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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ITSMA: 5 Ways Services Marketers Can Enable Sales

September 21, 2010 — Laura Ramos

Selling high-involvement products through a direct sales force is hard.  Selling high-involvement services through a direct sales force is even harder. The job requires more focus on relationship creation, management, and maintenance in services than other industries — activities that good salespeople accomplish almost naturally and good marketers struggle to leverage across different audiences.  Those of us in high technology/IT services marketing are lucky, however, because we have ITSMA to help.

I love that there is an association exclusively for IT Services Marketing professionals – one that attracts true peers from other large, high technology companies who exchange experiences and learn from each other readily. ITSMA does a great job of providing thoughtful research and best practices focused specifically on those who must work with sales and delivery across a wide range of target markets, industries, geographies, and offerings.  The folks at ITMSA help to start — and keep — those conversations going.

For example, today I attended ITSMA’s Briefing on The Next Generation of Sales Enablement here in Santa Clara, CA. This is an important topic among services marketers because the culture in many professional services organizations revolves around sales and delivery. It can be common in this sector, when compared to others, to see executive sales management relegate marketing to the “Make me some pretty slides” department. This is a fate good sales enablement can help to avoid.

How Do Services Sales Spend Their Time?

ITSMA Study: How Do Services Sales Spend Their Time?

While I can’t share the entire presentation with you, I found one slide particularly informative. In an August survey of the membership, ITSMA found that almost 1/4 of salespeople’s time, on average, is spent on indirect selling activities like lead generation, lead tracking, account planning, account strategy, creating presentations, and customer research, among other things.

Wow, doesn’t that sound like many of the activities marketing should do — and could do more consistently and less expensively — to target prospects, educate them ahead of the sales process, and increase sales productivity? I think industry marketers must work harder to understand the typically long, extensive sales processes — that include assessments, proposal responses, oral presentations of the proposed contract terms, and negotiations — and determine “how can marketing help to find this business earlier, nurture it, and help move it through the pipeline?”  This requires more than a direct marketing approach because services firms must demonstrate a commitment to the client’s business that goes beyond messaging and presentations.

Using ITSMA’s framework, successful sales enablement in the services world requires close attention to 5 critical areas:

1) Marketing and sales alignment: do you share the same goals and objectives for 2011 as well as this quarter? Do you agree on what it is you have to sell, who you want to sell it to, and what’s needed to make that happen?

2) Sales processes: fundamentally how do you sell and what makes your best salespeople outdistance their peers? Even if marketing does not share this responsibility, they should know how the sales and negotiation process works to know how they can help accelerate deals in the pipeline.

3) Lead generation: to my mind this is most important for sales enablement.  If marketing can’t demonstrate a direct link between marketing activity and sales results, it’s time to get into another line of work.

4) Sales tools: knowing “how” salespeople sell helps determine which tools they need at each stage in the process. Where you have the most fall out from one step to the next is where marketing should focus the sales tool effort. Don’t fall in the trap of asking sales “what do you need?” Rather, find look at how they spend their time and ask, “how can we help you do that faster, better, more efficiently?”

5) Account/territory planning:  this one is huge in services firms because account assignment requires long term commitment, both at the account level and at the broader segment level.  Service marketers in particular want to chase “industry marketing” and proffer industry solutions.  That’s fine, but targeting fewer industries more deeply works better in the long run that spreading those precious, few field resources across a jumble of different segments.

To learn more, I invite you to check out the ITSMA website or to look into their annual conference in early November. I look forward to seeing you at an upcoming ITSMA event!

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B2B Marketer Tips For Empowering Sales Success

May 20, 2009 — Laura Ramos

I love eBooks. I download, print, and read them during take off and landing when you can’t use electronic devices. Then I recycle the paper. Recently I read “The New Rules of Sales Enablement” by Jeff Ernst at Kadient. I know Jeff going back to his days at Fatwire — he’s a smart guy with loads of practical insight into how sales and marketing can work together better.

In his book, he compellingly argues that marketers should abandon old ways of thinking about the content they produce. Instead, they should focus on developing content that helps salespeople have conversations that advance customers through the buying process. This is consistent with Forrester’s research perspective on how marketing can engineer valuable sales conversations.  Before highlighting the four steps Jeff outlines in his ebook  for creating a successful sales playbook process, I want to point out 3 fundamental axioms marketers and sales should keep in mind:

1) Marketing’s job is to create content. Content is the foundation for brand building, thought leadership, education, offers, messaging, positioning, comparison, competition, and so on. All the things marketing does well starts with great content.

2) Sales’s job is to sell, close deals. Yes, they need great content to do that, but left to their own devices, content creation is not a strong suit among the majority of sales professionals.

3) Marketing scales sales. In tight economies firms forget this maxim when they forgo branding, advertising, and PR spend in favor of building pipeline in the short term. Firms that treat marketing more strategically — but spend with and eye to ROI — usually come out ahead when markets turn around.

In his ebook, Jeff contends “the most effective selling content, messages, and strategies are discovered from experience with buyers.” Couldn’t agree more — customer centricity separates the best marketers from the pack.  Knowing what works in winning deals helps sales figure out what to do in similar situations, when to do it, and how to do it much faster and more consistently. Jeff favors capturing this information in sales-specific playbooks and making playbooks the main way marketing and sales share information. His four steps, paraphrased here, include:

Step 1: Assess — Identify recurring selling patterns where your firm wants to drive repeatable business. If you are closing a lot of deals in a specific industry, that’s a candidate for a playbook. Profile the winning sales engagements in these situations to learn about the specific information buyers need at different stages in problem-solving, which tools/materials reps used to best convey this information, and how reps overcome common objections — or bring in experts to help them do so.

Step 2: Build — Marketing should gather, organize, and make available the content, tools, and resources identified in step 1 in playbooks. I’ve called this a “sales portal” in prior research; a lot of this content will come from sales and existing customers. The main idea however is not to build a huge library of stuff, but  to focus tightly on what helps real reps be successful.  Then surround it with tips and coaching that helps other reps learn how to mimic successful peers.

Step 3: Launch — Marketing rolls out the playbooks to the sales team starting with a pilot group positively disposed to the playbook idea. Get opinion leaders in sales to support the pilot and make a concerted effort to collect and act on their feedback.

Step 4: Evolve — This is the hard part. Playbooks take on a life of their own and marketers must monitor usage and measure impact to know when to change a playbook, create a new one, or retire one that no longer produces results.

Here’s the key: Marketing must lead the process of defining which playbooks to build. Base this on a core understanding of the real market opportunity and on effective customer segmentation and targeting. That targeting must flow through to the go-to-market plans and messaging of the firm (or the various product lines in a large firm.) It must reflect a customer-first perspective, not a fixation with features, feeds, and speeds.  And lastly, it must be precise and specific. Which may seem counter-intuitive to growing market share broadly, but many technology firms create messaging that is all-encompassing, fails to attract a unique audience, or to stake a defensible claim.

Check out Jeff’s ebook or blog for more information — there’s a great assessment checklist on page 32 every marketer should take and use to start the discussion about “how well do we enable sales?” And feel free to post a comment with your insights, comments, and counter-arguments as well.

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Sales 2.0: Accelerating Deals In A Slow Economy

March 4, 2009 — Laura Ramos

This is my first time attending the Sales 2.0 Conference.  As an advocate for marketing professionals, I feel like a bit of a spy since this conference all about how to enhance the art and science of sales by combining sales process with Web 2.0 productivity tools. Some of this makes me nervous because it is not so much about enabling sales (which is good) as it is about making sales self-sufficient in demand generation.

Gerhard Gschwandter is the founder and CEO of Personal Selling Power and he wasn’t kind to vendors and analysts in his opening remarks here.  And with good reason: in this economy doing what sales and marketing have relied on in the past isn’t working. Buying the best technology doesn’t insure more closed deals, greater customer retention, or higher profitability. Analyst advice is”two steps behind” where problem seekers and solution providers are trying to go because Web 2.0 changes things so quickly.

Rather than drown in an ocean of information, sales needs to learn to swim efficiently  in this new socially connected, information saturated milleu.  This means learning how to get closer to customers, understand our real place in the market, and orchestrate technology and process to make customer interactions more engaging.  Gerhard offers 6 steps to help sales and marketing deal with this situation, which I interpret here and include my thoughts in italics:

1) Ditch the pitch. It’s not about you, but about the customer. Work on having a conversation and building a relationship, not just putting the right message out there. (I agree: Web 2.0 and social media make it easier for prospects to learn about you long before the first sales call.  Sales presentations need to be about “how we help you” not “who we are.” And it’s marketing’s job to give sales the tools to do this well.)

2) Learn to be consultative or become extinct. Getting closer to customers is about listening to their problems and helping to find solutions, not just putting out new features and functionality. (There’s a lot of emphasis on consultative, but only 10% of vendors are seen as strategic.  This is hard to do, but feels like the new holy grail in sales.  Big step for those who are order-takers.)

3) Co-creation is key. Spec and price sheets are old school. Customers don’t want to be sold to, they want help developing new business capability. (Precisely – so customer success stories, references, and how-to guides are essential in proving that we know how to deliver new business capacity, not just technology. The tech industry is evolving from tech to service delivery, for sure.)

4) Redefine selling. Based on your market, products, services and target customers, design the sales process that supports your business goals — don’t just rely on what you’ve done in the past or what sales process consultants tell you to do. (Hmm, I’m still seeing a lack of well defined sales process.  Unless the process is completely broken, getting to consistency and repeatability is probably more important than wholesale redesign at this point.)

5) Use more science.  Manufacturing quality management tolerates fewer than one mistake in 1000, 10k, or 100K. Sales and marketing tolerate one mistake in 5 or 10.  We need to change that. (Right, and marketing needs to lead the way.  Both sales and marketing need to be measured on the same lead-to-opportunity conversion metrics.  Sales can’t take all the credit and neither should marketing. Dashboards, analytics, and tracking keep everyone honest and on the same page.)

6) Customers will create companies.  Web 2.0, social media, and the Internet put buyers in the drivers seat.  (Yes, marketing’s charter is now to listen to customers express their needs, model these demands into known patterns of problems, match their products/services to these models, and map out the communication needed to move buyers from one stage to the next in the buying process — eventually turning them over to sales to take the relationship from online to physical.)

Scott Santucci followed Gerhard and introduced Forrester’s Model-Map-Match methodology that can help shift to a customer-first focus. The upshot of Scott’s presentation? Content is king in the selling process. We worry about process, people, and technology but tend to overlook content, which fuels the sales conversation. Marketing needs to help sales put the right information (not message or positioning) in front of customers at the right time — as defined by their needs, not ours — to create two-way, co-designed solutions that enable faster adoption and shorter time to value.  Check out the MMM process for yourself.

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