New Skills B2B Marketers Need To Beat Becoming Obsolete

February 18, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Raising marketing’s value to the organization will require some new skills. Fortunately, these skills aren’t difficult to learn; I think marketers just need reminding that because change is constant, self-reinvention is a necessity.  After speaking on this subject in Q4 of last year, I shared an insight into what I had learned about the things marketers need to do better to avoid extinction:

B2B Marketing Obsolete, Really? (Part III) – November 14, 2008

At the end of October 2008, Rebekah Donaldson, founder of Business Communications Group LLC, joined me for an informal discussion during a Forrester Teleconference about the future of the business-to-business marketing profession. We received some great questions from the audience after our talk. In November, I spoke again on this subject when MarketBright VP of Sales, Mike Pilcher, asked me to join Eric Rogge, VP of Marketing at Exalead, to talk about the future of both sales and marketing.

While Mike and I did our best to prophesy a grim future for our respective professions, Eric — as Rebekah did about two weeks earlier — helped to illuminate a way forward. In the end Mike, Eric, and I agreed that technology will be a key element (but not if applied indiscriminantly) to help marketing and sales shift from obnoxious bullhorn to respectful partner. Eric made three points worth underlining:

1) For marketing to evolve, we need to learn to listen more than we talk. We need to create listening posts throughout the Web that reveal what the market wants, prospects find interesting, and which problems are worth solving. Technology can help us do this, but not without human brains behind it to filter out the noise and tell us what’s important.

2) Qualifying leads means more than answering the BANT questions. Early online interactions should prove to buyers that we are interested in doing business together, not just in hooking prospects and tossing them over to sales. Techology helps by tying lead scores to behavioral (as well as factual) information, but marketing has to be smart about where to take the conversation next.

3) Move fast, especially when you get it wrong. As Eric said, one “aw heck” can overcome 10 “attaboys”, so it’s important for marketers to move beyond the front of the pipeline to make sure customers are overwhelmingly satisfied — and that sales doesn’t take bad business. Great customer insight, fed by marketing-specific database information, helps marketers do this efficiently.

I wanted to thank Eric for providing this great insight and hope he doesn’t mind my paraphrasing his contribution to the Webinar. Bottomline: the road out of marketing obsolescence is paved with open, truthful conversations and a true concern for our customers’ future success. Technology will smooth the path, but not shorten the journey.

Tags: , , :: Add to del.icio.us

—————————————

Listen more than you speak. Figure out how to read your prospects’ (and customers’) digital body language to figure out if they are ready to move onto the next step in the purchase process. Move quickly, don’t be afraid to make mistakes, but if you do, own up to them and fix them.  What other skills or behaviors would you recommend B2B marketers improve in 2009?

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , . Leave a Comment »

B2B Marketing: Obsolete? Not Yet!

February 17, 2009 — Laura Ramos

I am an advocate for excellence in business marketing. I don’t believe for a minute that the marketing profession will disappear any time soon. But I think it’s possible for marketing to assume a much diminished role at the executive table as sales, development, service and support use technology to connect directly with prospects and current customers. Social Computing and Tech Populism provide the evidence that this risk is real.

I raised a few eyebrows and stirred a few passions when I first posted on this topic. Here is the second post in the series on obsolescence, which begins to address the changes B2B marketers need to make, and make soon:

Will B2B Marketing Become Obsolete? (Part II) - October 24, 2008

Wow.  I am overwhelmed by the response I received from my first post on this subject. Looks like I hit a nerve and inspired some great commentary.  In particular, I’d like to call attention to the thoughful response from Arthur Einstein, who is the VP of Marketing at Loyalty Builders. I wanted to comment briefly on what I am hearing from all of you so far. To avoid obsolescence, readers believe B2B marketers must focus on:

1) Improving customer insight. Business buyers are people, not faceless companies. Rational decisions get clouded by emotions, motivations, and desires. B2B marketers must stop pushing out communications and start listening to what buyers need. Customer research, segmentation, understanding the buying process, and creating relevant information that engages prospects in conversations — and ultimately long-lasting relationships — all require marketers to understand their customers deeply. This includes gathering and analyzing factual, behavioral, and social information.  Most marketing organizations are woefully underinvested in the technology, processes, and skills needed to do this right.

2) Managing demand, not just trying to generate it. B2B marketing and selling involves supplier teams interacting with buyer teams. This means fostering multiple interactions that evolve in a nonlinear fashion to build relationships and success. It require sales and marketing to work together to give buyers the unvarnished information they need to make a well-considered selection.  This also means all parts of the selling organization need to get more involved in educating and nurturing demand. When marketers deliver fewer, but more qualified leads that sales can act upon, then marketing’s value becomes tangible and strategic to the business. Bottomline: there isn’t an unlimited amount of demand out there to draw upon, so marketers need to figure out which ones to invest in to grow into a relationship.

3) Embracing the social groundswell. Buyers have turned to peers for advice for 100 years; social computing simply extends and supports this behavior. Buyers also mistrust advertising and messaging because marketing has been too focused on feeds, speeds, and fluffy claims — not on value, evidence, and real solutions. Good news: Readers are optimistic that social media, and Web 2.0 tools, offer new opportunities for marketers to correct these past mistakes and use social activity to build relationships that are essential to effective B2B marketing.

To this list, I would also say B2B marketers must learn how to: 4) integrate online and offline communication to better create dialogue and learn more about customer needs and 5) use technology to quantitatively measure, test, and report on marketing activity and the progress of building relationships. Automation will drive the efficiency that wards off obsolesence.

Stay tuned for Part III of exploring how B2B marketers can avoid obsolesence…

Tags: , , :: Add to del.icio.us

——————————

Avoiding obsolescence is not about grabbing onto new tactics or technologies in an attempt to rise above the landslide of messages bombarding buyers every day.  Goodness knows the Web 2.0 world provides an abundance of these tools and the hype to make everyone feel you must jump in immediately or get left in the dust.  It’s not about finding the next unique gimmick or chasing the next eye-catching fad. It’s about making marketing relevant to buyers, and — as a result — to the business. 

Despite rumors to the contrary, buyers have not lost their senses or their trust in conventional marketing communication channels. In our recent research, business publications and sales people follow close behind peers/word of mouth and the Web site as the primary sources of information buyers use when validating purchase decisions. The challenge for B2B marketers has been, is, and will always be finding productive ways to put concise information in front a well-segmented and targeted audience so they will look over and say, “yes, I would like to talk to you about that further.” Delivering messages, information, and offers through marketing that blends traditional channels with digital, social approaches works most effectively when it creates conversation, not just shouts through the bullhorn.

With marketing budgets under tight financial scrutiny, it’s time for B2B marketers to account for their true impact on the business. Otherwise, becoming simply the “make it pretty department” is right around the corner.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , . Leave a Comment »

Is B2B Marketing at Risk of Obsolescence?

February 16, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Technology Populism and Social Computing are two big ideas that Forrester coined to describe the unstoppable impact of technology on business process, business people, and purchasing.  Briefly, for those unfamiliar, the defintions are:

Technology Populism – An adoption trend led by a technology-native workforce that self-provisions collaborative tools, information sources, and human networks — requiring minimal or no ongoing support from a central IT organization.

Social Computing – A social structure in which technology puts power in communities, not institutions. (Similarly, the Groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.) 

Both ideas talk about how technology puts power in the hands of individuals — buyer or worker — and that traditional control over technology and information — byIT or corporations — will decrease as  a result. I think both ideas are important for marketers to grasp because those who brush aside the idea that a groundswell of social activity has — and will continue to have — little impact on business will soon find themselves on the path of the dinosaurs and dodo birds.  Social computing and tech populism are only two factors forcing B2B marketers to take a hard look at their role in the world.  In the first of a four part series on Forrester’s Interactive Marketing Professional blog, I talked about the forces I see at work pushing marketing toward a diminished position inside the companies they serve if they don’t take steps to mitigate these forces now:

Will B2B Marketing Become Obsolete? (Part I) – October 22, 2008

Today marks the beginning of my 8th year at Forrester and my 4th year researching B2B marketing. I’d like to use this anniversary to start a blog conversation about what I see happening in B2B marketing and to think about what’s next. And, frankly, I am concerned about the future of the business marketing profession.  In particular, for those of us marketing high technology products and services.
First of all, I see four macro trends working against increasing marketing’s future value.  In brief they are:

1) Commoditization: software as a service, open source, service-oriented architectures and a number of similar trends make it easier to enter a market and more difficult to differentiate products on features and capabilities alone. As a result, marketers need to work harder to understand, attract, and engage an audience. And it takes multiple touches to involve prospects in conversation and figure out if they are ready for sales to contact.

 

2) Consumerism and the social groundswell: Buyers are more likely to use information from associates than from institutional sources, like marketing messages and sales people, when purchasing. We found proof of this recently at Forrester when we surveyed business decision makers this year and found 36% of the 2187 who buy networking products and 34% of the 2148 who buy security solutions turn to peers (word of mouth) when researching what to buy. Peers were the #1information source picked in both survey samples. Social computing also establishes more open and authentic communication that will fundamentally change how marketing works – no longer will marketers be able to “spin” product problems or customers concerns away. Look at Dell or Comcast for examples of this.

 

3) Ad avoidance translates to sales call avoidance. Consumers are really good at avoiding ads. Technology only helps them do this. Tivo lets prospects skip commercials, spam blockers keep email clean, and pop-up blockers keep online ads away. This behavior spills over into the business world where busy buyers turn to the Web to get information while avoiding phone and sales calls until they are further in the buying process.

 

4) Globalization: Besides needing to address customers in fragmented regional markets, marketers are beginning to face offshore skill competition. Not only do marketers outsource their brains to interactive, ad, and PR agencies, but now outsourcing practices like lead generation and telemarketing are starting to bleed over into core campaign design and execution functions.

 

Unfortunately, I see marketers focus take a narrow view that causes them to miss seeing the impact of these trends looming ahead. When I ask B2B marketers, “What is marketing’s charter or mission at your company?,” most often I hear “We generate demand.”  This goal is very hard to measure. Why? Because most B2B products are highly-considered sales involving a sales force or indirect channel where marketing gets caught in the middle or brushed to the side. Marketers who simply want to know which tactics work best and which statistics matter fail to see beyond the front of the funnel. Without this broader perspective, marketing will become obsolete as the Web, blogosphere, and social networks let businesses connect buyers directly with product development and bypass marketing all together.

 

So what should marketers do to avoid this fate?  I’d like to hear from you on this topic.  Feel free to comment or contact me. I will be posting more thoughts on this topic over the next couple of weeks. (Hint: managing demand, not generating it, is a key discipline B2B marketers must improve.)  But I’d like your thoughts first.  What should B2B marketers do to become more relevant to the business and avoid becoming obsolete?

Tags: , , :: Add to del.icio.us
___________________________

This blog post garnered quite a bit of commentary. You are welcome to chime in here, as always.

 

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , . Leave a Comment »
Newer posts »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.