What is a Marketing Campaign’s “Influence” on Deals?

December 13, 2012 — Laura Ramos
How do you apportion marketing effort to sales results?

How do you apportion marketing effort to sales results?

I remember my first one-on-one meeting with the head of major account sales at Xerox.  For a bit of perspective, this gentleman ran the team responsible for over a billion dollars in document outsourcing services revenue.  I presented a carefully prepared summary of the industry marketing team results from the current year and plans for the next period. Included in this review was my analysis of the number and types of deals influenced by industry marketing activity and the size of the pipeline resulting.

Upon seeing those figures, he turned to me and said:

“I would be careful about showing numbers like those around.  It’s easy for people to question the impact marketing has on sales.”

Like it or not, this attitude prevails within many enterprise sales organizations. It presents both a challenge and opportunity B2B marketers face at large companies like Xerox and small ones as well — how do you demonstrate the impact of marketing activity on the health of the sales pipeline?

Every sales opportunity or closed deal should have at least one marketing campaign, program, or activity associated with it.  If not, your company is missing an opportunity to drive the cost of sales down. Why?  Because business buyers get most of the information about products and services they might want to buy from sources other than the direct sales force.

When the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) published key research showing that buyers have completed 57% of the purchase process BEFORE they call a supplier, they quantified something we know intuitively — B2B purchasers use the Web, peers, colleagues, online recommendations, and so on to determine needs and buying criteria. They call in the vendors when it’s time to compete on price.

How do you impact that part of the purchase process that represents almost 60% of the time your reps aren’t in touch with the buyer? With marketing.

Source: Corporate Executive Board

Source: Corporate Executive Board

Communications, messages, and content that you send to prospects — or that they find when researching issues online — affect the purchase process.  Prospects and clients see this information, and may pay attention to it long enough to shape buying decisions. The difficulty is how to measure this impact and allocate the influence of marketing activity appropriately across pipeline and deals. And use this influence information to understand which campaigns played the greatest role in creating an opportunity or closing a deal.

Most marketing automation gives CMOs and their staff the false impression that they can use technology to figure this out easily.  However, most tools can’t factor in subjective criteria — like what to measure and how to determine the impact of any particular element on buying — that affect the equation.  Frequently marketers give all the influence credit to either the first or last touch before the deal closes, but this doesn’t help to understand which activities help to move opportunities from stage to stage or play a significant role in the overall process.

Luckily, I think the good folks at FullCircleCRM are on the hunt for a solution to this problem.  Take a break and listen as Andrea Wildt, VP of Products and Marketing, and I talk about the need to allocate influence, why it is difficult to do and the pros/cons of different allocation strategies. I think you will conclude that a weighted allocation works best for those with the analytics and tools to support this analysis.  However, most other B2B marketers should start simple and increase their sophistication as sales becomes more comfortable with talking to marketing about the pipeline and their mutual advantage in making it stronger.

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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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The Art of Evolving A Big Company Brand

September 5, 2012 — Laura Ramos

It’s pop quiz time, folks.  Quick, what’s the first thing that comes to mind when I say?:

BMW           (ANSWER:   ”The ultimate driving machine.”)

Nike            (ANSWER:   ”The swoosh.”)

Apple          (ANSWER:  ”Products designed to be incredibly desireable.”)

Xerox   –   Yeah, yeah… “The copier company….”

This little experiment into bad game-show trivia demonstrates how difficult it is to change well-recognized, deeply-ingrained brand perceptions.  For many people, Xerox will always be the copier company. Although half of our annual revenue now comes from helping other companies shed business process burdens and focus resources more on what they do best.

Last month, I had the pleasure of sharing some steps in my current journey, on the quest to move public perception of Xerox from the old to the new, with a great group of marketers at the ANA Business-to-Business Committee Meeting, held in lovely San Jose, California.  The basic objective of the presentation — that you can find here on Slideshare – was to explain how we adapt Ready for Real Business (our company communication platform) to specific industries (in this case healthcare) to demonstrate that Xerox has been — and will continue to be — about making business simpler. 

Can Xerox make the transition from “the copier company” to something more?

For marketers, the lesson is crucial – develop your brand and be true to it.  In the second half of the day, Intel presented its story behind the new “die” logo and brand image.  The presentation began by contrasting firms that struggled with brand image (think Burger King versus McDonalds) against their more successful counterparts.  I thought it was VERY interesting to have these two presentations open and close the day.  (Nice job, ANA folks!)

During my presentation, I explained how Xerox uses affiliate advertising to tell our services story and highlighted our surprising success with online video storytelling.  I then showed how we evolved this top-level positioning into what we call the “Freedom to Care” campaign, which features our engagement with conferences like TEDMED and the World Healthcare Congress, by engaging in earned and purchased social activity, and with MESC 2012 (the renamed Medicaid conference.)

Key lessons learned through these travels so far? I would say:

  • Be persistent, not impatient. Evolving a brand is a years-long process, so don’t whipsaw your strategy around if the immediate pay off doesn’t surface. 
  • Put the focus on your clients.  If your marketing talks about what’s important to their core business and to their customers, you will be more relevant and your message will get through faster.
  • Top-notch brands are disciplined. Marketers who steward them apply consistent effort and investment. And they are not afraid to be a bit repetitive in their communication.
  • Get everyone singing the same song.  In really big firms (those that have really big brands), cross-business line collaboration is key. Lead business lines by example, it’s easier than trying to be the brand police.
  • Digital technologies help to speed up the process. Of course, it’s always best to integrate marketing into a consistent set of messages and offers/promotions that cross traditional and online channels.

Did my message matter?  I think so -  the folks at ANA let me know today that attendees rated my presentation the highest of the day.  Yay for me, but more importantly “yay” for the marketers who can marry the art and science of brand evolution in ways that stay true to company value but adapt to changing times.

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“Moneyball for Marketing”: Why Automation Matters

August 10, 2012 — Laura Ramos

Source: October 4, 2006, “Improving B2B Lead Management” Forrester report.

Remember this picture?   As a Forrester Research analyst, I published a report called “Improving B2B Lead Management” in October 2006 where this image first saw the light of day. 

Since then, it’s become popular with every marketing automation technology provider who uses to help explain a fundamental problem: how potentially good leads leak out of the demand generation process and how marketers must then spend more time, effort, and money recapturing them and putting these opportunities back in the sales pipeline. Which begs the question, “What am I really getting for my marketing dollar if some portion of the demand generation activity gets wasted?”

A CMO study sponsored by IBM last year found that, by 2015, most marketing departments will measure success using return on investment (ROI) as the primary metric. Most CMOs, however, struggle to demonstrate marketing’s ROI in a reliable way. Why? Because we haven’t instilled measurement discipline in marketing — or the technology, process, and automation to back it up. Since John Wannamaker turned his famous phrase about advertising, marketers have taken the easy way out by assuming much of marketing can’t be measured in a meaningful way.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (ISBN 0-393-05765-8) by Michael Lewis (2003)

But is the idea of measuring what matters in marketing that unattainable?  Recently, I joined Bonnie Crater, CEO of Full Circle CRM (a start up firm I advise), in a conversation about why it’s important to plug a leaky demand generation process. Bonnie drew a great analogy to the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis, which details Oakland Athletic general manager, Billy Beane’s focus on an analytical, evidence-based approach to assembling a competitive baseball team, despite Oakland’s disadvantaged revenue situation.

Like putting together a championship sports program, marketing teams must run a broad range of programs from advertising, public relations, and social media campaigns to lead nurturing and customer engagement programs. And they must do all of this with shrinking budgets and resources, against competitors who seemingly always have more (like the New York Yankees who brought in 3X the revenue when compared to the A’s).  Showing how each of these programs contributes to the business requires a way to track every marketing generated response without overstating or distorting the results.

Using a response-based solution to automate this process helps level the playing field by allowing marketers to track, differentiate and report on the ROI of each program — and to connect multiple program touches to the people in the account where opportunities are developing. With response-centric intelligence, marketing executives can better optimize their portfolio and drive demand more efficiently. Automation allows marketers to be more like Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s, where you can use statistics and evidence to figure out which marketing tactics to ”draft” and how best to put the lineup together.

Check out Bonnie and my conversation about what it takes to move to response-based marketing and see why marketing automation can help you get there.

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How to Tell A Story…Watch This And Be Inspired

July 26, 2012 — Laura Ramos

B2B marketers feel challenged to create compelling content.  We blindly pursue writing headlines that makes potential buyers drop everything to click on our links or give us a call. Or we chase the two-sentence value proposition that magically opens the door for our sales guys.

What we miss sometimes is the power of a story to get our message across. 

Humans love stories.  We learn from them.  Stories are part of our DNA: ever since we evolved from grunts to language, we have sat around campfires — or dining room tables — and told stories that share experiences.  Storytelling is a profound way to convey information to others in a form that is easy to remember. But B2B marketers get caught up in explaining why what we offer is better, cheaper, faster, more exciting, or more innovative. We lose sight of how a simple story — told by another customer or an employee with real, first-hand insight– can make our message come alive.

Since March, I’ve shared a few of my experiences managing the Xerox TEDMED sponsorship. I’ve talked about my new adventures in corporate sponsorship, messaging to healthcare, developing advertising, and surprising delegates with something unexpected.  All of which flexed new marketing muscles in me.  Now I want to share a TEDMED moment that will affect you in a profound way.  

Watch this video from TEDMED 2012. It will change your life and strike a deep emotional chord. I know this because it did to all the people who listened that day. In this video, Ed Gavagan tells a gripping tale about the medical expertise that saved him after a random violent encounter. It’s 12 and 1/2 minutes and worth every one.

So watch it and don’t be tempted to bail out after the first minute or two.  Because, as presentations go, this one has a few flaws.  Ed stumbles around in his speech a little. He stands in one place. He seems a bit uncomfortable. He doesn’t make a lot of eye contact with the audience. He doesn’t use slides. He doesn’t have props.  He doesn’t use gestures a lot.

But what he does well is tell an amazing story.

At the risk of ruining the moment, here are 3 things every B2B marketer can learn from watching how Ed tells a story:

1) Be authentic. While the presentation doesn’t look rehearsed, it is. However, Ed tells his story from the heart and with rich details that make you feel what transpired deeply. You connect with his story at a very basic level. Transparency, honesty, and realism count so much more than polish. If you need to spend time on your content, do it on the former not the later.

2) Surprise your audience. Using a flashback as the main part of the story is an unexpected twist that draws you into the action. Sometimes not following a linear progression, doing the unexpected (like the way Ed inserts humorous moments into the talk), and challenging your audience’s preconceived notions create the most memorable moments.

3) Tie it all back together. There is no obvious ”in summary” or “let me review my key points” in this talk. Yet Ed elegantly draws all the storylines back together at the end to thank an audience made up of many medical professionals for being who they are in the world.

Watch the video and let me know what you see in Ed’s storytelling that B2B marketers should follow.  Share your thoughts. 

And if you really want to experience something poignant, listen to the 25 second Q&A at the end of the session (the shortest one of TEDMED 2012) where Jay asks Ed to explain the real reason why the surgeon didn’t cut his long hair…

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Why Doesn’t Marketing Automation Impact the Business?

June 22, 2012 — Laura Ramos

Photo courtesy of Full Circle CRM and iStock.

Earlier this month, Gartner published its Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management.  Naturally, Eloqua and Marketo commanded top spots in the upper right quadrant. But a cluster of really big companies look poised to close in on them from the lower left. So marketing automation – in particular lead management — looks pretty hot. Right?

I’m not so sure.  In this report, I was struck by the second sentence in Gartner’s opening summary, which said:

“Impact on revenue generation is high and satisfaction with vendors is generally strong, but organizational alignment issues continue to reduce potential impact.”

Reduce potential impact.  Ouch.  Not good.

But which organizational alignment issues does Gartner mean?  Inside the vendors studied?  No, I think Gartner is referring to organizational issues between sales and marketing. 

Despite growth in market size, vendor offering sophistication, and customer interest, marketing automation has yet to reach that tipping point where marketing operations (who manages automation tools and directs campaign execution) stands on equal footing to brand, PR, product promotion, collateral development and sponsorships.  Even steadfast marketing automation practitioners still suffer from fundamental concerns about how well their systems pay off – especially when marketing metrics and sales numbers don’t line up. 

I hear many marketing execs ask the following questions, which – to my mind – are symptomatic of deeper problems in the automation world perpetuated by the chronic tension between marketing activity and sales results:

  • Which campaigns actually had the most impact on deals? Which drove the most sales activity and follow up that, in turn, drove more deals?
  • How can I demonstrate Marketing’s contribution and influence on revenue? And show the executive team that money spent in Marketing is more effective at moving the top line than hiring more salespeople?
  • How can we generate more pipeline/opportunity from each campaign?  Where should I invest to do this?
  • Why don’t my reports match what Sales has in its pipeline or forecasts? Why am I always defending Marketing metrics as a result?
  • What really happened to all those leads I generated last year? What percentage went into the pipeline?  Became deals? Are still active? Require more nurturing to re-engage? Why can’t we track sales activity on a per contact basis, instead of opportunity or lead?

These questions, and others like them, speak to the continuing inability to prove and improve Marketing’s contribution to the business.  To use this technology to really get to the facts and levers that move the business — and to stand on equal footing with Sales.

Because of my longstanding interest in demand management - and the people, process and technology issues that arise when marketers undertake automation efforts – I was intrigued when a friend told me about a new business she had started to help answer these questions. As a former CMO in large and small companies, she felt these pains acutely and believes marketing execs need something more to help them understand what’s happening with campaigns, make sure marketing data adds up, drive more revenue, and plan with confidence.

I was also very honored when she asked me to join her company’s advisory board to help her shape its future.  I worked with CEO Bonnie Crater at a company called Stratify (now part of Iron Mountain) in 2000 and 2001, and am pleased to become one of her firm’s advisors.

In future blog posts, I plan to share what I’m learning about marketing automation by working with Bonnie and her company. And shed some light on the best practices that answer the questions that will move automation and operations from the marketing back office into the forefront of the business.

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What Can Marketers Learn from an Innovation Powerhouse?

June 18, 2012 — Laura Ramos

Courtesy of ITSMA and PARC, A Xerox Company

Xerox PARC.

The name is synonymous with “innovation”.  Since it’s founding in 1970, this research center has pumped out a wealth of ground-breaking inventions: laser printing, Ethernet, the graphical user interface (GUI), object-oriented computing, and so much more. Spun-off in 2002, PARC (as it’s known today) is squarely in the business of developing new breakthroughs in technology for commercial and government partners including Xerox.

What can a research think-tank like PARC teach B2B marketers?  Quite a bit.

Last week I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the ITSMA Marketing Leadership Forum in Napa. While CEO Dave Munn and company put together another spectacular agenda (you can review the tweet stream at #ITSMAmlf12), that they asked Lawrence Lee, PARC senior director of strategy, to talk about how to become and stay innovative was an insightful move.

Sure, I happen to enjoy office space at PARC and to hold a warm spot in my heart for this Silicon Valley institution. But let’s walk past my little biases for a minute. Lawrence’s talk was particularly relevant to B2B marketers because good CMO’s spend a lot of time collecting and sharing customer insight. By studying customer behavior and pain points, good marketers uncover non-obvious opportunities to solve problems and create new business – like researchers at PARC do.

To achieve this, Lawrence explains, it’s important to create a learning mindset in marketing where taking calculated risks is part of the culture. PARC manages research projects like a good VC or stock broker manages a portfolio of investments.  Top marketers today must also manage a portfolio of activity aimed at increasing consideration and deal opportunities.  Fundamentally, both activities are pretty similar.

Courtesy of Lawrence Lee, PARC, June 2012

In the digital age, the marketing portfolio has become quite broad. Many marketers struggle to find the right combination of program tactics that move the needle on demand creation and sales enablement.  It’s never one particular approach – like creating a Facebook page, buying the right email list, or running a world-class event or Web seminar – that brings in the prospects.  Instead, marketers make the biggest impact when they take a consistent, investment-oriented approach to engaging customer and use different elements of the marketing mix to target buyers at different stages of the purchase cycle.

Using the figure shown here, Lawrence shows how PARC categorizes projects in four distinct risk/reward profiles. This helps PARC balance its need to make new breakthroughs against the requirement to drive new business.  Marketers should take a similar approach to deciding which marketing programs to pursue and which to abandon.  The matrix of risk/reward criteria for marketing may look slightly different, but each quadrant should include activity dedicated to:

  • Core – engaging with current customers to keep them well-informed, engaged with your company, and advocating for you.
  • Next-Gen – looking for new opportunities to cross-sell or upsell current customers and continue to add value to your relationship.
  • Scouting – building awareness, consideration, and trial with net-new customers for your existing products and services.
  • Options – investigating new opportunities in break-out, brand new markets that complement where you are now.

Determining what percentage of the marketing mix to dedicate to each area is an important consideration.  I recommend you put a healthy dose in Scouting, with Core and Next-Gen following. Never completely overlook Options, however, because new opportunity is often where true growth gets started.

It was fascinating to see SAP CMO Jonathan Becher’s presentation the following morning where he showed how SAP puts the innovation portfolio concept into practice.  Based on technology from an acquired company, Jonathan demonstrated SAP’s marketing dashboard that provides an online way to view, manage, and communicate activity health across marketing programs by region. This dashboard also helps to show the impact the tracked campaigns have on the pipeline.  Whether he intended to or not, Jonathan mixed together the PARC theory with SAP practice to really make the agenda hit home.

There were many other presentations — on balancing the demand generation equation, using simulation games to get to know your buyers better, creating stories, short messages and online demonstrations to embrace the customer perspective, and navigating the uncharted waters of marketing transformation — that were equally interesting and informative. Thanks to all the great speakers and attendees at the ITSMA Marketing Leadership Forum. Your participation made it one of the premier events for me this year.

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What Major Account Sales Wants from Marketing

June 8, 2012 — Laura Ramos

Leads: The Center of the Sales and Marketing Disconnect

You’ve heard this story hundreds of times.

You’ve probably lived through similar situations at some time in your marketing career. I’m talking about the ages-old argument between marketing and sales.  The conversation goes something like this:

  • Marketing wants to know “what did you do with those leads we generated from <fill in the blank event or activity>?”
  • To which Sales replies, “What leads?  Oh, those leads were terrible — send us better ones.”

Despite great advances in demand management and marketing automation – where marketers can use technology to target, engage, educate, and nurture prospects long before sales gets involved – the process of developing leads has yet to change fundamentally the natural tension between those who create market awareness and interest and those who turn that desire into deals.

This week I had the occasion to attend the Marketing Leadership Board Meeting, sponsored by the IDC CMO Advisory service.  The first item on the agenda was a “voice of the sales person” session that we could have continued all day.  Held jointly with the Sales Advisory service, this panel included front line sellers from top tech firms here in Silicon Valley. We’re talking enterprise sales — folks who manage one or two major accounts that create millions of dollars in revenue each year.  This friendly discussion was intended to give marketing counterparts some perspective and feedback on how to best impact sales’ productivity and effectiveness. What resulted was some very pointed commentary that set many of the marketing operations folks in the room back on their heels.

What does marketing do to really annoy those who manage major account relationships? Here’s my paraphrased synopsis of the key points made:

1) Sales builds key relationships and marketing messes them up. Every one of these sales people felt that it was Sales’ job to develop and maintain executive relationships at key accounts.  When marketing sends unsolicited communication — that is either off-topic, redundant, or too frequent — this interferes with their ability to keep the executive-level conversations moving forward. As a result, Sales is reluctant or unwilling to share contacts with marketing so they squirrel their most important information away on smartphones and personal databases.

2) Most marketing-generated leads are still poorly qualified. Even though they agreed that it can be helpful — from an awareness and credibility perspective — to communicate with contacts outside those involved in the current deal, these sales execs believe they hold deep insight into what makes buyers tick and that marketing should just butt out of these conversations. Generating net-new leads, and asking for timely follow up, simply takes too much time away from persuading their primary decision makers.

3) Marketing helps most when it makes content look snappy and throws a great party. Executive events, sponsorships, polishing RFPs and oral presentations, and dinners at nice restaurants provide great opportunities for sales to meet with top-level clients and prospects face to face. Marketing can help put that best foot forward (as I did with the recent Xerox TEDMED sponsorship). Beyond that, Sales doesn’t see much value in the advertising, direct mail, online content, or social interaction that Marketing often leads.

So what’s a dedicated marketer to do?  Throw you arms up in frustration?  Resort to the “oh boys will be boys” attitude of marketing in the face of direct, major account sales?

No, I think if you can’t beat them, it’s time to join them.  But in a very specific way.  Marketing must work to reinforce its purpose as the revenue generation engine of the company.  In building demand ahead of the pipeline.  If major account sales doesn’t yet appreciate that Marketing can help to drive the business in this manner, then it’s time to:

1) Find the parts of the business that can benefit from qualified lead generation. OK, major accounts may not (yet) see the benefit of marketing communication directed at the parts of the account that don’t yet know about your company and its products and services.  So work with the new logo/business development folks.  Channel partners are always hungry for net-new lead opportunities.  Look for small teams offering specific solutions or addressing specific markets (like healthcare or higher education.)  Showing that marketing can have an impact is the primary goal.  And major accounts may not be the first place to start.

2) Put sales in control of the demand generation process — in their accounts.  Many refer to this as account-based marketing, but the guiding principle is the same – develop demand generation and customer communication programs that target a specific audience.  Whether industry or role focused, programs that progress a buyer through a specific set of educational or business problem resolution steps can help sales people attract the interest of new buyers by delivering interesting, relevant content instead of promotional messages.

3) Double down on marketing/business centric metrics. The best way to demonstrate that marketing can truly help sales develop new opportunities or progress current deals is to measure your impact on the pipeline and the business. Marketing dashboards, reports, and portals that reflect the same business issues that Sales cares about it the way to start.

Will marketing and sales ever see eye-to-eye with sales?  I see many smaller to mid-size companies achieve this goal today.  But large, enterprise firms — with a long history of sales-centric operations, direct account coverage models, and professional sales processes — will take a longer time to develop this appreciation.

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Content That Generates Meaningful Thought Leadership

March 6, 2012 — Laura Ramos

Talk to anyone about marketing automation, demand management, or lead nurturing and the conversation inevitably turns to content. 

Copyright ITSMA 2011

Most marketing operations folks starting down the automation path talk more about their people, change management, and technology implementation woes. But after they get a couple of campaigns under their belt, the challenges of developing a steady stream of relevant, interesting content surface.

Here’s proof.  In the chart here, ITSMA shows that among services marketing teams surveyed in a 2011 study on lead management maturity, Leaders say content creation is the biggest concern they face.  So what does it take to create great content?  Great ideas.  Good marketers express great ideas through thought leadership. 

I think thought leadership is a fuzzy term. Many think thought leadership has to be truly unique and leading to be worthy of publication.  I like Forrester Research’s definition, from my former colleague Jeff Ernst, because it focuses on outcomes.  Jeff says that thought leadership is:

“The process of formulating big ideas and insightful points of view on the issues your buyers face capturing those ideas in multiple content vehicles and sharing the ideas with prospects and customers to enlighten them, engage them in a dialogue, and position your company as a trusted resource.”

At Xerox, I think we work hard to present insightful points of view on industry and the role of managed print, document, IT and business process services in those industries. I don’t think we are leading edge, but our experiences demonstrate that thought leadership is best crafted around three key ares:  your experts, your customers and your take on vertical industry problems (expressed as views shared with recognized industry experts.) 

If you are in the Denver Colorado area, and you want to find out more, please join me for the Colorado chapter of the BMA Keynote Luncheon on Wednesday, March 14, 2012.  I will post the slides from this presentation on my blog afterwards and share a few of the key comments, if you can’t make it.  I’m sure the folks at the BMA will share as well!

To preview a key lesson learned ahead of time, I want to point to Jeff’s research on thought leadership and say that his framework for upgrading your content to thought leading is very useful. He suggests 10 criteria for evaluating your content through a thought-leading lens, including:

  • Relevant – does your content deal with big issues your buyers face?
  • Provocative — does it challenge conventional thinking?
  • Forward-looking – does it anticipate what’s over the horizon?
  • Distinct – is it different than what your competitors, partners, or industry cohorts are saying?
  • Inspiring – does it energize people around this idea or way of thinking?
  • Actionable – does it provide advice on what to do now?
  • Results-driven – can using your ideas produce breakthrough outcomes or change?
  • Conversational – does your tone encourage dialogue and feedback?
  • Credible – how do you show your company can help others get there?
  • Independent – do you avoid making reference to your products and services?

(Source: Forrester Research, June 7, 2011, “Thought Leadership: The Next Wave Of Differentiation In B2B Marketing”)

Indirectly, many of the points Jeff makes are the same criteria we used in Xerox Document Outsourcing Services to determine which experts to feature, what type of content to develop, and which to feature in our campaigns. So it is a very useful and practical tool for assessing your content’s thought leadership acumen.

What challenges have you faced in developing great content?  I hope you will join in the conversation with the BMA and me next week.

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Why Must Future MBAs Know More About B2B Buyers?

February 9, 2012 — Laura Ramos

Segmentation, targeting, and positioning.

These are foundational concepts of any good MBA course focused on market strategy.  If you don’t start with “who” you want to reach — and understand whether or not the audience represents a lucrative market for your products or services — then B2B marketers stand to waste a lot of time, effort, and money. 

Ask Phil Kotler, if you don’t believe me!

Yes, this is all true.  But today it’s not enough.

B2B marketers set themselves up for disappointing results if they stop short at positioning and fail to look at what motivates purchase behavior and how buyers buy. This is a tough one for many B2B marketers — those with a tech bent in particular – because we tend to think we sell to companies, not people. And we tend to talk a lot about our companies, products, and features, not about the problems and issues buyers care about.

Profiling, personas, and “behavior”-graphics are tools B2B marketers should use more to shape marketing strategy. Knowing how the business purchase process work — all of its intricate, convoluted glory —  is as important to choosing where to play in the market as are understanding what you do uniquely, the market potential for your offerings, and how you should communicate and deliver your capability to the market.

I explored the how and why of B2B buyer behavior with Professor Ravi Shanmugam’s Marketing 551: Marketing Analysis and Decision Making class at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business this evening. I was the “special guest lecturer” — which means I got to talk with a bunch of bright, aspiring marketing students about business buyer behavior and why great marketers need to know their audiences intimately to succeed.  Some of the more interesting points of the discussion centered on:

1) Whether or not B2B personas are any different than B2C — and how the process of building personas is very similar, but the components and features that make up the B2B persona are different.

2) Which characteristics distinguish the B2B buyer from the B2C — and whether B2B buying motivations and behavior more or less complex than B2C.

3) Why knowing the difference between decision makers, influencers and gatekeepers (like purchasing agents) is important in understanding buyer behavior.

Still surprising to me, the students seemed more interested in Xerox and what I did as the head of industry marketing there than in hearing about theory or research insight. Examples shared on thought-leadership, promotion of educational/industry content (in the form of webinars), and integration of social media into the marketing mix were popular.

As always, I asked Prof. Shanmugam’s class to comment on my presentation and discussion through this blog post.  (Professor Shanmugam offers class participation credit if they comply with this request!) Please read their comments to learn what this future group of MBAs think about as they reflect on our session together.

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