, but they will play a more minor if the company chooses an on-demand solution. IT must make sure that integration with existing customer support, database, and sales automation systems goes according to plan and that the new system doesn’t introduce any security or unforeseen technical problems into the current environment. Marketing and sales folks shouldn’t have to take on the burden of understanding the existing technical infrastructure to make marketing automation work.

I emphasize that marketing and sales must share joint responsibility – an idea that many marketing folks may bristle over. But, let’s face it, unlike other marketing automation decisions; lead management automation delivers direct tangible benefits to quota-carrying salespeople like greater visibility into the type of leads coming down the pipeline. It can also expose which specific characteristics, profiles, search history, marketing interactions, online behavior, and such differentiate higher scoring leads from those with lower scores.

Many lead management vendors include what I call “sales enablement” features in their offerings today – tools that help track a prospect’s digital footprints and summarize their presales buying behavior. For most reps, these features create a window into the customer’s psyche formerly hidden from view. Sales management and key account managers need to understand how lead management automation benefits the sales rank-and-file, so involving them in early discussions about “What is a well-qualified lead? How can automation help our firm generate more qualified demand? And what do we need this system to do to get there?” will improve sales’ willingness to work with the new technology, make it part of the sales process, and give marketing the feedback needed to improve customer acquisition and insight processes.

I think it is important to include all customer-facing functions to the implementation and training process, even if only for an introductory look at what the platform can do. Customer service, technical support, professional services, and even human resources can benefit from the purchase insights lead management automation delivers.

Q8: What are the most important factors for successfully implementing a Lead Management Automation platform?

I know the following may sound simplistic, but – through dozens of interviews and conversations with marketers who have used lead management successfully for more than a year – I’ve found that the keys to success include:

1) Gear up for process change; don’t rely simply on technology. Looking to pump up lackluster sales pipelines, many marketers turn to technology and overlook the systematic process, people, and internal behavioral change successful automation requires. Most veteran marketers said focusing on process, and not technology, was the factor that most affected their success with lead management.

2) Stock up on the content. Surprisingly, many marketers under-estimate the amount of content they need to have on-hand or produce to keep the lead management engine running. Because marketers think classically in terms of white papers, brochures, and datasheet – all which require high production investment – they quickly feel overwhelmed by the prospect of feeding a constant flow of content into a lead nurturing program. The trick is to focus on quantity –take long white papers and break them into several smaller parts, cut up data sheets into tables and bulleted lists, enlist subject matter experts in developing blog posts, videos or podcasts, or syndicate partner content – without sacrificing relevance.

3) Market the marketing automation. Don’t expect everyone in marketing and sales to embrace the lead management automation platform with gusto. We all have tendencies to resist change to a greater or lesser degree. Embrace the enthusiasts, elevate their early successes to management, and encourage others to follow in their footsteps. Treat the rollout of the lead management system like a product launch; announce it, train on it, and certify sales and marketing on their proficiency with the platform. Ask “Have they got the message? Do they repeat it reliably? Do they practice what they preach?” When you can say “yes” to these questions, then you know you’re on your way to success.

Q9: How should Sales and Marketing leverage the Lead Management Automation platform to help drive the pipeline?

Lead management automation is all about driving the pipeline. It’s like a DVR or a mobile phone, once you own one you can’t understand how you lived without it. But getting things to run smoothly at first can be challenging. Stick with it because the payoffs are significant and tangible. Consistently, marketers who use this technology over an extended period of time report measurable increases in lead quality, opportunity-to-pipeline conversion, and deal velocity—all factors that directly impact sales pipeline health and revenues. It’s not uncommon to hear stories about how marketers improved inbound demo requests, early stage pipeline dollar-values, and appointment-to-opportunity conversion by factors of 2 or more.

Achieving this level of success requires focusing on the four key areas: scoring/profiling, routing leads to sales, nurturing leads not yet ready to buy, and monitoring lead progress (i.e. closing the loop with sales). If you make sure the lead management platform delivers on all four of those process stages, then your ability to drive pipeline heath and execute more effective campaigns will improve.

If you would like to learn more about this topic, please check out a whitepaper that Silverpop offers titled“How Managing Leads Pays Off In A Stronger, More Qualified Pipeline. ” In this report commissioned by Silverpop, Forrester (meaning yours truly, when I worked there prior to Xerox) surveyed 15 senior-level marketers to gauge their experiences in using lead management automation.  Yes, Silverpop is somewhat of a competitor to Loopfuse. However, if you look beyond this to see that we are all trying to raise awareness and educate marketers about the value of this technology, I think you will find some of the insights shared in this report both insightful and useful.

I wanted to thank Sean for offering me this opportunity to share our conversation with all of you.  Let me know what other questions you might like to see asked and answered in the future.

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Welcome to Xerox!

April 9, 2010 — Laura Ramos

Just closed out my first week heading up Industry Marketing lead for Xerox Global Services in North America, and my biggest accomplishment was getting my computer and network connections to function properly.  Wow, do I have a lot to learn!  But I am thrilled by the opportunity to help build a more vibrant, industry-specific story around what Xerox — and Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) — offers high technology companies who need help reducing office infrastructure costs, simplifying IT operations, outsourcing business process, optimizing print and publications, or improving communication-related business processes.

Most of all, I am very excited — and honored — to lead a great group of dedicated industry marketers who plan and execute marketing programs that drive business in existing global, major, and house accounts as well as new business opportunities in Education, Energy, Financial Services, Government, High-Technology/Telecom, Manufacturing, and Retail. You can meet the team online:

1) Nancy Richardson writes for the Xerox Healthcare Pulse Blog and tracks a wide range of issues ranging from the recent Healthcare Reform legislation and its impact on electronic medical records and healthcare communication to how the combination of Xerox and ACS can create smarter clinical, operational, and financial data, document, and process management, that enables Healthcare to provide an optimal patient experience and more cost-effective medical outcomes.

2) Karen McDermott explores the impact of technology — like mobile banking, social media, paperless banking, and sustainability– on the principled, regulated, and conservative world of financial services in Xerox’s Financial Services Blog.

3) If manufacturing sector issues like accelerating globalization, documentation innovation in product lifecycle management, and product safety are of concern, then check out Bettina Engelmann’s blog at Xerox’s the Manufacturing Industry.

4) Liz Vega manages industry marketing for the Public Sector, in which Xerox and ACS both have deep roots. Liz is also an expert on the critical success factors behind Account-Based Marketing where she has published and spoken jointly with ITSMA about case studies related to Xerox best practices.

5) Rounding out the team is relative newcomer to the high tech industry, but long time Xerox employee, Sharon Varalli who focuses on the High Tech, Telecommunications, and Media indstries in North America and supports Xerox’s efforts to provide publishing and business process services to some of our largest tech-centric accounts.

I look forward to learning more about the trends and concerns facing decision makers in these important industry sectors. If you would like to participate and contribute to getting me “up to speed”, feel free to contact me by commenting on this blog — or reaching out to me at laura.ramos@xerox.com — and letting all of us know what issues are top of mind for you as a participant and practioner in these key industry areas.

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Join Harte-Hanks And Me To Learn How To Integrate Social Media Into B2B Marketing

March 29, 2010 — Laura Ramos

Tomorrow Harte-Hanks will host a Webinar about how social media and online communities influence business buyers.  I am a featured speaker along with Kevin Kerner of Mason Zimbler US, a Harte-Hanks company.  If you would like to learn more: click here.

The webinar takes place on Tuesday, March 30 at 2 pm Eastern, and 11 am Pacific.  I hope you will register and join us tomorrow.

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2010 B2B Marketing Mix Effectiveness and Budget Trends

March 23, 2010 — Laura Ramos

I recently published two new reports on B2B marketing mix effectiveness — Rethinking The B2B Marketing Mix In The Digital Age – and B2B budget trends — B2B Marketers’ 2010 Budget Trends.

Great information here on what 249 B2B marketers say works for building brand and generating leads. Also where they expect to spend 2010 program budgets. Check it out further on my Forrester analyst blog (until April 1).

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