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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SVForum Marketing SIG Hosts SVESMC Community to Talk about Social Business

November 30, 2011 — Laura Ramos

Like the title of this post? I’m trying to fit in all the right buzz words and acronyms to describe a panel discussion that I will moderate December 12.

Speaking of buzz words, here’s one that has become so broad and overused as to be practically meaningless: SOCIAL MEDIA.

For all the hype and interest around social media in B2B marketing, a realistic survey of the landscape shows that there’s more talk than actual practice and, of those practicing it, most aren’t getting the results they expect. To go beyond “social media 101″ — and the useless puzzling over whether to use Twitter, LinkedIn or some other platform is the right choice for B2B marketing — a group of folks that I highly respect will get together during a meeting of the SVForum’s marketing special interest group and talk about the challenges and opportunities for making business more social in 2012.

You can register for the event at the SVForum site, or learn more about the panel from this great blog post by Mark Helfen. The event takes place Monday, December 12 at EMC’s 2831 Mission College Blvd address in Santa Clara.

As business moves beyond social media to social interaction, many B2B marketers still struggle to understand where social fits in daily business activity. As social spreads from early-adopter, technical enthusiasts through marketing, sales, customer support, and product/service development, business people need to consider how to use social to collaborate with customers and support, engage, and delight them. And how to include technology partners, channels, and suppliers in the process. And how to do this without adding unwanted risk to the business.

The Silicon Valley Enterprise Social Media Council (SVESMC) is an informal community of social practitioners who influence strategy or lead programs at predominant valley companies like Adobe, CA, Cisco, eBay/PayPal, Symantec, and Xerox. We don’t claim to know everything about social media or to have solved all of its intractable problems.  But we will share our perspectives on where we have been successful, where we’ve fallen short, and where we believe the true future of social belongs in business.

If you are local to the Bay Area, please join us two Monday’s from now to hear first-hand about how social continues to shape corporate culture, customer interactions, and innovation in the fast pace of the valley. I promise an evening of interesting conversation with a few laughs thrown in. (But I can’t promise that the buzz words won’t flow freely…. see you there?)

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To Honor Social Media Day: “Hug Your Community”

June 30, 2011 — Laura Ramos

Social media is a misnomer. It’s not about “media” — which is the channel by which communication gets delivered.  It’s about “community”:  people getting — and giving — help, advice, and support from others.

The Silicon Valley Executive Social Media Council (SVESMC) is my favorite example of this type of community. Earlier this month, the SVESMC met for it’s second practioner’s meeting.  Measuring the impact of social media was among the topics discussed. So, in light of Mashable’s self-proclaimed “Social Media Day”, I’d like to share a few insights from my favorite community – and echo thoughts that Petra Neiger shared in her Cisco post on this topic also.

During the gathering, a few folks took some time out to shoot impromptu videos to share lessons learned and to remind us about the impact social media has had on our lives.  The first video is a series of tips from people I consider top practitioners at prominent high tech firms here in the valley.  I found it very “telling” that both Gurmeet Dhaliwal (CA) and Jeannette Gibson (Cisco) both chose “listening” as the key strategic tip they would give others.

Listening is the first of five key social media objectives Forrester identified in the Groundswell book. I later wrote research to help B2B marketers set social media plans and incorporated the POST strategy into this work. Successful social media means knowing who you want to engage and how you want to change the nature of your relationship with them as a result. To do this right requires listening to that audience, not just shouting at them with an online bullhorn.

The second video is a series of personal stories about how social media changed some of the member’s lives — in both big ways and small.  Watch and see if you can relate. 

These are just a few examples that remind me how important a community can be to helping us navigate and learn about this new socially-connected, online world.  Happy Social Media day!  And in honor of it, find your favorite community and show them your appreciation.

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Live From the Summit On Customer Engagement, 2011 Edition

March 1, 2011 — Laura Ramos

This is my third time attending Bill Lee’s annual summit for customer reference professionals.  This event expanded beyond reference programs to include a variety of ways to engage with customers and help drive business. You can follow the Tweet Stream at #2011SCE for live reactions. This post describes the value I see this event deliver to the B2B marketing community that worries about what customers say on their company’s behalf.

Setting aside popular social media definitions for a second, this group truly embodies a cohesive, thriving community. Looking around, I recognize a many attendees from prior events. The key theme, using customer engagement to expand the value delivered to customers, remains current and persistent. Bill recalls a conversation with CIO of Cardinal, Patty Morrison, that defines why customers, particularly those in the C-suite, care about how they engage with vendors.  Unlike the common belief that customers references are difficult to acquire and maintain, Patty said that she wants to engage. But, in return, she wants value from that engagement.  As marketers, we achieve this by helping customers like Patty to:

1) Improve how you (as a vendor) deliver service to me (as a client).

2) Measure my participation and report on the value this activity delivers to your firm.

3) Engage me in developing best practices together.

4) Make it easy for me to partner with you and drive business together.

5) Give me new, simple, or different ways to engage in marketing with you.

6) Present new opportunities for me to engage with my peers.

Companies represented in this room, including Saleforce.com, Hitachi Data Systems, Infor, Citrix, Cisco, HP, Microsoft, SAP, Siemens, Intel, and many more, do this — with varying degrees of success — through formal reference programs, social media, online community destinations, events, advisory boards, user groups, customer media (case studies, videos, testimonials, etc.), and knowledge centers. This last approach is interesting because it begins to cross the line between customer engagement and customer support/service.

Why does an event like this attract over 180 participants, and about a dozen sponsors, during these times? By speaking to the key issues that business executives worry about.  Need proof? The IBM Global Survey of 1500 CEOs showed that “reinventing the customer relationship” is one of the top 3 issues concerning top executives.  CEOs know that social media gives buyers more control over the message and dialogue, and company leaders need more advocates to help spread the good word in burgeoning social channels where buyers turn.  CEOs also see great value when their teams involve customers in product development, marketing, and support functions to spur new levels of innovation and to get better intelligence on what the market wants and needs.

Here are the highlights of best practices shared today:

Tom Wong, VP of Customer Mojo, at Salesforce.com shared how the Dreamforce team created an app that engaged over 14K attendees and helped them to network by “matchmaking” their interests with other conference participants.

Asim Zaheer, VP WW Corporate and Product Marketing for Hitachi Data Systems showed how Hitachi blends new social channels, social monitoring, and virtual events into the myriad of traditional customer engagement programs they support. He summarized with advice that reference programs should focus on finding value for customers in participating, simplifying your messages, providing more flexibility for customers to participate in different ways, and moving the sales process along.

Surprise!  Bill collared me to join Leif Pedersen (VP Marketing, Siemens Industry Automation) and Salim Ali (Global VP, Marketing, SAP) on a panel discussion on what customer reference managers should do to become more engagement focused.

Jeanette Gibson, Director of Social Media Marketing at Cisco, shared the enormously rich set of social activities that Cisco uses to engage their customers around user events (physical and virtual), communities, and integrated media/PR.  Cisco enjoys a social-savvy audience, social corporate culture, and a few key executives who are social natives.

Karen Newman, Marketing Director, Global Customer Advocacy, Siemens shared real-life, tactical, practical experience around managing a reference program at a 500K employee company with over $100B in revenue. Challenges with getting sales and executives to support reference/engagement programs was the hot topic.

There’s more to come tomorrow, so I hope you will join in the conversation. #2011SCE

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Twitter Popularity May Soar, but the Noise-to-Value Ratio Remains High

January 3, 2011 — Laura Ramos

Sysomos, a Marketwire company that provides social media monitoring and analytics capability, recently published an interesting study it conducted on Twitter´s growth in 2010. In comparing Twitter usage between 2009 and 2010, they found:

  • Users with 100+ friends have increased by three-fold to 21% since 2009.
    (Note: I’m assuming “friends” means “friends on Facebook”, but I could be wrong.)
  • 22.5% of users accounted for about 90% of all activity.
  • 80% users have made fewer than 500 tweets.
  • “Justin Bieber” is one of top two-word phrases and top name in user’s bios.
  • Significantly more users are disclosing their location, bio, and Web information in Twitter profiles.

For me, the second finding in the list is the most interesting – that just over 22% of Twitter users account for 90% of the tweets.  It’s amazing that the “old rule of thumb” — that 20% of any population accounts for 80% of the activity, consumption, or item of interest — applies here.   Even more, 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than 500 times in total. (I am not a heavy-duty tweeter and I’ve post more than 800 tweets in about 2 years of participation.) There are a few ambitious individuals who have tweeted over 100,000 times (one is a recruiter and the other is a writer, so maybe it’s possible they have that much to say.)

Looking at the bio descriptions, I am struck by the fact that the Twitter population, as judged by their bio terms alone, appear to be younger in age, female, self- or unemployed, and fascinated with pop culture (reference the”Justin Bieber” statistic above).  However, I find it interesting  that “marketing” was the 20th most popular single word descriptor, and “business” was the 26th.  Twitter participation reflects a dominant consumer population, and there is only a modicum of B2B activity that makes it to the top of the popularity list.  Sifting through the noise will continue to be a daunting task without a social monitoring capability.

Bottomline: Twitter is very early in its lifetime — and remains an interesting combination of social phenomenon and communication channel. According to the study, 44% of users joined Twitter between January 2010 and August 2010.  That’s a microsecond in the history of media. Maybe my analysis reflects my own biases, so please take a look at the Sysomos study and let me know what you think.

If you have seen another study specific to business use of Twitter, please post a comment with a pointer.  Or tweet it to me at @lauraramos.  Thanks in advance.

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3 B2B Buyer Behavior Principles: Segmentation, Personas, and Profiling

October 20, 2010 — Laura Ramos

Business-to-business marketers have long struggled to reach decision makers and measure marketing results. Over 50% of the almost 570 respondents to my 2006 Forrester survey put these two issues at the top of their list of marketing challenges. It’s not branding, it’s not budget, it’s not competitive threats.  Finding the right prospects to engage, and demonstrating that marketing had an impact on this process, is what keeps B2B marketers awake at night.

I think B2B marketers, especially those in high tech firms, struggle because they don’t spend enough time understanding who their best customers are and what distinguishes those customers from the rest. Knowing your customers takes discipline – it’s simply not about conducting satisfaction surveys or publishing customer success stories.  B2B marketers need to analyze business buyer behavior and using the findings to inform their go-to-market approach. It’s about knowing and managing your Buyer’s Journey.

Tonight, I had the wonderful opportunity to share my insights and perspective with Professor Ravi Shanmugam’s Marketing 551: Marketing Analysis and Decision Making class at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business. We talked about the fundamentals of business buyer behavior and how to “get to know” your audience. If you would like to see the slides, I put them on Slideshare.

At Xerox Services, we believe in customer segmentation, profiling, and analytics. We deliver professional managed print services as multi-year contracts worth several millions of dollars.  Not your typical corporate purchase: there are a select number of organizations who need (and can afford) what we offer. But the business value is clear: we save our clients more than they spend.  This means that account identification and profiling is very important since we orient around a sales-centric go-to-market model.

From an industry marketing perspective, we also know that “knowing” who your buyer is — what are the key issues that concern him/her and how Xerox Services can help — is also crucial to making those sales interactions meaningful and to building a lasting relationship. Drawing from this experience, I shared with the Marketing 551 class, the following principles behind B2B buyer behavior and analytics:

1) Segmentation.  Critical to helping marketing to focus on “who” in the market you want to engage with your messaging and offers. Based on your market definition, segmentation shows you where the best market opportunity for your products and services will be.

2) Personas. Once you know “who” to target, personas help you understand “what to say” to them. As a representation of a real market group (i.e. segment), personas help marketers crystallize their message and speak in the voice of the customer, not market-speak. The best marketers create personas based on attributes that are relevant to purchase decision-making — not on generalities like industry, buying role (decision maker, influencer, etc.), or functional area.

3) Profiling. While most marketers are very familiar with firmographic information, and how to use it, many have yet to understand the importance of profiling behavior. One example of behaviorial analytics is Forrester’s Social Technographics, which describes a buyer’s propensity to engage in online, social behavior.  In this always-connected world, business buyers are becoming more willing to take purchase cues from peers and “knowledgeable experts” than traditional, company-lead media and messages.

I’ve asked the class to share their reactions to what I presented by commenting on this blog post.  By and large, these students are employed full-time at top Silicon Valley firms. They also tend to have technical/engineering backgrounds or current responsibilities. Take a look at the comments to see whether my views resonated with these future MBA graduates from my alma mater.

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Four Ways to Engage Your Socially Active Customers

June 20, 2010 — Laura Ramos

If  I have any (small) regrets about leaving Forrester Research, it’s that I miss working with folks like Augie Ray each day. I found his recent research on the growth in the number of people who update their statuses using social media – tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter – interesting and worth a read.

Forrester has long counseled marketers to follow a simple four-step planning process called POST to set social strategy. POST is an acronym Josh Bernoff coined to remind business people to keep audience first and objectives second on their list of social media priorities.  Understanding your audience involves more than knowing profile information.  In this new social world, marketers must also know where your customers go online and how they interact with social tools already.

Social Technographics is the tool Forrester analysts, including myself during my tenure there, use to categorize online, social behavior.  From a B2B retrospective, I have to say that the tool did not always uncover distinct differences between business technology buyers, IT folks, and technology marketers in various demographic groups. Techies love technology and this fascination produces extensive experimentation with all variety of tools, hence they tend to profile high in most categories.

I found that it was important for marketers to know if the target audience is participating (as Creators, Critics, Joiners, and now Conversationalists), observing (as Collectors or Spectators) or simply inactive socially.  Three categories are easier for B2B marketers to understand than seven, especially since the conversation quickly turns to “So, where do buyers spend their time — on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn?” (BTW, Augie’s report offers some good insight on this question in Figure 1.)

Putting the nuances of Social Technographics aside for a moment, I think Augie offers some solid advice for marketers wanting to engage with potential buyers and current customers through social media. For B2B marketers, I would summarize Augie’s list of ways to engage socially-active customers to read:

1) Listen to social conversations. Listening helps marketers learn how to engage socially as well as understand what buyers think about your brand.  Online monitoring tools – like Google Alerts, Radian6, or Biz360 — help here.

2) Use customers to energize others. Social updates are a viral element of online branding – and yes, there can be risks to the brand of doing so. Read Groundswell for a number of examples of what not to do.

3) Support customers as they support each other. Many companies have begun to support customers by listening to status updates and intervening on behalf of those currently experiencing problems. Most of the examples of what to do – or not do – involve consumer brands. But tech companies adopt this approach with success. The jury is still out about whether responding socially helps to lower customer support costs overall or simply papers over inadequate support processes.

4) Solicit customer feedback and ideas. Those who use your products can be the best source of innovation that other buyers will also want and use.

Most of all, I agree whole-heartedly with his recommendations, namely: listen before you leap, use social tools internally to understand the uses and limitations of each technology, and empower your employees. Marketing alone cannot run the whole social show – it’s definitely a group undertaking.

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Join Harte-Hanks And Me To Learn How To Integrate Social Media Into B2B Marketing

March 29, 2010 — Laura Ramos

Tomorrow Harte-Hanks will host a Webinar about how social media and online communities influence business buyers.  I am a featured speaker along with Kevin Kerner of Mason Zimbler US, a Harte-Hanks company.  If you would like to learn more: click here.

The webinar takes place on Tuesday, March 30 at 2 pm Eastern, and 11 am Pacific.  I hope you will register and join us tomorrow.

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Get Organized For B2B Community Marketing

February 8, 2010 — Laura Ramos

After testing the social media waters through much of 2009, I see B2B marketers waking up to the fact that successful social execution requires more than setting up group pages on LinkedIn, opening a corporate Twitter account, or posting videos to YouTube. To have the greatest impact, marketers will need to focus social media marketing efforts at the tail end of the customer acquisition and selling process — at creating long-term, vibrant customer relationships — not on building brand or generating leads. To turn social opportunity into marketing advantage requires marketers to adopt a community (in contrast to broadcast, direct, or one-t0-one) marketing mindset. It also requires new organizational structure, roles, processes, and incentives to help your company “get smart” about how it interacts with prospects and customers online.

Unfortunately, B2B marketers treat social like yet another media channel, not as a fundamental change to how business gets done. 

Source: Forrester Report "Organizing For B2B Tech Community Marketing" February 3, 2010

In research I published last week, I explore recent Forrester survey results where we asked over 300 B2B marketers how they are gearing up for social interactions with customers. Most say that their social organizational structure and governance is ad hoc or managed by different business units with little oversight (see the figure).  

While decentralized and ad hoc are good adjectives to use when describing any approach to social activity, the lack of oversight and governance creates (real or potential) risk for those blazing new trails in the social landscape.

To execute social strategy in ways that build deeper customer relationships and foster more transparent communications — without panicking executives or legal overseers — requires firms to create more flexible, decentralized ways of engaging with buyers that shake up traditional reporting structures but give employees the tools they need to be successful. To help marketers think through these changes, in the research report, I advise:

1) Organize for flexibility, not bureaucracy. Getting organized means creating some form of central governing body chartered with establishing shared resources and fostering communication. It also means distributing social execution responsibility — and accountability for results — widely in business units or regions. Rather than commanding and controlling, the central team guides activity, spreads best practices, and monitors progress continuously while giving product teams and customer-facing functions leeway to manage social activity in a local, transparent, and relevant manner.

2) Align social objectives with business goals. To mature social processes from ad hoc activity to consistent disciplines, marketers must specify what they expect to result from engaging with customers socially, and then make the functional areas involved responsible for achieving those goals.  Easier said than done, but picking the right objective is a core tenant to the POST methodology I’ve use to help many client get social media marketing right. To make progress quickly, start with social plans where you can limit the impact to one or two functional areas. This keeps internal competition on external social channels to a minimum and compels departments to collaborate as they experiment with social activity in a coordinated manner.

3) Run initial social forays like a corporate program, not a campaign. Social transformation requires dedicated budget, change management, and cross-functional coordination on a scale similar to other major programs, like sustainability or outsourcing. Some firms need temporary executive assignments and staff to hit major social milestones, such as establishing a listening process, creating a thought-leadership agenda, or inviting customers to engage in new community activity. This core team should also validate the business case for each social ”program” undertaken.

4) Open boundaries to facilitate internal collaboration and external outreach. Social requires employees to step outside their functional comfort zones and work with outside partners and influencers. Rather than opening borders completely, top firms progressively allow more access to resources, opportunities to interact, and incentives to do so by establishing a community hub. The community hub (aka community portal, social networking site, forum, etc.) creates structure, but offers enough flexibility, to allow social interactions to evolve. Encourage employees to collaborate with each other first because this will foster the skills, norms, and creative thinking needed to make the transition to external interactions go faster and remain permanent. To see how one marketer is wrestling with this today, take a look at Paul Dunay’s blog post titled “Fire Your Director of Social Media!”

What does all of this mean?  That B2B marketers should advocate for a social core team, under their leadership, to foster new process, structure and — ultimately — culture that supports online interaction where it matters most — at the touchpoints that customers choose to use daily.  Take a look at the research and let me know what you think.

(P.S. I am backdating this post to more closely correspond with the publication date of the research. Hope you don’t mind!)

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Best Practices For Marketing To Buyers “In The Cloud”

January 27, 2010 — Laura Ramos

“Cloud computing” is a very hot topic, and like social media, subject to much debate about “what is cloud computing?” and “what does it mean for business?” Simply stated, cloud computing lets your customers and potential buyers take advantage of services and resources delivered as an online utility. Buyers get the benefits of using your technology without worrying about the technical details as much as they would if they implemented software inside their data centers. The benefits can include: lower capital investment, faster implementation, reduced risk, proven security and improved scalability to handle the increased amounts of data. Purists believe that true cloud computing requires large scale sharing by infrastructure/application providers and their consumers alike. While my colleagues at Forrester try to sort out the market and make it easier for IT buyers to decide where to invest, I’d like to explore the idea of marketing to customers in the cloud. 

B2B marketing needs to embrace the cloud. Most executives see marketing as a large discretionary line item in the corporate budget. During tought economic times, that “discretion” gets cut more often than not.  Marketers perpetuate this short-sighted perspective when they focus more on program and campaign spending and fail to invest in the capital or IT support needed to make marketing execution more efficient and the results more visible to the organization. Cloud computing can give marketers ready access to technology and services that can drive demand and evaluate the effectiveness of their programs without the burden of traditional technology implementation and management.

Cloud computing will also transform the way marketing gets done. In this Web 2.0 world, buyers spend more of time online searching for information, interacting with like-minded colleagues, and comparing offerings long before the first sales call occurs. Cloud-optimized marketing strategies such as social media, paid search, search results optimization, content syndication, and engaging with buyers on social networking sites like LinkedIn and Twitter deliver brand building and customer engagement results.

To futher explore how social media marketing in the cloud can help to build deeper — and eventually more profitable — customer relationships, I joined Jon Miller (VP of Maketing at automation rising-star Marketo) and David Alston (social media guru who heads up both community and marketing at Radian6) on a webinar, which you can access here.  During the event, we looked at a number of different cloud-related topics including:

1) How to use Forrester’s Social Technographics® Profiles of business decision-makers to design marketing programs that not only capitalize on emerging social behaviors but also fundamentally change the nature of the marketing relationship between B2B buyers and sellers.

2)Forrester’s P-O-S-T methodology – Why starting with People, Objectives and Strategy first, then moving to Tactics and Technology is the best way to ensure success when using social media to engage with prospects and customers in the cloud.

3) How to use social media monitoring to engage prospects, build communities, service customers, uncover influencers, and listen for the point of need.

Over the next few months, I will join the the Marketing Cloud conversation to continue to explore how cloud-centric service and technology providers may be in a better position to serve the modern needs of B2B marketers who see social media not simply as a way to reach new audiences. More importantly, these marketers see social media as a tool to help them build communities of like-minded customers; customers who will remain loyal, buy more over time, and advocate to others on the marketer’s behalf to influence the standing and reputation his/her firm in a transparent, community-centric manner.  The 2009 Forrester Groundswell Awards winners in the B2B marketing categories demonstrate where this trend is heading.  But I would love to hear from you with examples of companies that you feel are doing an exceptional job of using social media to connect with business buyers who purchase high consideration products for on behalf of their firms.

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