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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Maturing Your Lead Generation and Marketing Automation

October 11, 2011 — Laura Ramos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Does A “Sales Kickoff” Deliver Value?

January 21, 2011 — Laura Ramos

Next month, Forrester Research will host its inaugural Sales Enablement forum in San Francisco. Sales enablement was a key topic at the ITSMA member’s conference last November as well. With so much interest focused on new technologies aimed at making sales more effective and efficient, I wondered what value the traditional start-of-the-year sales meeting still holds for B2B firms.

It also happens that I’m just a few days past experiencing my first kickoff meeting with Xerox Services, held last week in Orlando. Here’s proof: a candid shot of me running a workshop on “Switching On: How To Boost Growth in Xerox Services” and voting on team brainstorm priorities. Authors Chip and Dan Heath have a new book, “Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard”, that provided the theme for our meeting this year.

I have to admit, returning to the Disney Yacht and Beach Club did give me a bit of “déjà vu” since this venue has been the site for many prior Forrester and other popular high tech conferences. Without giving secrets away, let me just say that it was a very interesting experience to plan, execute, and participate in my first sales meeting in over 15 years. The recent economy, and the advent of new virtual conferencing technology, seems to be taking internal sales meetings down the same road traveled by the Edsel. Or has it?

In talking to colleagues at other large companies like Wells Fargo, Saleforce.com, Adobe, and many high tech firms in the valley, I found that sales kickoffs, in various formats, remain common. The key value my friends cite for hosting in person events include:

1) Connect with team members – nothing replaces spending time face-to-face. Many high tech firms tried virtual events during the past couple of years and, while they liked the novelty, most returned to physical events this year.

2) Set the tone for the coming year – rally the troops around a common theme and set of goals.

3) Inspire new thinking and behavior (usually provided by an outside expert or speaker).

4) Reward and recognize the sales community as a whole outside of President Club/Top Performers programs.

5) Streamline mergers/acquisitions by giving people an opportunity to interact in person.

6) Create camaraderie through structured and unstructured social activities – creating fun, silly, and exciting experiences is a common part of the program.

The value here seems a bit vague and intangible, huh? I mean, really, how does any of this lead to revenue growth, greater profitability, and customer loyalty? And there lies the challenge of justifying the expense and trouble of the annual sales meeting and why many firms are rethinking the place kickoff has in sales operations.

At the intersection of “Sales 2.0″ technologies and sales meetings, I think executives (and marketing professionals who support the activity, investment and process around sales enablement) need to remember that sales is ultimately about people and those people create and manage important relationships with your customers. Beyond their comp plans, Sales needs to feel valued, and a source of competitive advantage. Technology investment alone won’t provide that, but investing in ways to increase Sales’ commitment to your business plan, vision, and roadmap will.

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Change Management: The Key to Successful Marketing Process

August 27, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Digital marketing is a double-edged sword for B2B marketers making it a bigger part of their marketing mix. On the one side, digital is more targetable, addressable, and measurable than traditional channels like advertising, promotions, and tradeshows. Online, marketing now has more data to help them “know” more about prospects and buyers. On the other hand, the options available in the marketing mix have exploded and executives want to hold marketing more accountable for program results and campaign spend. Given these turbulent times, marketing challenges increase exponentially and marketing automation moves from a “nice to have” to “essential” investment. But technology implemented without a clear understanding of process typically gets many marketers into hot water. Face it, many of us have tremendous experience running campaigns and programs, but little experience with the change management needed to move process from ad hoc to repeatable and disciplined.

The August quarterly MOCCA meeting looked a little closer at the marketing operations community experience implementing process. Brenda Kring, Director of Demand Generation for CyberSource (who hosted the meeting) and Membership and Content Chair for the MOCCA steering committee, presented the results from the July association survey on marketing process. The audience then listened to a panel share their stories on how change management impacts processes, automation, applications and people and talk about the specific challenges each experienced rolling out automation. The conversation and questions reinforced for me how minor a role technology selection plays in operationalizing marketing and how automating poor process only results in long term problems.

Here are a few of the findings from the survey that stood out:

1) Process is important, but not approached in a systematic way. Of the 36 members who responded, 2/3 said they only apply process rigorously in a few key areas. Just 6% said they had a “very process-oriented culture” where they worked. Of those who implemented process, 2/3 said they did not use a formal methodology or defined their own as they went along.

2) Top management must push change. 44% of respondents said the key factor that led to a successful implementation top executives drive change from the top. 30% said getting stakeholder buy-in was essential. This underlines how people is the essential ingredient in change management, and marketing is no exception to this rule.

3) Marketing operations wants more accountability in process change. Almost 80% of respondents said their experience with process change was neutral or unsuccessful. Integrating accountability – making sure folks adhere to the new process or changed state – was the change 29% of respondents said they would make in retrospect. (This would also relieve executive management from spending times getting the troops lined up and marching in the right direction.)

(A few statistics about this group of respondents:  72% hail from the tech industry, 61% are in firms over 1000 employees, and 53% work at companies that earned $1 billion or more in revenue — so a very interesting sampling, especially to my research.)

If you’d like to see more information about the survey, check out the MOCCA and look up the Q3 meeting. I’d be interested to hear what you think are the top issues that keep marketers from implementing process successfully. What do you think achieves – or holds back – success in marketing process automation and change management?

(Disclosure: I back-dated this post to correspond closer to the timing of the meeting.  Sorry folks, just so much to do!)

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