Change Management: Critical Skill for B2B CMOs in 2013

October 25, 2012 — Laura Ramos

Have we reached a “new normal” for marketing budget growth?

Will marketing budget growth trends continue to shrink?

IDC’s findings from its 9th annual Technology Marketing Benchmarks Study show concerning results about the future of marketing budgets.  Prior to the start of the recession, marketing budget growth tended to keep pace with revenue growth.  In high tech, this looked like 6 – 7% per year on average across a variety of firms, large and small.  After everyone hit the reset button in 2009 and slashed budgets into the negative growth range, recovery to pre-recession levels continues to look distant, if not impossible, to achieve.  Current marketing budget growth rates are only half of those rates seen previously.

For many marketers, business leaders and financial officers now demand way more efficiency and accountability than was expected 5 years ago.  Marketing must build a business case for every program and demonstrate a return on investment.  Those marketers who do this well win budget approval for key programs and those that don’t struggle along with shrinking budgets.

Can automation help marketing get more efficient and be more accountable?

Partially.  It is almost universally accepted that applying technology to a poor business process only makes the flaws stand out.  But process improvement is where the future of business marketing lies.  In 2013, successful CMOs will turn their attention to managing change in this new era of marketing budget scrutiny and pressure. In a recent Forbes blog post, David Cooperstein — the leader of Forrester’s CMO & Marketing Leadership practice – outlines 5 areas where CMOs need to get smarter about before having change management conversations with their peers, team members, and agencies.  I want to second his advice and add a couple of more points for CMOs who work with Chief Sales Officers in organizations where direct sales is a dominant part of the business.

Besides defining the future state of the organization, mapping process against that and figuring out where technology can help, these CMOS also need to learn more about how to:

1)      Evolve the sales process.  Today, buyers are more than half-way through the purchase process when they decide to talk to vendor reps for the first time. To get ahead of this, sales execs want account managers to “be more relevant”, to get into the need-identification conversation earlier by introducing buyers to critical, insightful information about their business.  They expect reps to go online, mine social network relationships, and target executives with business-relevant information.  That’s a long way from a cold call.

2)      Shift from messaging to creating relevant conversation. Smart CMOs need to understand how the sales process is changing and partner with CSOs to make it easier for reps to have business-relevant conversations. Developing good marketing content that shares a unique point of view on industry-specific issues is the start.  But managing the change needed in the sales process to encourage and reward reps for having business-relevant conversations instead of yakking about features and benefits, is a change management challenge marketing must help sales overcome.

I think David is spot-on when he says that it’s difficult for CMOs to articulated the change management required for marketing to succeed in implementing and making use of the technologies that are now available to them – and that they aren’t going to get much help from vendors like Deloitte, IBM Global Services and Accenture in the meantime.  But I think B2B CMOs face a more insidious challenge – that of making marketing a true partner to sales – one that can help reps leverage the power of online, social activity to become a true partner to prospects, not just the organization trying to get them to sign on the dotted line. And to get this done without jeopardizing the brand image and equity many big firms enjoy.

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5 B2B Marketing Predictions for 2012

January 4, 2012 — Laura Ramos

Sourced from http://www.freedigitalphotos.net (see below)

Happy New Year! To kick off 2012, I thought I’d journey back to my industry analyst roots and make a few predictions about the issues most likely to impact B2B marketers during the next 12 months. I can’t say these predications are as well researched as my prior efforts, but – hey! – I don’t get paid to give advice any longer. (Doesn’t stop me from doing it, however.) I based this list of ruminations more on firsthand experience than third-party study and pseudo-science stuff:

1. Marketing automation (MA) interest, purchase, and use will accelerate. Despite claims from the vendors here, the MA market has been slow to develop. As the recession deepened, marketers turned to MA to cut costs and shift expenses from heads to tools. But the automation investment stakes will rise in 2012 as large enterprises move beyond initial trials to tap into the promise of building demand ahead of the sales effort. Sirius Decisions predicts 50% of enterprises will make the jump to MA by 2015 and Annuitas CEO Carlos Hidalgo expects MA purchase intent to double this year. I think the trend is positive, but that growth won’t accelerate dramatically. Experiencing this shift at a big company (Xerox) these past 18 months, I believe that the transition will be slower – and more painful – than these predictions as large enterprises in particular come to grips with the talent, process, and content issues (not the technology) that keep marketing automation on the B2B backburner.

2. Market program focus will shift from building brand and consideration to sales enablement. Marketing and sales cannot survive independently from each other, but only a minority of executives will address this dilemma in 2012. I don’t believe the solution is to make Marketing report to Sales and lose its position at the boardroom table. However, the core marketing conversation must demonstrate how marketing activity impacts sales pipeline and, ultimately, revenue. I see revenue performance management become more than just a buzzword as B2Bers start to demonstrate predictable, sustainable growth in sales, fueled by tighter marketing and sales alignment. Interestingly, notable successes will come from firms that grow sales with existing clients rather than bold moves into net-new markets.

3. The role of the customer advocate will emerge and take shape. B2B marketers have long known the value of the customer reference. Buyers want proof that you did what you say you do for someone else like them. And they want to learn from those experiences. While customer case studies and success stories were the physical and online record of this achievement, lower cost advances in technology will make it far easier for B2B marketers to capture customer testimonial in the form of video or interactive apps, particularly those suited for tablet presentation. I see companies like BrightTALK, ntara interactive, StoryQuest, and Velocity World Media experiencing a bumper year in 2012. Social networks – and plain, old, traditional industry associations and conferences — will let marketers turn clients into advocates by promoting mutual successes and shining the spotlight on customer achievement rather than product features.

4. To increase lead scoring effectiveness, marketers incorporate fit and interest criteria. Sales continues to complain that marketing delivers terrible leads. Lead scoring helps to bring discipline to the lead development and qualification process. But scoring backfires as marketers get too sophisticated too early when rating the value of prospect engagement with marketing activity. Because the threshold always changes, smart marketers will use scoring to prioritize leads, and let sales determine where to draw the line. As a best practice, they will use hard profile information – rightness of fit, account demographics, contact relevance, and audience rating – to augment softer behavioral information passed along with each “qualified” lead.

5. Content marketing will evolve as a separate function within the marketing organizational structure. The Internet has helped to make B2B buyers more sophisticated. Today, over half of the purchase decision is complete by the time buyers talk to sales. To get noticed during the early investigation phase – when the realization dawns to decision makers that the status quo is not working – marketers must produce interesting, educating, thought-provoking content. In 2012 they will quit relying on agencies to do this. The need to publish points of view in-line with thought-leading positions will cause firms (in particular: big ones) to hire or retain journalist-quality writers to pump out content for field and solution marketing programs (demand gen) to consume.

What do you see and how is that view different?  Post a comment here to share your thoughts.

PS: I sourced this image from http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=809

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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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Most CEOs Think Marketers Lack Credibility – Focus on Revenue to Change That

August 1, 2011 — Laura Ramos

Do CMOs really understand the fundamental nature of their businesses?  Not as well as they should.

London-based Fournaise Marketing Group released a study recently where they interviewed more than 600 large corporation and SMB CEOs and decision-makers in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia. In this report, 73% of these CEOs said they felt that their marketing executives lack business credibility and that marketing is not the business growth generators it should be.  These CEOs think marketing fails to demonstrate how marketing strategies and campaigns grow revenue by generating more customer demand, more sales, more prospects, or more conversions.

Other — equally dismal — findings include how marketers:

1. Talk too much about brand, not enough about revenue.  77% of CEOs feel marketers talk about brand, brand values, brand equity but fail to link this back to results that top management cares about: revenue, sales, earnings, or market valuation.

2. Chase social media, but can’t demonstrate its impact. 74% think marketing focuses too much on the latest marketing trends such as social media, but can rarely demonstrate how this activity helps them generate more business for the company.

3. Fail to demonstrate marketing ROI. 72% see marketing ask for more money, but can’t explain how much incremental business this money will generate. What’s worse, when asked to increase their marketing ROI, 73% of CEOs see marketing respond with cost cutting ideas stemming from better economies of scale or tougher negotiations with their third-party partners, instead of top-line growth generation like more prospects and sales opportunities.

4. Focus on the wrong things.  67% of CEOs believe marketers don’t think enough like businesspeople: 67% see marketers focus too much on the creative, “fluffy” side of marketing and not enough on business science. These CEOs think marketing relies too heavily on agencies to come up with the next big idea.

Wow, that’s harsh. But not unwarranted.

Two marketers I respect deeply – Carlos Hidalgo, CEO at Annuitas Group, and Lisa Arthur, CMO at Aprimo (now part of Teradata) — highlighted this research in recent blog posts. Unfortunately, it’s the type of information that most marketers “know” intuitively. But it really smarts to see overwhelmingly high numbers demonstrate the depth of the problem.

So how do we marketers get out of this mess? I’ll paraphrase some of Carlos and Lisa’s good advice with 5 practices that you, as a top B2B marketer, should adopt to shift your focus from marketing metrics to business outcomes:

1. Plan and execute marketing programs based on business results. Go beyond metrics that simply show opens, clicks, and response rates by measuring opportunities generated, “influence on sales pipeline”, conversion rates and other metrics that relate to business outcomes. Focus on this outcome-oriented data to learn which marketing activities — and in which combination — produce the best results. Replicate those.

2. Develop lead management processes. Poor process leads to a lack of visibility and open-loop activity that leaves revenue on the table. Instead, put tooling and process in place to help both sales and marketing generate new business opportunities, manage volumes of business inquiries, and improve potential buyers’ propensity to purchase. This will let you increase alignment between marketing activity and sales results and lead to an improved impact on revenue.

3. Use business language to describe marketing results. As the Fournaise survey clearly demonstrates, C-level executives are not interested in the “art” behind marketing. Chief executives want marketing to send qualified leads to sales that generate revenue. Push your team to think about the business as a whole and to communicate marketing’s impact on the business as they see it, not as you see it.

4. Determine what your customers want, not what you are trying to sell them. Most marketing and selling bypasses the customer. Yet, not understanding your buyer makes it difficult to engage them and convince them to buy your product or service. Get to know your buyer by listening to them and learning why and how they buy. This is not easy and never ending; successful marketers make it an ongoing part of the planning, execution, and measurement process by asking “how will this change the nature of our relationship with customers and how will we know we achieved that?”

5. Use analytics to help distinguish signal from noise. While studying customer buying behavior is the micro side of the problem, understanding market and buyer trends is the macro side. Invest in tools and process to help gather and analyze data. And to better understand customer segments and purchase patterns. Then apply these insights to campaigns and show how marketing impacts revenue, earnings, and market share.

In Xerox Global Document Outsourcing Services, we have a marketing team dedicated to analytics, business intelligence, and predictive modeling for the services business. Their goal is to put “analytics into action” by starting with a top-down view of the market and analyzing where the best business opportunities exist for Xerox field sales to pursue — either within existing accounts (by cross selling or upselling new business) or by attracting new logos. Of the many things we do in marketing, this is one of the most vital and important areas and one where the alignment between sales management and marketing strategy is the highest.

What is your experience? Are there other things marketers must do to better align with business and become the revenue generation engine for your firm?

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SocialTech 2010: Building A Social Media Marketing Discipline At A Major Brand

October 30, 2010 — Laura Ramos

Earlier this week, I had the good fortune to attend and participate in the first social media conference geared to B2B marketers. MarketingProfs sponsored an excellent event. I believe the 200+ who attended in person, and the 400 or so who listened in virtually, would agree. For a round-up of conference activities, here is a list of the best posts and articles I found on the event:

1) Ann Handley’s coverage of the event: http://www.mpdailyfix.com/the-state-of-the-b2b-marketer-in-social-media-3-trends-from-socialtech-2010/

2) Aaron Pearson from Weber Shandwick wrote a great post: http://www.b2bvoices.com/

3) #mptech daily read: http://paper.li/tag/mptech  (Search the #mptech tag on Twitter for more.)

For me, the price of admission was listening to Brian Ellefritz, Senior Director of Global Social Media Marketing, talk about his plans for creating a new social media marketing discipline at SAP. While “SAP” and “discipline” are synonymous to many, one might think that SAP’s top-down culture may struggle with the unruliness of social media a bit. To move SAP along, Brian adopted the “Social Engagement Journey” — a view of the stages large brands progress through when establishing social media marketing practices. Brian credits Sean O’Driscoll, and the team from Ant’s Eye View, with the concepts and framework he’s bringing to SAP.

According to Brian’s talk, the four stages along the Social Engagement Journey include:

Stage 1: Grass roots – characterized by lots of activity but little focus; lots of variation but little conformity. Individual teams pursue social media opportunities bottoms up. Charismatic personalities, who want to grab the spotlight as early adopters, tend to drive this stage where overarching strategy and leadership has yet to form.

To move along from Stage 1 to Stage 2, Brian offered the following observations and guidelines:

1) Find leadership – corporate entities like Legal and Marcom calm their social media concerns when adult supervision enters the room.

2) Don’t discourage the experimentation with too many rules or too much oversight.

3) Begin informal education – workshops – to form consensus around what needs to happen and how.

4) Increase and improve listening. In turn, better listening will improve content proficiency and efficiency.

5) Let standard tools and governance emerge. Grass roots teams find they need operational models, process, and a common tool platform to progress further.

Stage 2: Silos form – independent efforts start to coalesce around functional areas and some leadership, whether by design or accidental, starts to emerge. Co-opetition among silos can happen in this stage and can be disconcerting. Teams experiment with more tools, but a lack of focus on business objectives means processes have yet to align. Content generation continues to happen through enthusiasm and personal initiative more than strategy.

To mature Stage 2 activity, Brian suggested:

1) Don’t get caught up in inter-team competition. Those who stay true to good social principles – who walk the social talk – will rise to the top and others will adopt their ideas.

2) Progress tool strategies from ad hoc to formal vendor relationships and benefit from all the attendant training, support, etc.

3) Pay more attention to metrics. With tenures of 18 months or more, social media teams now need to answer tougher questions about investment returns and justification.

4) Focus on creating conversational content. Most marketers gear their writing around messages, lead generation, and holding prospects hostage to sales. Social marketing writers must get to know customers better and learn how to deliver content customers value.

5) Formalize roles. Social initiatives can no longer afford to run off of employee enthusiasm and activities executed during nights and weekends.

Stage 3: Operationalize – in this stage, the silos of activity merge, leaderships becomes clear, and the activity starts to feel more like marketing and less like chaos. Firms in this stage truly understand how their customers/prospects use social channels and engage with them in those channels. These firms also invest more in education and communication since practitioners now come from all areas of the business. Listening informs both tactics and strategy.

To evolve in this stage, companies should:

1) Focus training on roles and objectives, not just the tools. Instead of holding a “Twitter class”, sponsor “how to build a social conversation with <audience>” workshop.

2) Reset your listening strategy. Invest in tools like Visible or Radian 6 to learn more about where customer conversations happen, what your competitors are doing, and how strong your share of voice is. Use the data to determine where the market will take you next.

3) Advertise the heck out of successes, and invest in them further. Resist the temptation to focus on the laggards. Competition and public visibility will give them ample motivation to keep from being left behind.

4) Push silos of activity together. Create virtual teams of bloggers for example. Combine conventional email aliases and meetings with a community platform where practitioners can share successes, policies, and practices.

5) Don’t wait too long for governance to happen. Actively create discipline around strategy, ownership, priorities, and metrics.

Stage 4: Lifestyle – the ultimate stage is one where few firms reside today. Zappos may be the lone example of a company where social activity is part of it’s core structure and culture. Business units earn more autonomy to act socially based on business objectives, positive outcomes, and a common understanding of success examples. More rigor in metrics helps to keep employees engaged and competent in social discourse. In this stage, tools are optimized, systems are integrated, everyone buys in, and angels sing. (Well, the last won’t happen, but I wanted to see if you were still with me.)

A successful journey from social chaos to social engagement depends on many factors besides those outlined: your company culture, momentum, environment, funding, and the extent to which your audience is willing to engage with you socially. Yet, I think this model offers a good place for companies to assess their progress and to think about what they need to do strategically to move from one stage to the next.

Thanks for the enlightening talk, Brian, I really appreciated it!

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Join Me at SocialTech 2010: Oct. 27 at the Doubletree in San Jose

October 25, 2010 — Laura Ramos

As a former Forrester analyst, I’ve had a long-standing relationship with the wonderful folks at MarketingProfs.  I’ve come to value greatly the resources — both online and in-person – this organization provides to marketers who, frankly, can’t afford the big-ticket price of a marketing consultant or industry analyst firm. This Tuesday, MarketingProfs will host SocialTech 2010, their inaugural social media conference for B2B marketers in the high technology space.

After a rocky start caused by the slow economy, and postponement of the event from March until October, SocialTech 2010 promises to bring together the visionaries and experts who have used the power of social media to transform the way B2B technology companies market their products and services. At 3 pm on Tuesday afternoon, I will speak on a panel featuring:

In this session, Michael and René will present highlights from recent research — conducted by IDC and Palo Alto Networks separately and respectively — to benchmark the use of social media for B2B high-tech marketing. Michael will explain why traditional corporate culture remains the largest barrier to successful social media initiatives today. He’ll discuss the different operational challenges organizations face to effectively deploy and manage social media initiatives. René will then provide highlights on the adoption and usage of social media in his experience at Palo Alto Networks and (probably) Serena Software, where he worked previously. 

After Michael and René speak, Gurmeet and I will react to the research and share some things we are seeing and doing within our own organizations. Hopefully we can provide advice on how you can encourage social media use within your own organization while demonstrating its value to the business.

Prior to my panel, at 2 pm that same afternoon, my colleague Jeannine Rossignol will join Chris Koch from ITSMA to talk about “The Role of Social Media in the Buying Process“  and how Xerox has used social media to enable internal salespeople to have more informed discussions with customers. While I only touch on it in my panel presentation, Jeannine will talk more about “Competipedia”—a secure, interactive, wiki-based resource for the Xerox Global Services sales force to find the latest competitive information. Chris will share how CSC did also leveraged wiki technology when they launched the first B2B social networking site for the insurance industry, called WikonnecT. Wikis and service companies — anyone seeing a trend here?

The SocialTech agenda promises both forward-looking views from Jeremiah Owyang, Guy Kawasaki, and Robert Scoble – visionaries that no conference on social media should be without. I also hope you will find a lot of practical, real-world advice that you can put into action after you leave the conference.  Will I see you there?  I hope so!

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Best Practices For Marketing To Buyers “In The Cloud”

January 27, 2010 — Laura Ramos

“Cloud computing” is a very hot topic, and like social media, subject to much debate about “what is cloud computing?” and “what does it mean for business?” Simply stated, cloud computing lets your customers and potential buyers take advantage of services and resources delivered as an online utility. Buyers get the benefits of using your technology without worrying about the technical details as much as they would if they implemented software inside their data centers. The benefits can include: lower capital investment, faster implementation, reduced risk, proven security and improved scalability to handle the increased amounts of data. Purists believe that true cloud computing requires large scale sharing by infrastructure/application providers and their consumers alike. While my colleagues at Forrester try to sort out the market and make it easier for IT buyers to decide where to invest, I’d like to explore the idea of marketing to customers in the cloud. 

B2B marketing needs to embrace the cloud. Most executives see marketing as a large discretionary line item in the corporate budget. During tought economic times, that “discretion” gets cut more often than not.  Marketers perpetuate this short-sighted perspective when they focus more on program and campaign spending and fail to invest in the capital or IT support needed to make marketing execution more efficient and the results more visible to the organization. Cloud computing can give marketers ready access to technology and services that can drive demand and evaluate the effectiveness of their programs without the burden of traditional technology implementation and management.

Cloud computing will also transform the way marketing gets done. In this Web 2.0 world, buyers spend more of time online searching for information, interacting with like-minded colleagues, and comparing offerings long before the first sales call occurs. Cloud-optimized marketing strategies such as social media, paid search, search results optimization, content syndication, and engaging with buyers on social networking sites like LinkedIn and Twitter deliver brand building and customer engagement results.

To futher explore how social media marketing in the cloud can help to build deeper — and eventually more profitable — customer relationships, I joined Jon Miller (VP of Maketing at automation rising-star Marketo) and David Alston (social media guru who heads up both community and marketing at Radian6) on a webinar, which you can access here.  During the event, we looked at a number of different cloud-related topics including:

1) How to use Forrester’s Social Technographics® Profiles of business decision-makers to design marketing programs that not only capitalize on emerging social behaviors but also fundamentally change the nature of the marketing relationship between B2B buyers and sellers.

2)Forrester’s P-O-S-T methodology – Why starting with People, Objectives and Strategy first, then moving to Tactics and Technology is the best way to ensure success when using social media to engage with prospects and customers in the cloud.

3) How to use social media monitoring to engage prospects, build communities, service customers, uncover influencers, and listen for the point of need.

Over the next few months, I will join the the Marketing Cloud conversation to continue to explore how cloud-centric service and technology providers may be in a better position to serve the modern needs of B2B marketers who see social media not simply as a way to reach new audiences. More importantly, these marketers see social media as a tool to help them build communities of like-minded customers; customers who will remain loyal, buy more over time, and advocate to others on the marketer’s behalf to influence the standing and reputation his/her firm in a transparent, community-centric manner.  The 2009 Forrester Groundswell Awards winners in the B2B marketing categories demonstrate where this trend is heading.  But I would love to hear from you with examples of companies that you feel are doing an exceptional job of using social media to connect with business buyers who purchase high consideration products for on behalf of their firms.

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Taking B2B Marketing to the “Next Level” in 2010

November 20, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Thanksgiving is next week, and it marks the start of the mad dash to the end of the year. As I look towards 2010, I see B2B marketers, in the tech industry and elsewhere, face increasing pressure to reach decision-makers, justify spending, and deliver high-quality leads to an increasingly dissatisfied sales organization. Compounding these demands is a lingering recession and increasing pressure from product commoditization, new business models, functional outsourcing, and a social groundswell where buyers turn to peers to validate purchase decisions.

To turn these changes to marketing’s advantage, 2010 will be the year where B2B marketers must expand their focus from the intake of the pipeline to a broader range of activities that flow across the entire customer life cycle. This requires fundamental changes in people, process, and technology to stem marketing’s slide into mere makeup and wardrobe responsibilities. Next year, socially savvy B2B marketers must:

1) Move out of the corporate ivory tower. Globalization, Social Computing, and buyer control make community marketing essential. Our interactions with buyers must become more inclusive as internal subject matter experts, engineers, and external voices will participate more often in the formerly exclusive realm of polished marketing communication. To adapt, we must adopt community management roles and evolve our companies’ communication style to become more open, transparent, and focused on relationship building — not just offer promotion.

2) Use communities to combine the best of user conferences and support forums. B2B buyers are a busy, overburdened crowd. If you want them to join your communities, you had better make it worth their while. Expect membership in business communities to be comparatively shorter-lived — and more episodic — than consumer counterparts. Marketers must accommodate this “sometimes active but mostly passive” pace by merging online events — like virtual trade shows run on software platforms from ON24 and Unisfair — with collaborative, conversational capabilities from social software firms like Communispace, HiveLive, Jive Software, and Lithium.

3) Use technology to enable digital selling with a personal feel. Prospect databases and lead management automation let marketers create personalized online experiences that replace traditional first and second sales calls. Customer-generated video, print on demand, and microsites that deliver one-to-one content replace four-color brochures as core marketing tools. Where will you be in this transition come 2010?

If you would like to hear about the 5 ways to take your business marketing efforts to the next level in 2010, check out my December 1 teleconference. During the presentation, I will take a closer look at the forces tech marketers must be able to overcome and why becoming customer centric, adopting integrated marketing, better managing demand, upgrading measurement, and embracing social is key to your ongoing success.

There is a charge for non-clients to attend, but if you reply to this post, I will put you in touch with the right folks can help you qualify for a reduced rate. (Yep, gotta talk to one of my salespeople.) Hope you will listen in or join the conversation on Twitter at #B2B2010. Happy Thanksgiving and see you December 1.

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Why Customer Engagement Is Critical

September 21, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Making your customer reference program, advisory boards, customer councils, and communities relevant to C-level management means you need to speak their language and help them pursue their objectives. Not yours.

Taken individually, a reference or communities program may not show up on your firm’s executive radar. But as crucial aspects of “customer engagement,” these programs — and the intimate customer interactions they produce — are critical to senior management.

Recently I had the pleasure of joining Bill Lee, President of the Customer Strategy Group, Asim Zaheer, VP Product Marketing for Hitachi Data Systems, and Sean Geehan of the Geehan Group for a roundtable discussion on the role these programs play in engaging your current customers. You can find the interview and roundtable discussion on Blog Talk Radio. 

I think you’ll find the discussion lively as we talked about how to measure the effectiveness of engagement programs, how specific programs like references tie into broader corporate goals, why integrating with other marketing programs is critical, and tips on how to do so.  Prior to the recording, Bill sent me a few specific questions to answer. I jotted down my responses and — while the radio show took some interesting twists and turns as questions blended into discussion — I thought I would share my thoughts with you through this blog post.  Enjoy the questions and the answers I prepared:

Q. Forrester is taking a substantial interest in this area of marketing: customer engagement. Why so? Why now?

We are really excited about researching customer engagement for three reasons–

1) The Groundswell: We see a major shift of power in the vendor-buyer relationship from seller to the buyer. We see buyers turning to each other increasingly, and to social sources of information, to inform their business purchase decisions. Marketers need a way to not only tap into that activity and learn from it, but they also need a way of figuring out who are the new influencers, and ways to measure the value that comes from these social interactions. Engagement helps do that.

2) We think that business marketing – particularly in high technology — has gone astray. We marketers tend to worry more about marketing mix and execution than what happens to customers after the deal closes. But because studies show that it costs 1/6th to 1/10th as much to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one, we think that this myopic focus on the front of the pipeline is upside down. Focusing on how to increase and strengthen customer engagement helps turn things around.

3) Classic marketing metrics don’t capture all the value of ongoing customer relationships. Sometimes customers who, relative to others, don’t buy a lot from you are incredibly valuable because of the way they influence others, advocate on behalf of your company, and support the broader customer community.  Looking at engagement helps to capture this value in a meaningful way.
Q. We’re seeing a major shift in the ability of customers to get information directly from each other – without going through vendors. Is this the most important development in this area to you? How is that going to impact B2B businesses?

Agreed, we see this same shift. We use the term Groundswell to refer to that shift and it’s as big a shift – if not bigger — as the one we saw with the early stages of the Internet.

Profound impact on B2B businesses, but not in the way we see today.  From a B2B marketing perspective, the majority of the activity around these social interactions today is still one-way.  Marketers experiment with social media but treat it like old media – another way to get their message out in front of an audience. The novelty of social activities – like Facebook fan pages, Linkedin groups, Twitter and YouTube – create a lot of interest here today, but marketers – and executives — are beginning to question the return on this activity.

We believe that the real impact of this shift in customer behavior will happen – not at the front of the marketing funnel, where it is concentrated today, BUT at the opposite end. Social activity will allow customers to band together into communities of interest to not only solve problems and find more creative ways to use products and services, but to provide direction and innovation to the firms who supply those products and services.  Smart marketers will work now to tap into this social behavior, engage customers’ participation, and encourage customers to advocate – openly and transparently – on their behalf to the community.

Q. How do you measure the success of your customer engagement efforts, with these new realities?

This is a problem most B2B marketers struggle with right now, and I can’t say that we’ve cracked the case.  To help, however, Forrester introduced a model for measuring engagement that we call “the Four I’s.” We see engagement defined as the deep connection a company creates with its customers that drives purchase decisions, interaction, and participation over time. It’s measured by the level of involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence with the brand over time. 

Q. How will customer reference programs adapt to the new realities?

I think the scope of customer reference programs will increase from meeting tactical goals – like percentage of customer base that is referenceable – and service levels with sales TO providing direct and tangible value to the customers who choose to give references. Right now a lot of customer reference participation is driven by good will. I think customer reference programs need to give back more value than recognition and appreciation without sacrificing social currency — things like trust and credibility — that make for good references. This is where the social groundswell and community building come in.

While I don’t think customer reference managers will lead the charge into social media, they must participate because their perspective – “here are our most valuable customer advocates and what can we give back to them?” is so important to shifting the focus in marketing from campaigns and leads to ongoing customer relationships.

Q. What are your thoughts on the ability of firms to meaningfully engage with senior level decision making customers?

I think many firms over-estimate their ability to engage with and sell to the C-level suite. Just by putting marketing materials together that say we are going to be more engaged at the strategic level doesn’t make it a reality.

It reminds me of this quote I use to kick off the conversation I often have with Forrester clients about the value of  product positioning. It is part of Forrester lore and reportedly said by a frustrated CIO to a very large software vendor at that vendor’s customer summit.  He said:

“If you call yourself a ‘Strategic Business Partner’ one more time, I’m going to throw you out of your own building. You are not a strategic partner to my business just because your marketing department gave you slides that say you are. You are a vendor, selling us technology, and until you tell me exactly what business value you bring to my business, that’s all you’ll ever be to us.”

It’s a harsh statement, but I think it brings into sharp focus the problems that happen when marketing focuses too much on message, communication, and channel and loses touch with what customers really value – which is a problem-solving relationship that has commercial benefit to both parties.

Engaging with senior level decision makers takes time and skill to develop. You don’t send your sales rep straight in with a marriage proposal, you have to date – woo them with the equivalent of candlelight dinners.  In real terms, that means giving senior decision makers – and their influencers and information collectors – relevant, timely reasons to engage with you. It means useful, usable information and experiences that satisfy their needs, motivations or aspirations. And the degree to which you can foster this kind of relationship with customers on THEIR terms, not on yours, will mean the difference between success and failure at engaging at the senior level.

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2009 Economic Impact on B2B Budgets and Practices

April 3, 2009 — Laura Ramos

MarketingProfs hosted Digital Marketing World Spring 2009 virtually. The free conference attracted over 2000 attendees, and mesmerized most with a video speech by David Plouffe, Barak Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign manager, who spoke extemporaneously about how the campaign team developed a world-class community of followers who blew away previous fund raising records (over $580M in 2 years with the majority from individual donors.) Using social media like Facebook, Twitter, etc., the campaign connected a dispersed group of people and generated brand loyalty with unparalleled success.

I know all of this because I followed Mr. Plouffe on the agenda and enjoyed quite a bit of carryover from his incredibly popular session. (Thank you David!) I would also like to think that B2B marketers are quite interested in the impact of the current recession on marketing budgets and mix. Here are a few highlights from the research:

1) Traditional tactics still command the lion’s share of the budget. Trade shows, direct mail, inside sales, TV and print hold a tight grip on the five top spots in our list of most expensive B2B marketing tactics. Coming in sixth, the company Web site is the only digital tactic to scrape together a double-digit percentage of marketing budgets

2) Social media makes a few budgetary inroads. Virtual trade shows, community sites, rich media (video, podcasts, etc.), blogs, and other Web 2.0 tools like RSS subscriptions, mashups, and widgets got a bigger portion of markeitng budget leftovers this year: each of these emerging tactics captured between 3 and 5% of the marketing budget this year versus the measly 1 to 2% devoted last year.

3) Recessionary concerns slammed the brakes on spending plans. While 3/4 of respondents reported program budgets holding steady or enjoying reasonable increases in 2008, spending came to a skidding stop in 2009 with only 58% of marketers reporting that their budgets would grow or stay the same, a sizable drop. The most striking figure is that 42% expect overall budgets to getslammed by 23% on average. (See Figure)

Marketing Spending Plans Dropped in 2009 v 2008

Marketing Spending Plans Dropped in 2009 v 2008

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This data — and a lot more — is part of a joint study with MarketingProfs, Forrester surveyed 317 B2B marketing professionals in firms with annual revenues ranging from less than $20 million to more than $5 billion and who met our minimum criteria for marketing spend and mix.

Forrester will publish the results of this research shortly in two documents that I will blog about in the coming weeks.

I also plan to give another rendition of the Digital Marketing World presentation for Forrester audiences in May. Check the blog for date and time.

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