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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Driving Growth in B2B Companies? Try This Playbook

December 7, 2011 — Laura Ramos

December is a popular month to spend planning for the next year or reviewing current progress.  I find it is also a good month to reconnect with your corporate strategy and ask “what can marketing do to help create more predictable, profitable, and sustainable growth for my company?” Recently, I read The B2B Executive Playbook, written by my friend Sean Geehan of the Geehan Group. I think it offers a succinct summary of the factors that most affect the B2B business’s ability to thrive, with a unique perspective on one — why it’s important to focus on your current clients as a way to grow revenue. 

I first met Sean in 2009 at the Customer Reference Forum. We stayed in touch through my transition to Xerox and he invited me to speak at his Executive Summit on Business Transformation in February. He asked me to review an early draft of his book and sent me a final copy. (This is all the open disclosure stuff, folks.) I have heard him speak several times on the topic of this book.

The B2B Executive Playbook consolidates principles that apply specifically to companies that sell highly-considered products or services through a direct salesforce to other businesses. Some of the ideas here resemble others we have seen, but are good reminders. The “B2B relationship continuum” in chapter 2, for example, reminds me of research that my former director, Laurie Orlov, wrote on The Three Archetypes of IT. The “Market-Aligned Three-Circle Venn” in chapter 5 calls to mind Jim Collin’s “hedgehog concept” popularized in Good to Great.

What Sean does really well, however, is put these concepts in the context of a vitally important B2B best practice — that of engaging with your customers to collaborate on your company’s strategy directions, refer you to other decision makers, advocate for you as a trusted supplier, and do more business with you.  A lot more. 

Case in point: HCL, a professional services firm located in Noida, India.  Paraphrasing the book, HCL lacked a systematic way to interact with key decision makers from their customers prior to 2008. HCL’s Americas President Shami Khorana decided to target their “top 80″ clients  in a formal program to exchange ideas and gain their collective feedback. And to demonstrate a sincere interest in keeping their business. Khorana credits this program, in part, with HCL’s rise from $1.4B in 2007 to over $3B in 2010, with an annual growth rate of more than 20% — even through the economic downturn of 2008/09.

Through other case studies like HCL, the B2B Executive Playbook gives practical advice on how to build and retain key decision maker relationships at the right level of your organization, and how to maintain a select group of the key executive customers in your market who will advise you willingly and buy from you consistently.

Recognizing that B2B companies win or lose based on the strength of relationships with a relatively few, very key customers is the essential insight that B2B executives and marketers can overlook. Consider your 2012 marketing plans, for example, and ask how much you intend to spend on customer acquisition versus retention, loyalty, and advocacy. Reflect on how much time your sales representatives spend with real decision makers versus influencers or users (who can’t sign a purchase order.) 

If you are like most B2B, large enterprises, then you will find a quick read through this book will help to reorient your thinking around those customers who matter most and hold the keys to your future success.

Take a look: I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

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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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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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BtoB Online Names Its “Top 25″ Digital Marketers

June 19, 2011 — Laura Ramos

I feel a bit sheepish writing this, but I’ve had so many friends and colleagues (including the Xerox CEO!) contact me about this award that I wanted to take the opportunity to offer my thanks and share the news. 

On June 13, in its inaugural Top Digital Marketers special report, BtoB magazine recognized 25 B2B marketers doing “exceptional” interactive work. If you look through the list at the bottom, you will see my name.  BtoB explains, “The winners were selected by BtoB staff, based on criteria including strong interactive vision and strategy as part of their overall marketing efforts; innovative use of digital technologies; and proven results.”  Wow, that’s quite an honor! And one I would like to share with my team and coworkers because I am never alone in these endeavors.

Here’s how I see it: Digital marketing is an essential part of any marketing program today – it should never stand alone. As buyers take more cues from online content, community, and experts, marketers can no longer depend on “interruption marketing” — tactics that try to get in front of prospective customers regardless of the prospect’s level of interest or qualification. B2B marketers must engage with potential buyers, determine their interests, and share useful, relevant information if they want to excel online. Here’s an example of how our industry marketing team approaches digital marketing to illustrate how we translate this perspective into practice.

Earlier this year, we decided to host a webinar featuring a well-recognized vertical industry expert. For those of you who know Ellen Carney, senior analyst at Forrester Research, she is one of the bright lights among the property, casualty, annuity, and life insurance industry luminaries. (And, yes, I adored working with her while at Forrester, so there’s my bias out in the open.) Our goal was to build Xerox Service’s reputation in the insurance industry, demonstrate a thought-leading point of view, and attract prospects to our story.

To do this, we wanted to produce fresh, interesting content that we could repurpose in different ways to drive traffic and interest. Now, to be honest, Forrester is not the cheapest resource with which to partner on this, so we wanted to make sure that the Webinar lived beyond its broadcast date. Here are a few highlights detailing where we focused our effort:

1) Relevance. We learned Ellen planned to publish a new report (not yet available on Forrester’s site) about the key trends shaping the future of the insurance industry. To associate ourselves subtly with what we expected to be ground-breaking research, we introduced Ellen to Gary Cole, who heads up our customer communications line of business for the insurance industry. Ellen liked Gary’s perspectives and decided to interview him to help provide background for her report.

2) Podcasts/audio files generate content — quickly.  We didn’t want to spend a lot of time writing, reviewing, and rewriting new content. Leading up to the webinar, we asked Ellen to talk to Gary about her findings. With Forrester’s consent (and — full disclosure — hired advice) we recorded and published three separate snippets of a Q&A conversation between the two of them, and featured each podcast in a separate blog post.  You can find them here:

Insurance 2020,  Insuring Against a Hole-In-One and Other Calamities, Going Green, Big Brother Evolves into a Risk Manager, and National Dog Bite Prevention Week: CA Tops National Liability List. We started promoting the Webinar in the fourth and fifth post in this series; we didn’t lead with it.  We tried to use catchy, off-beat topics to grab attention. We also tried to steer away from Xerox-centric language — this had to be about the industry, not us.

3) Highly targeted contact list.  This is probably the most important part. We market and sell managed print services contracts valued at multiple millions of dollars and spanning 5 years or more. There is a rather short list of companies that would be interested in this type of outsourced service. Knowing existing customer profiles, we crafted a list of specific accounts from which we generated a refined list of over 5000 contacts using internal databases and external sources.  To B2C folks, this may not sound like many, but for us, this was significant. While we welcome anyone interested in the future of the insurance industry to attend, we wanted to make sure that key folks at companies — like Allstate, the Hartford, New York Life, Prudential, State Farm, Travelers, USAA, and others — had the opportunity to hear from Xerox about Ellen’s new research.

4)  Industry-specific landing page. Nothing fancy, but we wanted one destination to focus our blog and outreach efforts toward that would also serve to tell interested parties a bit more about what we have to offer.  This way we could focus the Webinar content on what is interesting to clients and minimize the sales pitch from Xerox. It was also vital to record the event (again with Forrester’s paid permission) and make it available as a resource to those who couldn’t attend live.

5) A personal touch. We reached out to friends, fans and followers on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We answered every email inquiry promptly. We sent personal emails to people we knew in the industry and promised to minimize the promotional content. We sent a reminder 30 minutes before the broadcast so that registrants didn’t have to dig through their email to find the links. We crafted separate thank-you notes for attendees and “sorry we missed you” messages for those who couldn’t make it. We made the replay available to everyone and encouraged them to share.

As a result, this Webinar enjoyed an 80% attendance rate against registrations. I don’t know about you, but — while at Forrester — I was thrilled to get 30% or more of the registrants to attend Webinars. 50% attendance is exceptional and 80% is out of this world! Also, this was the second highest attended industry-specific Webinar my team conducted so far. (So, for those cynics out there, 80% does not mean 4 out of only 5 individuals attended. We had many more than that participate.) We also generated three “leads” prior to the event — people interested in knowing more — as well as many requests wanting to see if the event would be recorded so they could access it on-demand.

What’s next? Measurement and tracking. We will enter attendee information into our database and track influence the influence of this Webinar and digital content against new opportunities and pipeline.  We will extract key questions, quotes, and other tidbits from the Webinar and use those content chunks to promote the replay. We will create customizable emails — featuring content elements and key talking points from Ellen’s research — for our sales people to use to follow up directly, and personally, with clients using our Business Builder tool. And we will do more – but I can’t give away all my secrets!

While the BtoB award is so appreciated, I hope in sharing this, you can get a glimpse into some of the activity that creates fundamental, straight-forward digital marketing. And I also hope to remain worthy of the recognition. Thank you again BtoB!

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BMA “Unleash” 2011: Day 1

June 1, 2011 — Laura Ramos

I am thrilled to attend my first Business Marketing Association (BMA) national conference, here in Chicago this week.  I’ve known about BMA for a long time. Josh Bernoff, who gave an outstanding keynote talk about how empowered buyers require you to empower your employees to address their needs and treat them like a channel, told me about this organization two years ago. His exact words were “this is a group you should get to know.  Go call Gary Slack.” 

I procrastinated.  I left Forrester and went to Xerox.  Gary emailed me.  I ignored him.  Bad me. 

Lucky for me, Gary reached out again and invited me to speak on a panel in the afternoon, moderated by Accenture’s Executive Director of Advertising and Brand Management, Teresa Poggenpohl, and joined by Andrew Bosman, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Navigant Consulting, Ben Edwards, VP of Digital Strategy and Development at IBM (who works for IBM VP of Corporate Marketing, John Kennedy), and Bob Pearson, Chief Technology and Media Officer at WCG and formerly with Dell.  We talked about “Unleash Your Content to Generate Meaningful Thought Leadership.”  I shared some examples of the content we produce at Xerox to demonstrate — and engage — though leaders, the best of which are our customers.

While our panel discussion was one of the highlights of the day, Roy Spence, Co-Founder and Chairman of GSD&M, and author, “It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For: Why Every Extraordinary Business Is Driven by Purpose” delivered a particularly inspiring set of observations and humorous quips.  You can find his key points at the hashtag #bmaunleash — or by following @BMANational – to see how purpose-inspired companies don’t build relationships based on selling,  but on helping their customers to be successful. I most liked his quip “Forget about all those other P’s you’ve heard about in marketing — Pricing, Promotion, Product — Purpose is the most important P that you need to have.”

So are you wondering what a race car has to do with a business-to-business marketing conference? Nothing more than an unabashed plug for Avnet, BMA and the No. 16 Ford at the Chicagoland Speedway NASCAR Race June 4, on the weekend.  Daytona 500 Winner Trevor Bayne will take the wheel.  I have to say, Al Maag, new national BMA chairman, and Chief Communications Officer for Avnet, did rock the racing suit he wore in his opening remarks rather well.

DM or follow me at @lauraramos on Twitter to see more about the show.

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Geehan Group: B2B Executive Summit on Business Transformation

February 9, 2011 — Laura Ramos

I had the distinct pleasure of attending an executive conference of about 40 people last week in Phoenix, AZ. I met Sean Geehan over 2 years ago at the Summit on Customer Engagement during a roundtable discussion Bill Lee hosted. We reconnected through ITSMA events and I have been impressed with his insights into how marketing and business executives can connect directly to strategic customer groups and use them to build/uncover market opportunities. He also has an upcoming book called “The B2B Executive Playbook” pending.

So I was doubly honored when he asked me to speak about the multiple transformations that Xerox has been through — and will continue to experience since acquiring ACS in Feburary of 2010. Here is the link to Slideshare with the few slides I shared.  Not surprisingly, the value of the conference came in the interaction and discussion, not as much in the material presented.  I learned more from the CEOs, executive marketers, authors, and other top-notch business executives who attended than I feel I gave them in return.  Quite a new experience for a former analyst!

Of all the useful and strategic information shared, David Thomson inspired me the most. David is the author of the book “Blueprint to a Billion: 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth (John Wiley & Sons) and is the founder and Chairman of The Blueprint Growth Institute, a specialized management-consulting firm focused on helping companies execute business development and growth strategies that achieve exceptional or exponential growth.

He has enormous passion — and energy — around the topics of innovation, business development strategies, and growth leadership. His research and expertise identifies the success patterns of America’s highest growth companies. Two of the most interesting patterns he shared were 1) how much the composition of a firm’s board of directors matters (and that it needs to be fairly diverse, including those with deep community and philanthropic ties) and 2) how important Marquee Customers are to securing key Big Brother Alliances with important partners.

This was a rare opportunity for me to step outside of day-to-day marketing activities and think strategically about what it takes to grow or transform a company. I encourage all B2B marketers to take one day out of the quarter to focus on strategy and outline the top 10 tasks you could take on to dramatically change your business

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ITSMA Marketing Conference: A “Must Do” for B2B Services Marketers

November 9, 2010 — Laura Ramos

Last week I had the good fortune to attend the 17th annual marketing conference sponsored by ITSMA. I have blogged about this organization previously and continue to believe that events hosted by this association are a “must attend” for B2B services marketers. My highlights of the two-day conference included:

“The Future of Work: How Marketers Will Need to Transform to Succeed” — Malcolm Frank, Senior Vice President of Strategy & Marketing, at Cognizant Technology delivered an interesting look at how global trends in the economy, workforce size/age by country, and social behavior will change how work gets done. Malcolm described how marketing to millennials– and hiring them in your organization — will bring about fundamental changes in how marketers engage clients and buyers. Having met Malcolm previously at Forrester, it was great to catch up with him at the conference.

Jeff Summers, Chief Innovation Officer at SAVO, talked about “Marketing as a Catalyst for Field Sales“ and how to maximize the impact of sales conversations.  Jeff contends that sales enablement should focus more on how to help sales have meaningful conversations with prospects, and not simply on creating content. He also presented 5 common sales performance weaknesses and how marketing can help sales overcome them. Check out the Twitter stream at #ITSMA10 to find out more!

Jane Hiscock of Farland Group shared the stage with IBM and talked about their partnership in building online advisory groups and customer communities. Key lesson: ensure you will not “sell” to the community and never attribute community conversations/shared information to a specific member.

Julie Meyers, Vice President, Strategy, Marketing & Client Experience, Xerox Global Services NA (disclosure: my boss!) took the stage on the second day to present “It’s All About the Strategy—How to Elevate Marketing’s Role Through Alignment and Execution.“  Julie is a marketing and strategy wiz, and a primary reason why I’m here at Xerox.  Among best practices shared, Julie showed why marketers must understand sales’ motivations and metrics to truly partner with them and enable client acquisition, pipeline progression, customer retention, loyalty, and growth.

“Taking Thought Leadership to the Next Level” was a fantastic presentation by Bret Barczak, Chief Marketing Officer, Services & Solutions, GE Healthcare Technologies. Bret shared some shocking statistics about the US healthcare system, including tht facts that — while healthcare accounts for over 16% of the US GDP — most hospitals run at 3-4% margins, 50% lose money, and 64% are underutilized. To lead a conversation about how to alter these trends (before government prescribes unwanted changes), GE Healthcare developed “Next Level”, its thought-leadership centerpiece, which you can see at http://nextlevel.gehealthcare.com/ . GE won a Marketing Excellence Award for their work on this site during the conference. 

Over two years ago, TELUS began a transformation to move their marketing from simple lead volume generation to demand prequalification, scoring, and handoff. A good part of the strategy, uses social media to build interest and educate buyers at www.telustalksbusiness.com . TELUS used a version of the Forrester Groundswell framework to set social strategy. To learn more about this framework, see my prior blog post at: http://bit.ly/1ith6y .

This is just a small sample of the truly useful, practical agenda offered during the conference.  If you are a marketing professional in the services space (high tech or otherwise), I recommend you check out this event next year. To learn more read the Twitter stream by searching on #ITSMA10 or visiting the ITSMA site.

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Increasing The Life Expectancy Of CMOs

August 16, 2010 — Laura Ramos

Early in my new adventure here at Xerox, I met Susan Kelly, VP of Enterprise Marketing Services and found a kindred spirit.  Susan is a forward-looking direct marketer and came to Xerox from K/P Corporation, a marketing services provider that develops integrated data-driven marketing solutions, where she was president and CEO. She’s also spent time as an executive at RR Donnelley and RRD Direct.

Today, she runs the services division within Xerox focused on helping marketers make the transition from analogue systems to digital marketing while automating relationship management. Like me, she wants to encourage marketers to embrace marketing automation as a means of gaining the transparency and control we need to better connect with customers, support sales activity, and deliver top-line growth. So naturally, I was thrilled when she invited me to contribute a few thoughts as a foreword to her new whitepaper.   Here’s what I wrote:

During the past four years, I had the privilege of studying and writing about business-to-business (B2B) marketing best practices at Forrester Research. I surveyed and spoke with thousands of B2B marketers about their processes and best practices. Through this work, it became clear to me that marketing’s influence is declining as business buyers go online to research purchase decisions using peer insights and independentexperts. Years of being the department with hard-to-quantify outcomes make it difficult for marketing to specifically and concisely demonstrate its true impact on the business. New campaigns, clever advertising, and delving into social media mask over problems and won’t spur the profound changes required to avoid what may seem like an inevitable slide toward obsolescence.

To remain viable, marketers must invest in technical capability that lets them work smarter and run leaner. Specifically, top marketers I know set up marketing-specific data management systems to improve insight, automate lead development and cultivation,integrate digital and traditional channels, embrace social media, and continuously measure and quantify the results.

However, technology investment without the proper skills, planning, change management and execution rarely succeeds. Most marketers must also rely on key marketing services partners to advise – and outsource – the needed process change. I hope, as you read the following white paper, you will come to share my view that marketing stands on the verge of a major transformation. But that needed change comes through rigorous, data-driven assessments, expertise in new process design, workflow optimization inside and outside the firm, modern marketing automation capabilities, marketing logistical management and customized tracking tools that validate marketing’s forward progress.

In this paper, Susan outlines some of the key challenges she sees CMOs face today and how marketing automation provides a clear way forward. Key among her insights are the “Four Cs” of marketing automation:

  • Collection: Cataloging, cleaning, and centralizing the management of customer data and digital assets is the first step. This work and investment, while difficult, wil pay off later as it provides a solid foundation for business intelligence that can benefit marketing, sales, and the entire enterprise.
  • Collaboration: Getting your assets and data in order makes it easier to collaborate with agencies, marketing automation vendors, database marketing services providers, and other internal marketing groups.
  • Convergence: Is really about the integration of traditional and online channels that allow marketers to target , connect, and dialogue with customers and prospects wherever they may be.
  • Connectivity: Combining creative development and demand management with shared access to data and digital assets, marketes can now integrate marketing on an enterprise-wide basis. This access lets you not only improve customer acquisition and lead management but also develop more effective customer retention and loyalty programs.

To read the full whitepaper, and learn more about Susan and her perspectives on the landscape, future, and opportunities for marketers, visit her Thought Leadership site.  And I would enjoy hearing your thoughts on the paper — feel free to post a comment to let us know what you think.

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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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