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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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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ITSMA: 5 Ways Services Marketers Can Enable Sales

September 21, 2010 — Laura Ramos

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

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

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

How Do Services Sales Spend Their Time?

ITSMA Study: How Do Services Sales Spend Their Time?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Concluding Our Conversation: Loopfuse CEO Chat, Part III

April 18, 2010 — Laura Ramos

To finish up on the conversation I started with Sean Dwyer in February, I’d like to share a few final thoughts about the ways I’ve seen top marketers implement lead management automation successfully.  In this final installment of our Q&A series, Sean and I explore who are the core stakeholders to involve in lead management automation, what are the key success factors, and the ultimate prize — how lead management automation helps deliver healthier sales pipelines. 

Part III: Implementation and Key Success Factors

Q7: Who should be involved in the implementation of the Lead Management Automation platform?

Lead management automation should include marketing and sales as equal partners in the requirements gathering, selection, and implementation process. IT will be involved, too, but they will play a more minor if the company chooses an on-demand solution. IT must make sure that integration with existing customer support, database, and sales automation systems goes according to plan and that the new system doesn’t introduce any security or unforeseen technical problems into the current environment. Marketing and sales folks shouldn’t have to take on the burden of understanding the existing technical infrastructure to make marketing automation work.

I emphasize that marketing and sales must share joint responsibility – an idea that many marketing folks may bristle over. But, let’s face it, unlike other marketing automation decisions; lead management automation delivers direct tangible benefits to quota-carrying salespeople like greater visibility into the type of leads coming down the pipeline. It can also expose which specific characteristics, profiles, search history, marketing interactions, online behavior, and such differentiate higher scoring leads from those with lower scores.

Many lead management vendors include what I call “sales enablement” features in their offerings today – tools that help track a prospect’s digital footprints and summarize their presales buying behavior. For most reps, these features create a window into the customer’s psyche formerly hidden from view. Sales management and key account managers need to understand how lead management automation benefits the sales rank-and-file, so involving them in early discussions about “What is a well-qualified lead? How can automation help our firm generate more qualified demand? And what do we need this system to do to get there?” will improve sales’ willingness to work with the new technology, make it part of the sales process, and give marketing the feedback needed to improve customer acquisition and insight processes.

I think it is important to include all customer-facing functions to the implementation and training process, even if only for an introductory look at what the platform can do. Customer service, technical support, professional services, and even human resources can benefit from the purchase insights lead management automation delivers.

Q8: What are the most important factors for successfully implementing a Lead Management Automation platform?

I know the following may sound simplistic, but – through dozens of interviews and conversations with marketers who have used lead management successfully for more than a year – I’ve found that the keys to success include:

1) Gear up for process change; don’t rely simply on technology. Looking to pump up lackluster sales pipelines, many marketers turn to technology and overlook the systematic process, people, and internal behavioral change successful automation requires. Most veteran marketers said focusing on process, and not technology, was the factor that most affected their success with lead management.

2) Stock up on the content. Surprisingly, many marketers under-estimate the amount of content they need to have on-hand or produce to keep the lead management engine running. Because marketers think classically in terms of white papers, brochures, and datasheet – all which require high production investment – they quickly feel overwhelmed by the prospect of feeding a constant flow of content into a lead nurturing program. The trick is to focus on quantity –take long white papers and break them into several smaller parts, cut up data sheets into tables and bulleted lists, enlist subject matter experts in developing blog posts, videos or podcasts, or syndicate partner content – without sacrificing relevance.

3) Market the marketing automation. Don’t expect everyone in marketing and sales to embrace the lead management automation platform with gusto. We all have tendencies to resist change to a greater or lesser degree. Embrace the enthusiasts, elevate their early successes to management, and encourage others to follow in their footsteps. Treat the rollout of the lead management system like a product launch; announce it, train on it, and certify sales and marketing on their proficiency with the platform. Ask “Have they got the message? Do they repeat it reliably? Do they practice what they preach?” When you can say “yes” to these questions, then you know you’re on your way to success.

Q9: How should Sales and Marketing leverage the Lead Management Automation platform to help drive the pipeline?

Lead management automation is all about driving the pipeline. It’s like a DVR or a mobile phone, once you own one you can’t understand how you lived without it. But getting things to run smoothly at first can be challenging. Stick with it because the payoffs are significant and tangible. Consistently, marketers who use this technology over an extended period of time report measurable increases in lead quality, opportunity-to-pipeline conversion, and deal velocity—all factors that directly impact sales pipeline health and revenues. It’s not uncommon to hear stories about how marketers improved inbound demo requests, early stage pipeline dollar-values, and appointment-to-opportunity conversion by factors of 2 or more.

Achieving this level of success requires focusing on the four key areas: scoring/profiling, routing leads to sales, nurturing leads not yet ready to buy, and monitoring lead progress (i.e. closing the loop with sales). If you make sure the lead management platform delivers on all four of those process stages, then your ability to drive pipeline heath and execute more effective campaigns will improve.

If you would like to learn more about this topic, please check out a whitepaper that Silverpop offers titled“How Managing Leads Pays Off In A Stronger, More Qualified Pipeline. ” In this report commissioned by Silverpop, Forrester (meaning yours truly, when I worked there prior to Xerox) surveyed 15 senior-level marketers to gauge their experiences in using lead management automation.  Yes, Silverpop is somewhat of a competitor to Loopfuse. However, if you look beyond this to see that we are all trying to raise awareness and educate marketers about the value of this technology, I think you will find some of the insights shared in this report both insightful and useful.

I wanted to thank Sean for offering me this opportunity to share our conversation with all of you.  Let me know what other questions you might like to see asked and answered in the future.

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Sales Enablement Tools: All The Rage In 2009

December 11, 2009 — Laura Ramos

While attending Dreamforce last month, I took a walk around the show floor to see which firms were exhibiting. It wasn’t surprising to see a raft of new companies talking about sales-support additions to the AppExchange family with lead generation and pipeline health hot issues in this economy. I caught up with eTrigue, whom had briefed me October as they ramped up for the announcement of eTrigue SalesPro, still another sales enablement tool.  I have covered eTrigue in the Lead Management Automation market for a couple of years now.  In my market overview, I highlighted how they have a robust, continuous lead scoring and segmentation/list building capability, presented in an easy-to-use interface with a relatively low price. 

eTrigue SalesPro Lead Alert Provides Clean UI and Quick Overview

SalesPro takes this ability and translates it into a sales enablement tool that, unlike some of the competition, presents a fairly detailed view of potential leads that can result when prospects take multiple actions that increase their lead score and qualify them for a sales touch.

Rather than simply capturing Web site visitors, performing a reverse-IP look up, and passing this information onto sales, eTrigue SalesPro puts marketing at the head of this process. Sales and marketing agree on lead qualification and scoring criteria which SalesPro reflects in which alert messages sales reps receive through email. 

The key here: reps don’t get an email everytime a lead visits your Web site, but only when those leads meet a minimum threshold that you determine.  SalesPro presents the scores –  and the reasons behind the scores — along with account and buyer activity in an easy-to-read but information-rich format (see the Figure to check it out). 

Sales reps can quickly scan the information and, if they choose to pursue the lead, click into eTrigue to continue the conversation using email templates that nurture and track the activity. It’s a compact package that, for firms not yet ready to take the full lead management automation plunge, can create more alignment between marketing and sales efforts. 

The sales alerts provide a concise summary of lead potential that can help sales determine which opportunities to pursue while keeping marketing in the loop — an activity, in my mind, that requires some form of automation to achieve successfully, but for which automation alone is never  a complete solution. For firms without sophisticated lead management processes, eTrigue SalesPro can help you get started maturing those processes with an investment that can slide in under the CFO’s radar.

Take a look for yourself and let me know if you’ve used eTrigue, if you find it a low-effort, easy-entry to lead management automation, and how you would compare it to other sales enablement tools.  Feel free to let me know what you think, what I missed, and whether you see things similarly.

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PeopleMap: A Real Tool for Sales Enablement?

October 5, 2009 — Laura Ramos

It’s no secret: I am not a fan of the emerging class of “Sales 2.0″ tools that let reps follow online visitors or peer into their browsing habits. In a prior post, I admitted that I did not see how chasing anonymous Web traffic helps reps manage assigned accounts or follow up on well-qualified leads delivered by marketing. I believe marketing should strive to put sales out of the business of cold calling.  So I am quick to dismiss these tools in my research and advice.

Until last week when I discovered a new software application that helps reps do what they need to do: build and mine relationships with prospects. Kevin D’Souza, long-time colleague and friend from my Stratify days (where I worked prior to joining the analyst ranks), introduced me to 7 Degrees, a very small tech firm where he’s handling sales and business development today. 7 Degrees is the team behind PeopleMaps — a tools that lets you leverage personal and professional networks to let you see how you connect with other people, especially those inside of companies (see the screenshot where I used PeopleMaps to see how I am connected to Gord Hotchkiss, co-founder of Enquiro, a search engine marketing agency, and author of a new book about the BuyerSphere — a topic for a future blog post. Not surprisingly, most roads to Gord lead through SEMPO,  the search engine marketing professional organization that he chairs).

Elana is ex-analyst/mentor and Dave is colleague from Forrester

Elana is ex-analyst/mentor and Dave is colleague from Forrester

The tool, which takes 10 minutes at most to install, runs in a browser, uses an intuitive Java/Javascript-based UI, imports connections from applications like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Outlook (contacts), and maps out the social graph between people you know and people with professional, public profiles that you may want to know. It combines data from the networking tools you use daily with commercially available data licensed from companies like D&B/Hoovers, Thomson Reuters, and ZoomInfo. (Which specific data sources is information that 7 Degrees doesn’t explicitly share on its Web site yet, but should. I will chalk this slip up to an early-stage-firm oversight that I hope they correct soon.) So nothing I am showing in the picture above is private or gained through non-publicly available means.

Why does this tool appeal to me as a B2B marketer?  Because it helps sales folks make first contact AFTER the lead management process delivers a qualified prospect to their SFA inbox. It helps salespeople prioritize which hot leads to pursue. It helps mine relationships that can make warm introductions to prospective buyers. Combining PeopleMaps with lead management information culled from an Eloqua, Marketo, Silverpop, or any of the other vendor’s I’ve mentioned in my market overview gets sales closer to that fabled “360 degree view” of the client. 

Marketing lead management gives sales the qualification information — demographics, contact history, interaction insights, and buyer behavior cues — and PeopleMaps then shows sales how they connect to the prospect through a social graph of personal contacts and relationships. Sales isn’t making cold calls; their building off of existing relationships to form new ones.  And isn’t that what sales does best?

Check out PeopleMaps for yourself and let me know what you think.  I would also be interested in hearing from you about similar tools you have seen or experienced. For example, I think technologies from companies like LinkedIn and ZoomInfo show who is who and that connections exist, while PeopleMaps shows how these connections occur.

Bottomline: If marketing wants to enable sales and leverage technology to do so, then providing tools that help sales foster relationships, and continue the dialog marketing starts, will be key to achieving a real closed-loop process between marketing teams (who develop the market) and sales (who sell to it.)

Note: In light of recent FCC rulings, I am disclosing that Kevin did pay for lunch last week.  Not that it really should matter , but that’s my disclosure of a “material connection” to Kevin and 7 Degrees.

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New Sales Tools Increase Alignment Between Sales and Marketing

June 15, 2009 — Laura Ramos

The lead management automation vendors have been busy. In March, Genius announced Genius Enterprise and broadened their scope from sales enablement to lead management. Late in May, Eloqua introduced Prospect Profiler, a graphical, one-stop interface that tracks a prospect’s digital footprints and summarizes buyer activity. Next, Silverpop’s EngageB2B team unveiled a new graphical campaign design and management tool to the market and, on June 9, Marketo launched Sales Insight, a 100% Force.com application that lets sales reps see and interact with the “hottest” leads in their queue, a product they made generally available at the end of May. It’s interesting, and not coincidental, that 3 of the 4 announcements target sales reps as the primary user and demonstrate growing demand for technology helps marketers align with sales activity.

At first, I thought tools that let sales see information about prospect activity – like tracking when potential buyers visit a Web site and what they look at – amounted to no more than fancy cold-calling tools. Just because someone opens an email or visits a Web page doesn’t mean they want to get phone call from a sales person minutes later. It feels a bit intrusive and creepy. But the Eloqua and Marketo announcements are changing my mind by showing that access to prospect information, done right, helps sales understand how buyers buy and makes the sales process more efficient.

Sales Insight Helps Sales Zero In on Hot Leads

Sales Insight Helps Sales Zero In on Hot Leads

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What I like most about the Eloqua and Marketo offerings is both put marketing’s lead generation hard work in front of sales in a succinct and digestible manner. Both make it easier for sales to decide how to pursue leads and how to pick up the conversation marketing starts. Of course, the devil is in the details when it comes to determining which tool will best fit your firm’s specific demand management needs. Here are the pros and cons of these sales enablement tools that jump out at me:

1) Integrating with the SFA system. Like it or not, reps prefer the phone or in-person meetings. When online, they spend time almost exclusively in email and the SFA system using either through an iPhone or Blackberry interface. Getting them to open another tool, can be like pulling teeth without an anesthetic. Kudos goes to Marketo for seamlessly integrating with Salesforce. While sales can open Prospect Profiler inside of Salesforce, the action looks like opening another app and Eloqua will have to work to convince reps to take that extra step. Of course, the nod goes to Eloqua if you are not a Salesforce user because their tool can run standalone like the Genius Tracker. But the task of getting reps to open it still remains.

2) Delivering information versus data. Reps want to know “Who should I call first? Who should I call now?” While the Eloqua tool does a great job of summarizing a broader range of customer activity by category – how many emails have prospects opened, what have they searched on, etc. – it doesn’t highlight which leads are “hot” or “qualified” with the simplicity that the Marketo tool does. However, getting reps to agree on marketing’s definition of hot and qualified is the challenge Marketo faces – because if sales disagrees with the label Sales Insight applies, they won’t trust the tool’s suggestions in the future. To counter this, Marketo’s tool lets reps, with one click, send feedback to marketing and close the scoring loop. How quickly marketing responds to this feedback and zeros in on regional or territorial differences will determine how effective the stars and flames become.

3) Investigating anonymous visitors: Integrating with reverse IP lookup tools is a hot topic today. From a pure marketing perspective, this feature is not one I would put at the top of my list. Letting reps check out anonymous Web traffic seems like shortcutting the lead development process. Sales management says “have an account plan and execute against it.” Marketing says, “here are well-qualified leads you should pursue, and here’s why.” I just don’t see how chasing anonymous Web traffic helps reps take care of these two mandates.

Yes, I know reps are expected to develop their territories and that looking for clues about buyer intent in Web traffic is less expensive, and (today) more productive, than cold calling or buying lists. But I also believe that marketing is the best way to develop new business and that sales should focus more on mining existing accounts, where relatively more expensive sales prospecting activity can be put to use building relationships. I find Marketo’s featured integration with Jigsaw, Demandbase, and LinkedIn a nice-to-have. To keep it from becoming an annoyance, I recommend using it in a telesales or lead development function as one tool in a kit used to qualify and build dialogue before turning prospects over to direct sales. (Happy to hear if you see it differently.)

4) Notifying versus overloading. I like Marketo’s Interesting Moments feature because it keeps sales and marketing focused on “moments of truth” – events that influence prospects’ propensity to buy. The language here is simple and understandable. And marketing can adjust it to make the descriptions even more relevant. However both firms need to avoid crossing the line between providing useful information and causing information overload. Optionally sending email notifications and Web visit alerts to reps is the right approach. The next step should be to automatically create a report that summarizes how many reps use these features and how many have turned them off and send it to marketing.

5) Understanding the Buyer’s Journey better. As any rep can tell marketing, not two deals close the same. Learning how buyers buy is a huge challenge in B2B made more complex by the myriad of digital channels that buyers now use. That’s why I like Eloqua’s profile feature that summarizes inbound and outbound activity over time. This helps marketing see to which communication a customer best responds and sales see if the prospects digital body language is showing an increase in interest over time or just the random activity of someone not fully engaged.

To determine whether one of these tools is right for you, look at which one will do a better job of answering the “so what?” question from your sales team’s perspective. And, let’s face it, that’s a key question to answer because sales always want to know “what have you done for me lately?”

So what do you think? I’m happy to hear your thoughts on which product you’d pick and whether these features are essential when investing in automation for B2B marketing.

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B2B Marketing’s Job #1: Sales Enablement

May 26, 2009 — Laura Ramos

If you have never been confronted by a sales person over lead quality, you can stop reading this blog post now:

The primary source of tension between marketing and sales is this: Marketing wants to know what sales does with all the leads they generate. In response to the question, sales says, “What leads? Those leads were awful; send us better leads.” Sound familiar?

The basic problem is that marketing and sales don’t agree on what constitutes a lead. The deeper issue is that many marketers are still learning what it takes to develop truly qualified demand and pass the right information to sales in a way that helps sales to progress an opportunity quickly and consistently.

Resolving this situation takes a lot of work, but starts with getting marketing and sales to see that their mutual success increases when their activities – and feedback loops – align around common goals. It also requires understanding that the overall firm wins competitively, grows revenue, and builds market share more efficiently by applying lower-cost marketing resources to the front-end of this process and deeper customer insight to the backend hand-off between marketing and sales. While technology alone rarely fixes this, firms don’t get to top performance without marketing automation to help segment and target customers – and to focus sales on topics that resonate with buyers and create dialogue.

When marketing delivers a new batch of leads, sales wants to know quickly which have the most potential. In my research, I show how top marketers build practices that score leads numerically, route top-scoring leads to sales, and – more often – use visual tools to engage with sales. This is where many marketing automation vendors are heading and Eloqua has taken a major step in this direction with its announcement of Prospect Profiler today.

Sales-centric Dashboard Helps Track Digital Activity

Sales-centric Dashboard Helps Track Digital Activity

In short, this tool gives sales a graphical, one-stop interface that tracks a prospect’s digital footprints and summarizes buyer activity across Web content, online registration form (for various events), email, and online search touchpoints. If marketing says, “we think this is a hot lead,” Prospect Profiler shows visually why that is the case.

More importantly (although Eloqua doesn’t mention it in its press release), this tool helps extend marketing’s impact on the sales organization. Campaign and drip nurturing reports are useful, but giving sales a tool that helps individual reps know how involved one prospect is compared to another is a sure way of cementing marketing’s value for enabling smarter sales conversations.

Collaboration with and the sharing of content among salespeople are key themes I will explore next month in my blog posts and upcoming research on the Lead Management Automation market. Let me know what you think of Eloqua’s announcement and share your thoughts on which features you think are essential when investing in automation for B2B marketing.

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B2B Marketer Tips For Empowering Sales Success

May 20, 2009 — Laura Ramos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sales 2.0: Accelerating Deals In A Slow Economy

March 4, 2009 — Laura Ramos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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