Season’s Greetings from Palm Desert, CA

December 24, 2011 — Laura Ramos

Here’s wishing the happiest of holidays and a prosperous 2012.

While taking a little time off from Xerox here in the sunny, southern California desert, I took note of something that I rarely, if ever, pay attention to in the Bay Area – billboards.

Maybe it’s the monotony of the drive along interstate 10, the stark contrast with the arid landscape, or the sheer number of them, but billboards seem to stick out here in the desert. The vast majority target consumers with messages inviting them to gamble at local casinos, stay at swanky resorts, shop at outlet stores in Cabazon, invest in gold, refinance mortgages, and avoid bankruptcy problems.

One set of billboards piqued my interest. Rather than demands to buy a particular brand or service, these billboards feature an interesting, sometimes historical figure – ranging from the Dali Lama, Jackie Robinson, and Kermit the Frog – and an inspirational message like “Live Your Dreams”, “Courage”, or “Work for Peace.” The only message is to “Pass It On,” along with a nondescript reference to a Web site called www.values.com

I wondered what this was all about. Who would spend tens of thousands of dollars on physical advertising to simply extol the virtues of, well, virtues? So I looked up the site and found the homepage for the Foundation for a Better Life, which is (according to Wikipedia) an organization founded in 2000 to promote positive behavioral values.

Funded through a trust established by billionaire Phillip Anschutz, this foundation creates public service campaigns to communicate values such as honesty, caring, optimism, hard work, and helping others. It does this through television, outdoor advertising, theatre, radio, and the Internet. It focuses exclusively on public service media and all media is donated (hence no one spends thousands, as I first thought.)

Why do they do this? Their Web site simply says, “We want the stories we share about the positive actions and values of others to serve as inspiration for someone to do one thing a little better, and then pass on that inspiration. A few individuals living values-based lives will collectively make the world a better place.”

I thought this was a lovely and relevant sentiment during the holidays, so I wanted to pass it along to you. I think values.com should also give B2B marketers inspiration to think about corporate responsibility and how you can help to pass the positive aspects of your corporate culture and mission onto your clients, partners, and community.

Peace on earth, everyone.

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Top 10 List of Social Marketing Practices to Avoid in 2012

December 15, 2011 — Laura Ramos

Copyright 2011 Cisco Systems: Reproduced with Permission.

Everywhere you look, folks offer B2B marketers social media marketing advice. (In fact, I’m guilty of that!)

But how about a few lessons on what NOT to do?

Petra Neiger leads the Center of Social Media Excellence at Cisco Systems. I met her through the SVESMC and, this past week, she joined me for a panel that I moderated on Forecast 2012: The Challenges and Opportunities with Social Business. 

During our talk, she mentioned this clever, tongue-in-cheek blog post that she wrote recently with another Cisco colleague about those special practices guaranteed to give any marketer nightmares. 

I think the graphic is a scream, so with her permission, I include it here.  (Hint: You can turn each of these nightmares into a best practice by doing the opposite…)

From a mainstream B2B marketer’s perspective, here are five more “worst practices” that I’d like to add to Cisco’s list:

1) Switch to social media from traditional online and physical media because, well, social is “free”!  Did you ever count up the hours people spend (and waste) on this medium? Or what kind of effort it takes to keep a blog interesting?  Or a Twitter handle active? Still think it’s cheap?

2) Start a Facebook fan page and wonder why only your employees like it.  Lesson: Facebook is a social networking site, not a substitute for a Web destination. Search engines don’t pick up the content you put there as readily as they do Web pages. And if you don’t do anything social, like offer promotions, coupons, contests, games, funny/ironic observations, controversy, etc., few will notice.

3) Use Twitter to promote business services that require assessments and have long sales cycles. (https://twitter.com/XeroxMPS)  After about 20 tweets, what can you really say that’s interesting and specific enough to garner a following?

4) Encourage your sales and service people to get involved in social media.  Lesson: except for LinkedIn, this idea stands a snowball’s chance in Hades on so many levels.  (Customer support is another matter, however.)

5) However, do let your sales executives blog.  Especially when clients might find the posts just a little bit insulting. See: Why does everyone hate us?   And the winner is….  So things are looking better or aren’t they  (Enough said.)

Here’s hoping your social media marketing plans continue to shape up well for 2012. Remember: True success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration — so keep experimenting with your social marketing, but keep the client in mind as you do.

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Driving Growth in B2B Companies? Try This Playbook

December 7, 2011 — Laura Ramos

December is a popular month to spend planning for the next year or reviewing current progress.  I find it is also a good month to reconnect with your corporate strategy and ask “what can marketing do to help create more predictable, profitable, and sustainable growth for my company?” Recently, I read The B2B Executive Playbook, written by my friend Sean Geehan of the Geehan Group. I think it offers a succinct summary of the factors that most affect the B2B business’s ability to thrive, with a unique perspective on one — why it’s important to focus on your current clients as a way to grow revenue. 

I first met Sean in 2009 at the Customer Reference Forum. We stayed in touch through my transition to Xerox and he invited me to speak at his Executive Summit on Business Transformation in February. He asked me to review an early draft of his book and sent me a final copy. (This is all the open disclosure stuff, folks.) I have heard him speak several times on the topic of this book.

The B2B Executive Playbook consolidates principles that apply specifically to companies that sell highly-considered products or services through a direct salesforce to other businesses. Some of the ideas here resemble others we have seen, but are good reminders. The “B2B relationship continuum” in chapter 2, for example, reminds me of research that my former director, Laurie Orlov, wrote on The Three Archetypes of IT. The “Market-Aligned Three-Circle Venn” in chapter 5 calls to mind Jim Collin’s “hedgehog concept” popularized in Good to Great.

What Sean does really well, however, is put these concepts in the context of a vitally important B2B best practice — that of engaging with your customers to collaborate on your company’s strategy directions, refer you to other decision makers, advocate for you as a trusted supplier, and do more business with you.  A lot more. 

Case in point: HCL, a professional services firm located in Noida, India.  Paraphrasing the book, HCL lacked a systematic way to interact with key decision makers from their customers prior to 2008. HCL’s Americas President Shami Khorana decided to target their “top 80″ clients  in a formal program to exchange ideas and gain their collective feedback. And to demonstrate a sincere interest in keeping their business. Khorana credits this program, in part, with HCL’s rise from $1.4B in 2007 to over $3B in 2010, with an annual growth rate of more than 20% — even through the economic downturn of 2008/09.

Through other case studies like HCL, the B2B Executive Playbook gives practical advice on how to build and retain key decision maker relationships at the right level of your organization, and how to maintain a select group of the key executive customers in your market who will advise you willingly and buy from you consistently.

Recognizing that B2B companies win or lose based on the strength of relationships with a relatively few, very key customers is the essential insight that B2B executives and marketers can overlook. Consider your 2012 marketing plans, for example, and ask how much you intend to spend on customer acquisition versus retention, loyalty, and advocacy. Reflect on how much time your sales representatives spend with real decision makers versus influencers or users (who can’t sign a purchase order.) 

If you are like most B2B, large enterprises, then you will find a quick read through this book will help to reorient your thinking around those customers who matter most and hold the keys to your future success.

Take a look: I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

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What Did B2B Marketers Learn in 2011? – A discussion on Focus.com

December 5, 2011 — Laura Ramos

Craig Rosenberg, VP and leader for the Focus Expert Network (aka @funnelholic), invited me to participate in an online discussion about what B2B marketers learned in 2011. Now that I am into my “sophomore year” at Xerox, I can’t presume to speak for all B2B marketers like I did when I was an analyst. However, I thought I would share a few personal insights about what I’ve learned working from the marketing trenches at a very large, very tenured, highly-recognized brand in the tech space.  Here are my top 5 “hard won” lessons from this year:

1) B2B marketers must give Sales any excuse to talk to clients. There are a million things to do as a B2B marketer. If you prioritize those things that create an opportunity for your account managers to check in with a client — or your sales reps to reach out to a prospect — you will do more to align marketing activity with sales outcomes and increase marketing’s value to the business. As you put together marketing programs and campaigns, always ask “where does Sales engage the customer in this process?”

2) Time spent on segmentation and targeting is invaluable. B2B marketers are learning to understand buyers better, but the lesson isn’t complete. Knowing your buyer intimately — having the ability to define a buying persona precisely– lets B2B marketers develop the content that engages buyers and put it where buyers will find it. You also have to understand who Sales considers a target, because if you develop leads that aren’t in anyone’s territory or too small to sustain your average deal size, no one will pick them up and work on them.

3) The pressure to move from lead generation to demand management will continue to increase. Sales can’t pursue every “lead” that marketing uncovers because sales need to focus on those prospects that offer the best immediate opportunity.  B2B marketers who think beyond the current event, campaign, or quarter-end will better create programs that develop demand, qualify it over time, and deliver those “ripe” opportunities to sales — within the territory and opportunity criteria that sales wants to pursue. This is the best way to scale the pipeline and put the revenue generation engine of your firm into high gear.

4) The value of marketing content must be measured in the buyer’s eye, not yours. This is a tough one for B2B marketers to learn because they believe their products and services are so special — and require such obscure, tedious description — that they find it hard to talk about much else with authority.  This past year, top marketers learned that hiring people who know how to write, who can tell a compelling story, and who can make content interesting to watch is the best way to leave the meaningless blather and inside-out perspective behind.

5) Learn how to extend the life of your content assets and events. B2B marketers focus a lot of activity around events like tradeshows, sporting events, dinner meetings, or webinars. While these events help tell your story or make executive-to-executive connections, the activity also presents many opportunities to capture an asset and use it to engage those who could not be there live. Whether it is slides, photos, video recordings, interviews, tweets, or blog posts, every event creates artifacts that smart marketers can use to help sales keep client conversations going — or to engage new prospects — while demonstrating your unique point of view, expertise, and commitment to building deeper customer relationships.

What have been your key lessons from 2011? Check out the Focus.com discussion on this topic and join in!

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SVForum Marketing SIG Hosts SVESMC Community to Talk about Social Business

November 30, 2011 — Laura Ramos

Like the title of this post? I’m trying to fit in all the right buzz words and acronyms to describe a panel discussion that I will moderate December 12.

Speaking of buzz words, here’s one that has become so broad and overused as to be practically meaningless: SOCIAL MEDIA.

For all the hype and interest around social media in B2B marketing, a realistic survey of the landscape shows that there’s more talk than actual practice and, of those practicing it, most aren’t getting the results they expect. To go beyond “social media 101″ — and the useless puzzling over whether to use Twitter, LinkedIn or some other platform is the right choice for B2B marketing — a group of folks that I highly respect will get together during a meeting of the SVForum’s marketing special interest group and talk about the challenges and opportunities for making business more social in 2012.

You can register for the event at the SVForum site, or learn more about the panel from this great blog post by Mark Helfen. The event takes place Monday, December 12 at EMC’s 2831 Mission College Blvd address in Santa Clara.

As business moves beyond social media to social interaction, many B2B marketers still struggle to understand where social fits in daily business activity. As social spreads from early-adopter, technical enthusiasts through marketing, sales, customer support, and product/service development, business people need to consider how to use social to collaborate with customers and support, engage, and delight them. And how to include technology partners, channels, and suppliers in the process. And how to do this without adding unwanted risk to the business.

The Silicon Valley Enterprise Social Media Council (SVESMC) is an informal community of social practitioners who influence strategy or lead programs at predominant valley companies like Adobe, CA, Cisco, eBay/PayPal, Symantec, and Xerox. We don’t claim to know everything about social media or to have solved all of its intractable problems.  But we will share our perspectives on where we have been successful, where we’ve fallen short, and where we believe the true future of social belongs in business.

If you are local to the Bay Area, please join us two Monday’s from now to hear first-hand about how social continues to shape corporate culture, customer interactions, and innovation in the fast pace of the valley. I promise an evening of interesting conversation with a few laughs thrown in. (But I can’t promise that the buzz words won’t flow freely…. see you there?)

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“Between the Lines” – Xerox Shares a View on the Future of Documents

November 21, 2011 — Laura Ramos

"Between the Lines" by John Kelly of Xerox

One of our top Xerox executives — and my boss’s former boss — recently published an ebook about documents in business and why documents will remain important. (Note, a document does NOT mean a printed page in this context — what a novel concept for Xerox, huh?)  I’d like to invite you to download and enjoy this ebook over the Thanksgiving holiday.  I would also like to plagiarize heavily from a great blog post that Karen McDermott, one of my colleagues, wrote last week. I think her perspective is clever and interesting — so I have basically replicated the post here:

A Businessweek article from 1975 entitled, “Office of the Future” predicted the paperless office. In this article, George E. Pake, the head of the (then) newly formed Palo Alto Research Center, predicted“… that in 1995 his office will be completely different; there will be a TV-display terminal with keyboard sitting on his desk. “I’ll be able to call up documents from my files on the screen, or by pressing a button,” he says. “I can get my mail or any messages. I don’t know how much hard copy [printed paper] I’ll want in this world.”"

Fast forward 35+ years and that “TV-display terminal” (better know as a computer screen) that George envisioned sits on our desks – but we still have a lot of paper sitting there, too. What happened? Maybe the future of the lowly document is more resilient than we first thought.

John Kelly, Executive Vice President, Major Account Development at Xerox, published a book called “Between the Lines”, that looks at the future documents as we know them today. You can read the ebook on your Kindle or iPad, or print it as a PDF if you’re still a “paper person”. (We are “digital vs. physical” neutral on this one.) But do have a look, especially at the first chapter. While Xerox moves, together with our clients, into more and more digital media, we still recognize the role that the document — as the primary person-to-person and human-to-computer interface — plays in our lives and the value it delivers to business regardless of its physical form.

John’s book is full of real world examples about how companies use documents to reduce costs, improve investment returns, and achieve other business advantages you might not expect. It also talks about futuristic technology like erasable (reusable) paper. Here’s your chance to get a glimpse at other innovative technology that — like the computer screen — might become commonplace over the next decade and beyond.

I hope you will download it. It reads quickly and may get you to look at documents in a whole new light.

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Successes and Shortfalls of Marketing Technology: As Shared with the Milwaukee BMA

November 14, 2011 — Laura Ramos

Xerox Document Services - Example of Thought Leadership on Sustainability

From social media to sales enablement, I have found new marketing technologies are abundant, often replacing established tools in the marketing programs and operations toolbox.  In my relatively brief time here at Xerox Document Services, we’ve enjoyed the opportunity — and challenge — of adopting a variety of new technologies with a mix of successes and shortfalls.

On November 10, I had the honor of delivering the keynote presentation to the Milwaukee chapter of the BMA. (The BMA is an organization I shamelessly plug to all B2B marketers.) I shared a few lessons that we’ve learned rolling out social media, lead management automation, and guided selling tools in our professional services organization where sales coverage runs the gamut from geography to industry.

It was a frank recounting of the challenges and problems many marketers face with new technology adoption across a range of programs, campaigns, and operations. It was the ”practical experience” view to the perspective  that Debbie Qaquish, Chief Revenue Officer of the Pedowitz Group, shared on how revenue marketers are changing the landscape of the industry through lead management automation. 

You can find the presentation on the Milwaukee BMA site, scroll to the bottom as the presentation is the last one featured on this page.  In it I talk about:

1) The state of B2B marketing and how the explosion of online tactics has made it harder for marketing to escape the execution treadmill and demonstrate its true value to the business.

2) How Xerox Document Services uses an online destination and social media to share thought leading perspectives from some of our key executives.  On this site, we talk about sustainability, change management, transforming enterprise marketing, innovation, and the future of documents.  Topics completely unrelated to copiers and printing.

3) Demand generation and lead management: how we use industry experts and clear, specific targeting to develop a perspective on key issues — like the future of the insurance industry — and share these with current clients and prospects. And how we keep the conversation going.

4) A cautionary note about guided selling and sales enablement and how the most exciting new technologies may be a bit much for your sales people to digest in one swallow.  Instead start with something they know (powerpoint slides) and give them a tool that enhances their effectiveness and professionalism when presenting in front of clients.

I also shared the following lessons with the 40 or so BMA members and guests who joined us for dinner and the evening presentation:

  • We are never finished.  Technology makes many new marketing approaches possible, but you have to keep feeding the machine.
  • Choose carefully, understand impact/risks of the new technology approaches you want to try.
  • Get inside your business financials to select metrics. If your programs and technology don’t show results in the language of business, you will fail to gain support.
  • Partner with sales, but gain senior management support. If the “big boss” doesn’t demonstrate both interest in and commitment to your implementations, then the road to success will be long and difficult.
  • Focus on audience and objectives first, the rest will follow. This is the POST principle.
  • People, process, and change management are more important than technology. Technology for technology’s sake is never a good thing.
  • Content generation is biggest success factor and hurdle. Figure out how to keep the content coming.
  • Use reporting to improve marketing, not just “prove” it.
  • Don’t be afraid to fail.

If you can relate to the contents in the presentation, let me know how.  Also, join your local chapter of the BMA. It’s a wonderful organization that I know helps to improve the business marketing profession.

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Three Views on Marketing Automation – Focus Experts and MAI

October 13, 2011 — Laura Ramos

Unquestionably there are many ideas and theories on marketing automation and the automation industry. Today the Marketing Automation Institute sponsored a Focus roundtable discussion that examined three views of marketing automation through the eyes of an analyst, a customer and a vendor.  And I got to be the customer instead of the analyst this time!

Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of the Annuitas Group and Executive Director of the Marketing Automation Institute, asked me to join some folks I haven’t spoken with in a while — Jeff Erramouspe, President of Manticore Technologies sand David Raab, long-time marketing automation technology and market analyst — for a conversation about the marketing automation industry, where it’s heading, how companies use lead management technology, and what to do to get more value from value from automation.

You can find the full recording and Twitter stream here.

Some of the questions we tackled — well, that I tackled – include:

1) Moving from analyst to practioner, what do I see at Xerox as some of the driving factors behind the push for automation?
(A growing profusion of marketing approaches and little consensus about what really works to drive demand. Therefore, the need to measure and automate marketing to better demonstrate its impact on the business.)

2) What are some of the ways an organization can use automation to reach buyers besides using it as an email engine? 
(I think it’s all about finding new ways to reach buyers outside of email — syndication of content to industry and association Web sites that link back to a landing page, publishing YouTube videos, starting a Facebook fan page, developing a community destination outside of your Web site are but a few examples.)

3) Of people, process and content, which one trumps the others — or all they all equally important — when it comes to successful automation? (Depends on where you are in the adoption lifecycle. Marketers starting out talk more about technology and skills their key needs. But more mature practioners point to content development as the gating item to success.)

Want to hear more?  Visit the site.  Listen to the recording. And share your views
UPDATE! — To hear the Sales’ view of marketing automation — sign up now for the November 10 Focus/MAI Roundtable.

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Maturing Your Lead Generation and Marketing Automation

October 11, 2011 — Laura Ramos

  Today I had the wonderful opportunity to speak with the Corporate Financial Group about maturing lead generation and lead management automation. This association of commercial banking marketing professionals offers the latest, industry-relevant insight into business-to-business marketing trends, practices and people in the financial industry.  I first met this group, spearheaded by the effervescent Pat Scanlon, over 4 years ago when I was a Forrester analyst and just starting out in the B2B marketing arena.

Pat connected with me, probably through LinkedIn, a few months ago and asked if I would be interested in speaking to the group, who was planning to meet in San Francisco this year.  When we last met in Chicago, I found CFG members to be at the cutting edge of both industry and marketing trends for large enterprise/business banking. That day we talked a lot about lead management, marketing automation, why both are important, and the four stages that B2B marketers progress through as they adopt lead management best practices. Their comments were both insightful and challenging.

So naturally I accepted Pat’s invitation to speak to this group again. We talked about the problem of lead generation in B2B marketing and the promise of automation in solving challenges like:

  • Getting alignment between marketing and sales around how you go to market
  • Market segmentation, understanding the buyer’s journey, and profiling buyer behavior.
  • How to deliver relevant, inspiring content — and how “thought leadership” helps marketers do that.
  • Integrating marketing tactics that attract and engage prospects.
  • Creating advocacy among customers – in particular through social media.
  • Enabling sales – and get credit for doing so.
  • Shifting the marketing discipline from creative to operational — from right brain to left brain.

If you would like to see a summary set of the slides I presented to this group, take a look at this link on Slideshare. 

Key takeaways for this group concerned where to focus their time, money and investment in lead management:

  1. Beg, borrow or buy talent in three key areas: journalist-quality writing talent, business/data analyst (who also has a segmentation specialty), and an operations techie with HTML experience.  Buying a tool is not enough – you need tech, content and analytics talent to make it work. On the content side, you can get some of this from your agency.  You need a partner in IT to help with the rest.
  2. Be prepared to build a marketing database and to perform regular data quality management. Also, you must plan to invest in a library of content that covers issues, roles and industries for the target buyers you approach.
  3. Start with a “Quick win” project that shows how marketing scales sales, but make sure your lead management efforts reward marketers and sales for using it and “doing the right thing” – these rewards provide the change management and cultural cues that signal the importance of this new way of going to market to all the players involved.

Take a look at the slides and let me know if you have any comments or questions.

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I’m “Honored” To Be A “Top 25 Digital Marketer”

September 23, 2011 — Laura Ramos

Here's the award and plaque -- nice, huh?

Last week I had the pleasure to join 17 senior executive B2B marketers at the Julia Morgan Ballroom at the Merchants Exchange in San Francisco for the BtoB Magazine Top Digital Marketer awards luncheon. This event truly brought together a ”who’s who” of business marketing professionals. I thought I would share a picture of the awards with you in this post. 

I was humbled to share the stage with Scott Anderson from Hewlett-Packard, Julia Atalla from Microsoft, Kevin Cox from SAP, Pam Didner from Intel, Paola Dovera from Sybase, Martyn Etherington from Tektronix Inc. — many of whom I’ve met through BtoB Magazine events or from my prior experiences with Forrester — along with others from Corning, Oppenheimer Funds, National Starch, Intuit, Motorola Solutions, AT&T, USG , Cisco, Makino and American Express OPEN. The stars were certainly out in the afternoon that day.

Congratulations go to Linda Boff, executive director-global digital marketing at GE, who was named BtoB’s Top Digital Marketer of the Year.

After lunch, Linda and the honorees assembled on stage for a panel discussion where BtoB’s Kate Maddox asked each of us to comment on the following two questions:

What is one important lesson you’ve learned about using social media for marketing?  Of course, no one could limit their advice to one lesson. I followed the crowd and said “know your audience — and understand whether they are socially active” and “relevant, rich content is the key to attracting those active, online audiences”.  If you don’t have something of value to share, it won’t get noticed in the social media world.

As you look to next year, where will you invest in online marketing?   I said, “Video.”  Used in two ways: for thought leadership (to demonstrate Xerox Document Services unique, executive points of view) and to tell our customer/success stories. I also said database and analytics because online allows you to be much more targeted, but you need to know HOW to be more targeted.  Data is the cornerstone to that success.

If you would like to learn more, check out the recorded video responses to these questions at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msZxDnNaYG0  and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvKGfkTWm8E

During the award presentation, BtoB singled out Xerox Document Services digital marketing work in thought leadership, customer testimonial, and industry blogging as highlights of our digital achievement.

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