B2B Marketers: 2009 Forrester Groundswell Award Winners Offer Great Examples

October 27, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Moments ago, Josh Bernoff posted this year’s winners of the 2009 Forrester Groundswell awards on the Groundswell blog. If you scroll down to the middle of the post (be forewarned; it’s a long one) you will see the winners and finalists in the B2B category winners. The images are great to look at as well.

In my research, I see marketers approach social media with a mix of enthusiasm and skepticism. Most want to know which firms execute social pursuits well and what tangible outcomes occur. Take a look and I think you will agree that these winners show how B2B firms can lead the way in achieving real business results.

As social activity expands – and business people seek out peers online to exchange ideas and validate their purchase decisions – these award winners and finalists demonstrate 6 types of objectives B2B marketers can use to connect – and ultimately change their relationship – with customers. Briefly, here’s what those 6 objectives are and why our winners took home the prize:

1) Listen to what customers talk about.  Listening to prospects and buyers may seem boring, so B2B markers tend to overlook this objective as an important start to setting social strategy. Yet, researching and analyzing what customers talk about pays off in deeper insight that leads to measurable benefits. CDW teamed with Communispace to listen to customers who participate in its community and apply those lessons to their sales interactions. As a result CDW increased the average of their total customer purchase revenue by 17% when comparing June 2009 to June 2008.

2) Talk with your customers (not at them): Successful marketers turn online activity and content into rich conversations. Eloqua’s self-guided sales tool, called the Conversation, treats users to an interactive discussion that hones in on their most pressing marketing problems using a combination of tongue-in-cheek humor and straight talk. Between 18 and 20% of buyers who engaged with an integrated campaign featuring this tool became prospects for Eloqua’s solutions.

3) Energize your best customers to talk about you. In B2B, using social media to energize customers around user meetings and conferences is a great example of making social media produce results. Depite restrictions on travel due to the economy, Sonic Foundry boosted Unleash 2009 attendance by 15%, and created a healthy pipeline of opportunity riding in on the coattails of this event.

4) Help your customers support each other. Social tools will accelerate the transformation of support forums from simple question/answer tools to communities where business-minded individuals network, share best practices, and seek business-oriented advice. In EDR’s case, commonground — a communityfor environmental professionals – resulted in over 90% of its customers giving EDR’s service a big thumbs up.

5) Encourage your customers spread success. In B2B, community succeeds when participation gets customers in a market — or users within buying organizations — to help others to adopt a product or service. ComplianceOnline, which I have written about previously, demonstrates this very well by attracting 500,000 subscribers, allowing members to share/purchase each other’s services, and generating approximately 30% of MetricStream’s leads.

6) Embrace customer ideas and suggestions. Ask customers for their opinions and ideas, and you will likely be overwhelmed with a huge number of responses. This was a hard category to judge because most of the submissions seemed to prove this conventional wisdom. Archer Technologies stood apart because, in their entry, they talked about how 2400 members contributed 1529 ideas resulting in new mobile and continuity products. That’s how to use the social power of your customers to drive business.

Will you join me in congratulating our new, B2B Groundswell Award winners?  And thank all of those who participated, especially after I badgered — uh, “reminded” you to do so . . .

And let me know about other B2B examples you find winning in the groundswell; I’d love to hear — and share — more.

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More Live From Summit on Customer Engagement 2009

October 21, 2009 — Laura Ramos

The Summit on Customer Engagement continues Tuesday, October 21.  From yesterday’s session, here are my takeaways from the panel discussion where Jeff Tinker, SVP Wholesale Product and Market Strategy, Wells Fargo, Asim Zaheer, VP Global Product and Competitive Marketing, Hitachi Data Systems and John Pasquarette, VP of Product Marketing for Software, National Instruments talked about their current, direct experience with customer programs. Bill Lee moderated and took questions from the audience.

What do your customer programs look like and what are the best practices that you see work?

Wells Fargo started by focusing customer engagement programs at the B2B user level, but has shifted more dollars and attention on the decision maker level .  They have built online community destinations that successfully attract users (of small business banking products, for example), but now face the challenge of involving large business decision makers and creating deeper relationships with them online. Right now, customer engagement with decision makers happen offline.  To ensure maximum value for participants, they interview advisory board members before each meeting, synthesize what members want to hear from bank and each other, and facilitate this discussion.

Wells launched user community 2 years ago as a separate site with separate registration.  Flat growth in community membership resulted. Recently, they integrated the community into the main Wells Fargo portal to make the community more accessible.  The Wachovia acquisition, and increased interest in industry-specific topics, led to a doubling in their advisory board numbers. To meet this increased demand, Wells is looking at how to do customer advisory meetings virtually.

Jeff sees written case studies get less interest than in the past; current clients want to interact and ask questions of each other — whether about Wells products, how the merger is going, or a host of other topics.

National Instruments –  which John describes as “the Home Depot for engineers” – produces tools that engineers use to develop and test products. Like Wells, customer engagement with end users is going very well.  Unlike Wells, NI needs to help their salesforce, who are all degreed engineers, to have higher-valued, business-level discussion. NI sees community tools and technology as a way to help resolve this.

John says NI executives, marketing, product managers, etc. spend a lot of time with their key customers. For example, an NI team just spent 2 days onsite with Harris learning how Harris uses their tools to reduce cycle  and test time.  Adoption is critical – once engineers move onto the NI platform, they don’t move off. So references — and demonstrating a vibrant community of like-minded engineers to new prospects —  is key to getting them to become customers in the first place. Customer references and case studies help to build that community identity and following. 

Hitachi Data Systems sells storage solutions to large enterprises, deals topping hundreds of thousands of dollars on average. Asim is accelerating their customer engagement activities to learn about – and adapt to — what customers face in this changing economy. HDS customer advisory boards are high-touch, but now HDS needs to move this activity down stream and engage the midmarket. They are working with TechValidate to see how automation can help them to reach into the midmarket further.

So far, HDS has created about ½ a dozen communities on LinkedIn and is currently montioring how prospects and customers use this social network to share successes and horror stories on a community-by-community basis. Community members know HDS sponsors the LinkedIn groups, but HDS actsl simply as an observer and moderator; they do not actively “participate” on these community pages. Currently, the LinkedIn experiment is not connected to customer reference activity.  Beyond this, HDS hosts gated, online communities. Keys to success with these private communities are: 1) Give the participants something of value that they can’t get elsewhere, 2) keep participation volume high– get more than 2-3 folks talking, and 3) make the feedback mechanism direct to HDS short and uncomplicated. HDS finds good customer references actively come from this community.

What do you do about customers/prospects who complain or make disparaging comments in communities?

Jeff talked about how the principles of good customer support/relationship building applies in the online world just as well as the offline.  You have to talk to the people with complaints or gripes; you can’t ignore them.  Don’t defend, but don’t justify either.  Jeff says, “If we are wrong, we admit it. We respond within 24 hours.” At first Wells’ legal department put together 7 pages of guidelines about how to interact in the community – but the executive sponsor stepped in and said “I want simple terms and conditions; we don’t want to stifle dialog”.

John says NI welcomes disparaging comments. Many times a customer, not an NI employee, jumps in to respond.  NI has changed a policy – or said why they can’t – when the customers bring up issues on the community. We regularly survey our customers on satisfaction, which is the final scoreboard for this activity.  John said, “The community provides one avenue of input to our strategy and direction, but we don’t knee-jerk react to all of it.”

Asim advises “don’t get into arguments with them.” Listen, address the issue, admit mistakes when you make them, and let other customers chime in.

How do you concisely explain the ROI of this activity to your executives and board? Especially when putting forth a budget?

Asim explained that justification is not that big a problem at HDS because HDS executives on down all agree they need and want to talk to customers. Customers are HDS’s biggest asset and customer engagment programs help them grow this investment.  But they do look at both hard-dollar and soft-impacts. For example, when some customers had trouble traveling to executive briefing centers to spend time with HDS engineers and execs, HDS looked at the numbers and found they could afford to take the program on the road.  Visiting a dozen cities for in-depth customer meetings is not cheap, but HDS track deal flow and revenue impacted by these events and has seen a very positive impact.  So much so that they plan to expand the executive briefing center roadshow to more cities in 2010.

Jeff said that Wells definitely increased its level of investment and involvement in customer engagement in 2009. To demonstrate the payoff, they highlight the role customers play in the development of products and how much customer interaction help them reduce time to market for new products. Customers cut the guesswork out of the development process.

Following this panel, Bill Lee hosted a “fireside chat” with Dan Crain, former CTO, Brocade and Tim Thorsteinson, Harris Broadcasting, on the topic of “What do Decision Makers Want from the B2B Relationship?”

Bottomline: Decision makers want trustworthy relationships and relevant discussion about industry topics.  They don’t want to engage in customer programs that are product or transactional in focus.

Dan Crain has bought a lot of IT equipment in his career, and gets invited to customer programs all the time. If sales sponsors them, he’s not interested. If the program is run by product marketing or the technical people, he finds much more value.  The most attractive programs center on discussion around industry-level issues.

Regarding social activity
Dan: “Social media is not good for putting out managed information or messages about your company. It’s more about getting closer to customers.”  Communities are not a new thing: the techn industry has had bulletin boards and forums for a long time.  They are a great way for users to interact, although it is debateable whether the new host of social software tools really enhances this.  Microsoft is a great example of how to use forums to interact with users well. In contrast, Dell putting out coupon codes for refurbished equipment on Twitter is not about getting closer to customers. But listening to customer suggestions and request on Dell IdeaStorm is.

Tim said Harris has used social media to automate getting feedback on products or specific ideas.  He feels it social media is better used for automating a focus group than blasting out messages to the community on social channels.

Tim and Dan agree: Buyers who select a vendor to work with want that vendor to be successful. So executives and decision makers will take time to provide references or to participate in customer advisory.

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Live From Summit On Customer Engagement 2009

October 20, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Today and tomorrow the Customer Strategy Group is hosting its inaugural summit on customer engagement – an intimate, executive conference designed for B2B marketers who manage customer reference programs, advisory boards, and the emerging area of online communities.  I will speak later today to about 70 t0 80 marketers and sponsors about “Understanding the Value of Customer Engagement”

Business marketers know customers who give references, participate on advisory boards, and engage in online communities are more valuable than those who are bystanders. But how do you quantify this value and socialize it to the rest of the business – especially in a tight economy when all the focus is on revenue and pipeline?  This forum takes a close look at this question.  In my presentation, I will introduce a model for measuring customer engagement that includes four components: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. Each component requires data collected from online and offline sources that — when done successfully — give marketers a more holistic appreciation of their customers’ actions while recognizing that value comes not just from transactions but also from actions customers take to influence others. I show how marketing messages become conversations, and dollars shift from media buying to customer understanding, when firms adopt engagement metrics to capture the value of customer relationships

Here are the highlights from the morning keynote sessions I attended:

1)       Sean Geehan, who helps B2B executives understand what it takes to drive revenue, growth, and shareholder value. In his work on customer engagement, he has shown that companies that target their customer programs at their “top 20%” customers outperform the market by several factors.  He profiles companies like Harris Corporation, HCL, and Oracle in his upcoming book to demonstrate this.   He sees firms that specifically target decision makers in customer engagement programs (versus end users or middle management) see retention rates of 90% (vs. 72%) and account growth of 12% (vs. 4%).  Most importantly their reference rates are 94% vs 28% — underlining the vital importance of creating customer engagement at the executive level, not simply among worker bees.  I think this has BIG implications for community development in B2B.

2)  Tim Thorsteinson, President, Broadcast Communications Division, Harris Corporation talked about the benefits of customers engagement in face of the seismic shift in the broadcasting market from conventional, US-based TV stations to cable, satellite, government, international and sports. His division sells video equipment in all these markets and 50% of their revenue now comes from products introduced in last 24 months. (They spend about $90M on R&D). Approximately 10% of customers generate 90% of revenue. His main point is that Harris could not have made this shift successfully without creating an executive advisory board – focused on this 10% — to draw insight from and validate their decisions. And these customers deliver value: EAB members drove 16% of Harris Broadcast revenue in 2009.

Observations: He enjoys fairly exclusive access to his dozen or so EAB members since Harris’ competitors don’t actively pursue customer advisory boards. He says face-to-face, intimate, offsite meetings with deep content – but that also feature a fun, inviting locations or activities — is very important to keeping these relationships strong.  No stand-ins allowed; members can’t send substitutes to the meetings. In between Harris uses quarterly conference calls and newsletters to stay in touch. Content includes technical issues, industry trends, but is not salesy.  He knows the EAB is successful because networking happens outside – and Tim believes this would continue without Harris’s sponsorship. EAB members talk about how to make their sector more attractive to Wall Street.  They also want a seat at the table with other industry leaders, where relevant dialog can happen, and where they can talk about the real business problems they face (not technology/ products.) 

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Sharing Lead Management Market Insights with the DemandGen Report

October 16, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Last week, the DemandGen Report published an article that highlighted my Lead Management Automation market overview report. As part of their recap, assistant editor, Amanda Ferrante, asked me a few questions that honed in on aspects of the market that I did not make central to my two main themes, namely: 1) that the market is far from mature and subject to change that represent some risk to B2B marketers and 2) therefore, B2B marketers should pick partners that can help mature their processes, as well as come up with innovation and easy-to-use features.

The interview questions and my answers look at:

1) My projections for future growth, and the shape of the growth curve, in this market.
2) Whether I think lead management automation will achieve popularity/penetration similar to the saleforce automation (SFA) market.
3) When I see consolidation occuring, and what is the likely form that will take.
4) Why lead scoring and profiling features are critical and to what degree these capabilities should influence the solution a company chooses.
5) Best practices I recommend for those adopting lead managment automation.
6) What is the best way to achieve alignment between sales and marketing, and how can LMA help achieve this goal.
7) Factors to prioritize when selecting vendors.

Here is the transcript/text with DemandGen’s questions and my corrresponding answers.  Let me know what you think:

1.The report highlights low adoption rate for lead management solutions (2-5%), do you feel this number will take off in the coming years? What kind of growth curve would you project?

I think the growth curve will rise gradually over the next one or two years until the early adopters of this technology become an early majority, then growth will take off. B2B marketers adopt the technology, but there isn’t a wealth of best practices — for lead scoring, customer profiling, and lead nurturing programs – for them to draw upon, and this holds adoption back more than a lack of technical capability.

The real risk to growth is market consolidation. Right now it seems the vendors are more concerned with taking business away from each other than building a vibrant, social community of B2B lead management professionals who use their technology creatively to boost pipelines and raise marketing’s stature as a major part of the business.

2.Will marketing automation become as prevalent as SFA, where it is really a must have for BtoB firms?

I think lead management automation will become part of a broader marketing automation platform that includes campaign design and execution, budgeting/planning, analytics, demand management, and monitoring/reporting. B2B and B2C will require separate, specific features due to the fundamental differences in how business buyers and consumers purchase.

I don’t know that marketing automation will become as prevalent as SFA until marketing automation providers figure out a way to price their systems based on the value the systems deliver. SFA has the advantage of user-based pricing – the more salespeople you have, the more you pay per person. It’s easy to charge and discount on a user model. Marketing automation doesn’t deliver value on a per user basis, but on a programmatic one. But every marketing program is different – or uses different tactics/approaches – so how do you build repeatability into that kind of model?

3.The report also points to the fact that vendor consolidation in this space is likely as it is currently cluttered with so many different options? When do you see that consolidation starting and how will it ultimately shape the landsape?

I see it starting now. Look at Adobe’s recent acquisition of Ominiture.

I think it’s hard to predict how the landscape will shape up because Forrester’s research shows that marketers want a consolidated, enterprise marketing platform, but one has yet to emerge. Much of marketing automation gets overshadowed by the SFA and CRM/customer support markets. When taken as a whole – enterprise, consumer, field, international, demand generation, branding, product definition, sales support, etc. – marketing is a very broad discipline is very difficult to automate entirely.

4.One of the key areas the report focuses on is around Lead capture, profiling and scoring. Can you expand on why these features are so critical and also if they should influence the solution a company chooses?

You can’t manage demand if you don’t have a way of measuring the impact marketing has on leads and pipeline. Profiling automates your ability to observe changes in buyer behavior and the impact marketing activity has on demand long before sales forecasts these opportunities in the pipeline. Lead scoring adds more precision to decisions about which leads to pursue and which to nurture. Both help marketing understand whether their messaging and programs have the desired effect on the audiences they want to reach and whether this audience is getting engaged in the sales process.

Absolutely should influence the solution a company chooses: these are essential features of lead management automation.

5.The report talks about the importance of dialogue tools that nurture leads that are NOT ready to purchase. As BtoB companies adopt lead nurturing, what are some of the best practices you recommend and again should this consideration influence the solution they adopt?

Nurturing is the most underdeveloped part of lead management. It can take on many forms from simple “stay in touch” campaigns to programs that accelerate buyers through the purchase process based offer response or event triggers.

Knowing your how your target buyers buy, what influences their purchase decisions, and how to build online dialog around the buyers journey are key best practices that few marketers have deep experience or track records of accomplishing successfully.

Again, absolutely should influence the solution a company chooses: these are essential features of lead management automation.

6.One of the ever-present challenges is how to get sales and marketing on the same page. What are some of the best ways to do achieve this alignment and how can some of the existing solutions help achieve this goal?

Start by working on the definition of a qualified lead. If marketing and sales can get on the same page on this subject, the battle is half over. Determining which criteria – and the relative importance of these criteria – are part of building a solid lead scoring model. But this model is very difficult to get correct the first time, so sales and marketing must work together to iterate on the model. This process creates better alignment between marketing and sales because it turns subjective arguments about lead quality into objective measures and factors that sales can critique, and marketing can adjust, without resorting to interdepartmental fighting.

7.Considering the crowded field of solution providers and the resulting confusion among buyers, what are some of the factors to consider when choosing a vendor?

Most B2B marketing buyers see vendors as tool providers only. They don’t see vendors invest in their future success, although I think this is happening as the market matures. Marketers who make it through their second year of lead management automation tell me that getting the right implementation and best practices support from their vendor is key to their success. Relatively speaking, few people know how to really make lead management work well, and getting your marketing team access to your vendor’s top experts should be a major consideration when selecting a technology provider.

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PeopleMap: A Real Tool for Sales Enablement?

October 5, 2009 — Laura Ramos

It’s no secret: I am not a fan of the emerging class of “Sales 2.0″ tools that let reps follow online visitors or peer into their browsing habits. In a prior post, I admitted that I did not see how chasing anonymous Web traffic helps reps manage assigned accounts or follow up on well-qualified leads delivered by marketing. I believe marketing should strive to put sales out of the business of cold calling.  So I am quick to dismiss these tools in my research and advice.

Until last week when I discovered a new software application that helps reps do what they need to do: build and mine relationships with prospects. Kevin D’Souza, long-time colleague and friend from my Stratify days (where I worked prior to joining the analyst ranks), introduced me to 7 Degrees, a very small tech firm where he’s handling sales and business development today. 7 Degrees is the team behind PeopleMaps — a tools that lets you leverage personal and professional networks to let you see how you connect with other people, especially those inside of companies (see the screenshot where I used PeopleMaps to see how I am connected to Gord Hotchkiss, co-founder of Enquiro, a search engine marketing agency, and author of a new book about the BuyerSphere — a topic for a future blog post. Not surprisingly, most roads to Gord lead through SEMPO,  the search engine marketing professional organization that he chairs).

Elana is ex-analyst/mentor and Dave is colleague from Forrester

Elana is ex-analyst/mentor and Dave is colleague from Forrester

The tool, which takes 10 minutes at most to install, runs in a browser, uses an intuitive Java/Javascript-based UI, imports connections from applications like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Outlook (contacts), and maps out the social graph between people you know and people with professional, public profiles that you may want to know. It combines data from the networking tools you use daily with commercially available data licensed from companies like D&B/Hoovers, Thomson Reuters, and ZoomInfo. (Which specific data sources is information that 7 Degrees doesn’t explicitly share on its Web site yet, but should. I will chalk this slip up to an early-stage-firm oversight that I hope they correct soon.) So nothing I am showing in the picture above is private or gained through non-publicly available means.

Why does this tool appeal to me as a B2B marketer?  Because it helps sales folks make first contact AFTER the lead management process delivers a qualified prospect to their SFA inbox. It helps salespeople prioritize which hot leads to pursue. It helps mine relationships that can make warm introductions to prospective buyers. Combining PeopleMaps with lead management information culled from an Eloqua, Marketo, Silverpop, or any of the other vendor’s I’ve mentioned in my market overview gets sales closer to that fabled “360 degree view” of the client. 

Marketing lead management gives sales the qualification information — demographics, contact history, interaction insights, and buyer behavior cues — and PeopleMaps then shows sales how they connect to the prospect through a social graph of personal contacts and relationships. Sales isn’t making cold calls; their building off of existing relationships to form new ones.  And isn’t that what sales does best?

Check out PeopleMaps for yourself and let me know what you think.  I would also be interested in hearing from you about similar tools you have seen or experienced. For example, I think technologies from companies like LinkedIn and ZoomInfo show who is who and that connections exist, while PeopleMaps shows how these connections occur.

Bottomline: If marketing wants to enable sales and leverage technology to do so, then providing tools that help sales foster relationships, and continue the dialog marketing starts, will be key to achieving a real closed-loop process between marketing teams (who develop the market) and sales (who sell to it.)

Note: In light of recent FCC rulings, I am disclosing that Kevin did pay for lunch last week.  Not that it really should matter , but that’s my disclosure of a “material connection” to Kevin and 7 Degrees.

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