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Why marketers must become the new publishers

October 6, 2009 by

One of the great trends were seeing at ITSMA is increased automation of the lead process. It’s great because the software acts as a battering ram for alignment between marketing and sales.

But this trend has an unintended side effect: it exposes our content development processes (or lack thereof). If we now have a system measuring how long it takes marketing to nurture a lead until it is sales ready, we will now also have a measure of whether the nurturing period increases or decreases over time.

That metric is going to be critically important as we automate the lead process because nurturing is marketing’s special sauce. It’s how we move people tantalizingly close to a sale—without ever putting a salesperson in front of them.

We accomplish this feat through content. And if our nurturing metric is going to improve over time, so must our content.

Improvement through relevance
By improve I don’t mean that we all have to learn to write like Tolstoy. By improve I mostly mean that we need to make the content more and more relevant to target buyers. I’ve spent the last two days as a guest at Marketing Sherpa’s B2B conference in Boston and the many excellent speakers used publishing metaphors constantly. And I think those metaphors are useful for simplifying the content process (and for improving it) because most of us are familiar with the publishing model.

The publishing model is also relevant because as a business model, it is dying—especially for trade magazines. The ad revenues that once funded coverage of every arcane niche of technology have dried up, and so has the content that could have mentioned our companies. Demand for that content hasn’t gone away however, and companies that can provide an adequate alternative will grow their businesses more than those that can’t.

How to adapt the publishing process to marketing
To fulfill an ever-increasing demand for content you need a process. And the publishing process works better than the marketing content development process because the publishing process developed without an overlord (e.g., salespeople screaming for a brochure today or an event tomorrow). The publishing process is intended to identify a target audience, develop an understanding of that audience, and deliver targeted, relevant content. To consistently beat competitors, that content needs to remain relevant and targeted. If it doesn’t, circulation drops, ad revenue drops, and the publication goes out of business.

In other words, relevance is the primary measure of success.

That’s how we should think about our marketing content process. Here are some aspects of the publishing process that drive relevance:

  • Identify the target reader. Publications fail if they don’t grasp exactly whom they are trying to reach and why. Marketers need to do a similar kind of segmentation.
  • Create an editorial calendar. Every good publication has an editorial calendar. When I was at CIO, we despised the calendar process because it was the primary instrument that our salespeople used to demonstrate relevance with potential advertisers (and our competitors could see it). But looking back on it I think we despised it more because it revealed the gaps in our coverage and in our knowledge of readers and their needs. The calendar planning exercise always gave us a ton of ideas that wound up driving much of our coverage for the year—especially since we weren’t a newsmagazine and most of the topics were evergreen. Much of the content we offer as marketers is also evergreen, so there’s no reason not to have a plan for content. If nothing else, it gives you something to wave in salespeople’ faces the next time they come screaming about a brochure.
  • Research the reader. Most magazines do annual reader surveys to ask subscribers what they think of the magazine and what could be improved. Through these surveys, they construct archetypes of the typical reader. Marketers can replace offers with survey questions once in awhile to help build an understanding of timely issues to drive future content.
  • Interview the players and the experts. Journalists aren’t experts in the fields they cover, but they’re experts at finding those that are. They’re also good at finding the people who live the stuff they’re writing about every day. All good journalism comes from expert insight and real-world examples. Marketers need to talk to subject matter experts inside the company, influencers outside the company (analysts, academics, bloggers, journalists), and customers. All you need to do is ask questions and the content will flow out of these people.
  • Audit content. When surveying readers, magazines also ask whether readers like specific articles and subject areas covered in the magazine. Marketers need the same feedback from customers and from salespeople. If you don’t have the money to do research, consider adding a review button or comment feature to content.
  • Diversify content. Most magazines are a mixture of long and short, graphic and text-heavy stories. Marketing content needs to be similarly diverse.
  • Cycle through top reader interests. Magazines develop a short list of topic areas that matter most to their readers and hit those topics regularly as part of the issue planning process. Marketers need to develop a similar list as they plan their content calendars.
  • Be timely. Editors always try to leave room in the planning process for the timely, exclusive scoop—the story that identifies an important trend before others do. For marketers, being timely means having content that matches every stage of the buying cycle, so that you have a chance for an “exclusive” at each stage.

What’s your publishing process for content? What have I left out?

Filed Under: Idea Marketing Tagged With: , , ,

Want to launch a new product or service faster? Do some research.

September 25, 2009 by

I helped host an ITSMA round table this week and a near universal complaint from our B2B technology clients was how difficult it is to launch new services in a fast, efficient way. One client summed it up by saying that there are two points of resistance in the process of bringing new things to market. The first comes at the beginning of the process—the “why” battle—where everyone takes pot shots at the new idea. The second comes after everyone signs off on the new offering and they are suddenly confronted with all the things they need to do to make it happen—the “how” battle. The organization goes into a kind of collective amnesia as all the interested parties begin denying that they ever wanted to have anything to do with this misguided thingamajig—what’s it called again?—and complain about not having the resources or the time to make the proposed launch date.

Put more energy into the first battle
Our client said that in the past he has devoted most of his energies to the “how” battle because his company prides itself on seamless delivery. However, this week he said he was going to shift his strategy. “I’m convinced that we put so little into the first battle that we end up spending way more time and money on the second than we need to,” he said.

In other words, companies start trying to deliver new products and services before they’ve adequately answered all the questions about whether this new thing is something customers actually want, whether it’s something that salespeople can actually sell, and whether it is something that operations can actually deliver at a reasonable cost.

Stop relying on human nature
The biggest reason for this lack of investment at the front end is human nature. We’re optimists at heart, and we like to trust that past success will lead to future success. We also like to trust our own instincts and experiences as useful guides. And we don’t like to spend a lot of time weighing our decisions before taking action. Makes us feel weak.

But of course, all we can really ever trust is the data. Good data, that is.

Talk to the right people first
By good data I mean taking a comprehensive research approach during the “why” stage. When we’re thinking about new offerings, we need to consider all the pieces of the business that will be affected by the decision—from customers, to operations, to strategy, to profitability—and factor them into the research.

We need to make sure that we gather the opinions of all the different constituencies that will be affected by the decision. Important stakeholders need proof, through research, as to whether their own experiences, views, and hunches are borne out by the facts. Otherwise, they will fight tooth and nail during the “how” stage because they haven’t really bought into the idea that the new thing is necessary, nor do they want to change what they are doing to accommodate it.

This is why the second fight takes so much time. Those who resist keep going back to the “why” argument and point out that there was never convincing evidence that we needed this new thing in the first place. Meanwhile, the backers of the new thing are convinced that the organization has already invested too much time and money into getting this far and that it’s too late to turn back now. Resistance hardens and it takes much more time and resources to actually implement the new thing—meanwhile, no one’s really sure if it will succeed or not.

It’s tough to work your butt off on something that you’re not sure about. That’s the nut of the problem in delivering new services. Instead of focusing on design and delivery, we’re still wondering—and fighting about—whether what we’re doing is worthwhile.

Do research early and save money on the second battle
It seems like a waste of time to stop and ask everyone what they think before plunging ahead with new offerings, but it will save money in the end.

In working with our clients, we’ve found that it’s particularly important to survey both customers and employees when developing an important new service, because it allows you to put the “why” argument to rest using objective data. You can compare employee perceptions about customer needs and the potential new service with the perceptions and needs of the customers themselves. What a concept, huh?

Now getting customer input isn’t as simple as asking them what they want and then delivering it to them. You need to balance their wants with their willingness to pay for those wants and your ability to deliver on them for a reasonable cost. That’s why the research process needs to be iterative. Here’s a typical progression:

  1. Competitive intelligence. It pays to know what’s available from competitors before you develop your own offering.
  2. Influencer research (analysts, journalists, bloggers, academics, etc.). Get help in determining the need in the market and pla around with options before going ahead.
  3. (Concurrent) Customer research and employee/partner research. Using the competitive and influencer research as a base, develop a survey that asks about the market need and a few different versions of the offering.

If our work with clients is any indication, you’ll be surprised at the gap in perception between customers and employees. For example, one company we worked with was considering offering 24×7 support as a new service, which would have meant a huge investment of resources and big changes in its organization.

On the survey, almost two-thirds of employees said that customers wanted 24×7 support, while just a handful of customers actually wanted and were willing to pay for 24×7 support. What they did want was 12×5 support in their local time zone with the option of 24×7 support for critical issues. The data was incontrovertible evidence that the service offering as originally envisioned was off base. Working with development and delivery people (who took the internal survey), the company worked to modify the offering to meet customer needs—while saving millions in the process.

For marketers, the research becomes great fodder for a marketing campaign that offers rich evidence of listening to customers and developing new services based on their actual needs. Makes our jobs that much easier.

What do you think? Will you share your war stories about new product or service launches?

Filed Under: ITSMA Research, Service Development and Delivery Tagged With: , , ,

Want to know which social media tool to bet on? Look at their relationship models.

September 18, 2009 by

We’ve all been reading a lot about the social media horse race. Will it be Facebook or MySpace? Or will it be Twitter by a nose?

For marketers trying to figure out where to put their resources into social media marketing, the horse race looks more like a crapshoot. These brands all start to sound the same and there are so many variables at play—the usual business stuff like VC funding, marketing, strategy, management, funding, M&A, etc.—that it’s hard to know where to place your bets.

We need to dig deeper to start to make meaningful comparisons. Analysis that looks at the concept of the different social media tools as “technology platforms” adds a little more clarity—as in, Facebook could win because it has the largest number of users and therefore, like Microsoft Windows, it could emerge as the de facto monopoly in social media.

But even this way of looking at it is suspect. People are fickle—especially young people—and all it takes is a shiny new technology or good branding to make an end run around the incumbent technology platform in social media. That’s because unlike Microsoft Windows, all the different social media tools are based on universal technology standards—i.e., the internet—and so linking different tools together or switching outright from one to another is simple and easy. Just look at how quickly MySpace has become uncool vs. a nearly identical competitor, Facebook.

What is a relationship model?
If you want to be able to place your bets more reliably—and I think marketers need to do this, given that social media marketing can be an incredible time sink—I think you need to consider the underlying social models of the different tools. The big question to ask is: How are relationships formed through this tool? I call this the relationship model of social media—it’s the underlying driver that attracts people to use it.

Right now, I think there are two primary relationship models in social media, the permission model, and the viral model.

  • Permission model. This is the model of most relationship-based social media tools today, such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Plaxo. You search for people you know and you ask their permission to start a relationship. Then, and only then, can you begin to figure out their networks of relationships—the people they know that you would like to know (and market to). Then you need to get those people’s permission to build your network further.
    For marketers trying to build relationships with influencers and customers, this is a fundamental roadblock, because the permission model tries to replicate the way we form relationships in real life: Trust needs to be established before we enter into a relationship. For marketers, it’s a Catch-22. How can we establish trust with influencers if we can’t get to them?
    The recent growth of permission-based groups on these sites helps a little bit, but so much of what gets posted on group pages is noise—blatant advertising, desperate job seeking—that it can be difficult for marketers to cut through all that crap and establish trusting relationships based solely on being in the same group as someone else. Only if marketers are starting and participating in meaningful discussions in the groups can they take the next step and try to form a relationship. And that kind of participation takes time—and subject matter expertise.
    Thus, I’m growing increasingly convinced that the permission model is of limited use to marketers. It’s a way to broadcast messages for sure, but you can do that better through your own channels. And the opportunity for real relationship building—which is what social media is supposed to be all about—in this model is limited.
  • Viral model. This model differs from the permission model in that it does not try to mimic the way we form relationships in real life. In fact, in real life we might call it something else: stalking. This model was popularized by the folks at Twitter (others are also using the model, such as Yammer, which is a social network for use inside large organizations), who realized that technology could be an effective substitute for trust—up to a point.
    Of course, by now you know that on Twitter, you can follow whomever you choose and listen in on what they are saying—one of the key benefits of social media for marketers, as I explain in more detail in this post. Because Twitter has written its own rules for relationships and because by signing up for Twitter we all agree to play by those (new) relationship rules, the trust barrier is effectively removed. The brilliance of the people at Twitter was to realize (or at least hope) that we wouldn’t mind if they changed the rules of relationships on us. And we don’t mind. In fact, the dizzying growth of Twitter shows that many of us have been waiting for someone to change the rules of online relationships for some time.
    We are tribal creatures, so we respect group opinions and authority. We tend to accept rules that the majority of those around us follow. Of course, that has good implications and bad implications. But in the case of the viral model, it’s all good—at least for marketers.
    The reason I call this model viral is that following someone is just one piece of the equation. The openness of the model means that once you discover and follow someone, you can then use one of a number of free tools such as TwiPing to discover their followers and add those people to your network. By finding and following just a few key influencers who have well established relationships on Twitter, you can grow your network of relationships exponentially (though not too exponentially, otherwise Twitter may throw you out).
    The nice thing about the viral model for marketers is that we don’t need permission, or even reciprocity, to get benefit from the relationship. It’d be great if your target influencers follow you back (so you can engage them with your messages and begin to build a deeper relationship), but if they don’t, you can still gather valuable information. And because the model is so open, if you post good, useful information (think education, not promotion) then you will inevitably build relationships and at some point, those reluctant to reciprocate will see your stuff being passed along by others that they follow, and they will have cause to reconsider their decision. Content is also viral in this model, passed on and on by people to their various networks of followers, which means that good content producers have another avenue to grow their relationships exponentially.
    And the viral model acts as a nice front end for building a deeper relationship through the permission model. For example, if you start to exchange messages with an influencer, it’s a logical next step to enter into a permission-based relationship on something like LinkedIn.
    Now the openness of this viral model has already led to some problems. Spammers and hackers are slamming away at it, trying to find cracks to exploit. Public figures like football players say things they shouldn’t and are banned. But for now anyway, the model seems to be hanging on.

If you start to look at social media based on the relationship model, I think it becomes a little easier to make decisions about where to spend your limited marketing time. Right now, given that B2B buyers are just beginning to adopt social media, I think the viral model clearly gives us the most bang for the buck. It gives us a shot at accomplishing the three aspects of social media marketing:

  • Monitor. You can follow all conversation.
  • Engage. There is the potential to develop a closer relationship.
  • Manage. Though you can’t control your Twitter community like you would say, a user group, the network of relationships does form a loose sort of community that you can speak to and interact with as a group (e.g., ask a poll question, etc.).

In B2B, there are broad caveats to investing too much in any social media marketing—the major obstacles are outlined in a good post by B2B blogger Kip Bodnar here—and anything you do should be integrated with your other marketing activities. But assuming some of the people you’d like to reach are out there—and ITSMA’s recent survey of 300+ technology buyers says that they are (even senior executives) then the evidence seems to suggest that you should be emphasizing the viral model in your marketing.

What do you think? Is this the right way to place your bets? Have I left out any other relationship models?

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy, Social Media Tagged With: , ,

The information gap between marketing and sales—and how to fill it

September 11, 2009 by

I’m hearing a lot from clients and researchers about how vast swaths of salespeople need to be eliminated as companies transition from selling products to services and solutions. The estimates range from one third of the sales force, according to these academics, to as much as two thirds.

It’s portrayed as a DNA thing—some are born to do consultative selling and to have “executive-level conversations” and some are not.

Hogwash.

Now don’t get me wrong. I do think there is a gene for sales. Great salespeople truly are born, not made. They have genetic tendencies towards extroversion, confidence, hope (some would say denial), relationship building, and the real differentiator: emotional perception—usually expressed as the ability to “read people” (and one’s self). (For more on this, read about Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences.)

Why salespeople can’t make the cut
But I think we start slicing the genetic material a little too thinly when we separate the product salespeople from the services salespeople. If you assume that we haven’t hired the wrong people from the start—i.e., the order takers who never really had any true sales skills, or people who are so inflexible or fearful that they simply refuse to try to make the transition—I think we need something else to explain why so few salespeople seem able to make the cut.

I see two big reasons:

  1. Incentives. Salespeople are about the money. It’s the yardstick of success and self-worth. Companies need to make it worth salespeople’s while to endure the longer sales cycle and lower margins that come with services. Of course, devising those incentives, putting them in place, and driving the cultural change necessary to make them stick is a maddeningly complex process that helps keep consultants and academics in business.
  2. Information. This is the one that’s actually within marketers’ control. Information, not DNA, is the most important piece of the consultative sale and the executive-level relationship. With customers able to do so much research online, the way to get in the door these days is to have information that isn’t readily available elsewhere.

Executives live under constant fear of myopia—that by focusing so much of their time on internal operations, they are missing something important out there in the market. Salespeople who can ameliorate those real or perceived fears with information—and keep doing it over time—will outsell the mere backslappers every time. The essence of this skill is always being able to answer the question: “What are you hearing from others?”

Information is marketing’s responsibility
It’s not salespeople’ responsibility to come up with the answer to this question on their own. Executives are looking for reliable, objective, and insightful answers that go beyond an anecdotal summation of what’s going on with the other accounts in a salesperson’s territory.

If marketers aren’t supplying salespeople with the answers they need, then we need to think of ourselves as partly responsible for all those salespeople going out the door in the transition from products to services. We need to supply salespeople with the information that will create the impression among customers that they are missing something if they don’t stay in touch—an information dependency.

How to supply the information salespeople need
We need to set up a reliable pipeline of information that salespeople can access when and where they need it. Here’s how:

  • Get permission. Sales leaders need to agree that information is necessary for their people to succeed. If they don’t, then the pipeline will feed into a black hole. You may need a third party, such as a sales consultant, to convince sales leaders that they need more than intuition to make the sale.
  • Create incentives for sharing. The information pipeline will be stronger if salespeople have a reason to share information about their own accounts with other salespeople and with marketing. Salespeople need to be active contributors to the information pipeline.
  • Monitor the chatter. Few salespeople have the time or the interest in giving marketers updates on what they’re hearing out in the field. Marketers need to be able to capture that information by monitoring the channels that salespeople use to communicate with each other, whether it is through e-mail or CRM systems. Marketing automation and CRM vendors are beginning to offer ways to capture that kind of information.
  • Do the research. Marketers need to do the primary and secondary research on markets and customers to lend the depth and objectivity necessary to create information dependency among customers. Surveys work particularly well for assuring customers that the information they’re getting is more than a veiled sales pitch.
  • Bring in the experts. Marketers need to identify and make alliances with internal subject matter experts, external academics, and analysts and filter and feed that information into the pipeline.
  • Make it a joint pipeline. The channel for monitoring the chatter needs to be integrated with the channel marketing uses to pump information to sales—salespeople need a reason to access it as part of their normal routine.
  • Make it self-service. Salespeople need easy access to the information that marketing gathers if they are to use it. If they can’t find the information they need, they will quickly lose interest.
  • Make it social. Take advantage of social media platforms to create information sharing groups for salespeople. There are ways to create private groups so that the public can’t see your groups or the information you’re sharing. Yammer is one great example of this.

What have I left out? How are you providing the information salespeople need to make the consultative sale?

Filed Under: Sales and Marketing Collaboration Tagged With: , , ,

The five components of a successful idea marketing program

August 21, 2009 by

Recently, I was asked by a former ITSMA client to help put together a plan for a thought leadership program for a B2B technology company that sells both products and services. It forced me to think about all the components necessary to build and sustain a thought leadership strategy. Here are my thoughts on the big pieces. Please tell me what I’ve gotten wrong or left out.

1. Research the need. Most people start with strategy. But starting with strategy assumes a need that may not be there. Doing research first allows you to set goals using reliable, objective data. Then when people start to question your strategy (and they will), you can show them the numbers. Survey internal sales and marketing staff, customers, target markets, and influencers to determine what they are looking for. Here are some questions to ask:

  • Do customers view of you as a thought leader; if not, can they envision you moving into that role?
  • What are customers’ areas of interest?
  • What types of thought leadership vehicles (councils, conferences, white papers, social media, etc.) are target customers most interested in?
  • How can thought leadership influence their buying behavior?

Answers to these questions will help drive the structure of the program and provide a foundation for achieving ROI goals.

2. Determine the readiness of the organization. Professional services firms expect their consultants to be thought leaders and that expectation flows through everything those firms do, from recruiting, to training, to marketing. Thought leadership requires a cultural commitment to the development of ideas and strong executive support. If those pieces are missing, thought leadership will be left to marketing, where it will either mutate into thinly veiled sales content or die out altogether. Marketing can manage a thought leadership program and disseminate content, but it cannot be expected to supply the ideas that form the basis of the content.

3. Build a thought leadership network. I go into more details on a thought leadership network in this post, but the basic idea is that there are two parts to thought leadership: idea development and content dissemination. Marketing is great at the latter, but needs help with the former. A thought leadership network provides a reliable source of content for marketers to package and disseminate. The thought leadership network focuses on identifying internal thought leaders and building alliances with external academics and customers who can help develop and test ideas. Primary and secondary research provide the inspiration for some ideas and the objective justification for others. Internal knowledge share sessions and reward and recognition programs provide the motivation for thought leaders to emerge inside the organization and help imbue a thought leadership mindset into the culture.

4. Create a content development process. Using ideas from the thought leadership network, marketing needs to develop vehicles for disseminating that content to customers and salespeople. The key components of the program are:

  • Create a publishing process and calendar. Marketers must become publishers, with a process for refining and presenting thought leadership content through various vehicles, (such as conference presentations, white papers, social media, etc.). A calendar helps marketing plan out the frequency and focus of its output.
  • Align thought leadership vehicles to the buying process. Marketing needs to develop materials that are appropriate to each stage of the buying process, so that customers and salespeople can get the right information at the right time. Marketing and sales need to agree on the alignment of content to the different buying stages so that sales will get the right signals about when and how to approach customers for a sale.

5. Install systems and metrics for supporting thought leadership. The goal of thought leadership is not just to raise awareness of the company; it is to help make a sale. For that reason, thought leadership programs need to be tightly integrated into the company’s IT systems—and particularly its CRM systems—so that the impact of thought leadership can be tracked all the way through to the sale. These are the key components:

  • Install a lead tracking and nurturing system. Marketers can use the consumption of thought leadership to track the readiness of prospects to buy if they have a system for tracking a prospect’s activities. For example, if a prospect downloads a piece of content targeted to the interest phase of the buying process and reads it thoroughly, a lead tracking and nurturing system can track that activity and send a signal to salespeople that the prospect is most likely ready for a call. As the lead is passed over to sales for follow through, the thought leadership content is tagged as part of the sale. If a sale doesn’t result, the lead can be put back into the nurturing process while keeping track of the content he or she has already consumed. This lead tracking system should be integrated with the company’s CRM system (most traditional CRM systems are not set up to handle lead nurturing) so that leads can be handed back and forth between marketing and sales without losing anyone along the way.
  • Get agreement with sales on a sales-ready lead. The benefits of a thought leadership program will be lost if sales and marketing can’t agree on the point at which the consumption of the content provides a reliable signal of intent to buy. There needs to be a smooth hand off of prospects between marketing and sales for thought leadership to have the fullest possible impact on a sale.

What do you think?

Filed Under: Idea Marketing Tagged With: , ,

Why your marketing to CIOs may be irrelevant—and what to do about it

August 7, 2009 by

When I covered CIOs for 13 years at CIO Magazine, I found that it was very difficult to generalize about the profession, beyond a handful of universal problems such as alignment with the business and the complexities and the voracious needs of the IT infrastructure.

If I learned anything in those years, it was that CIOs really are a diverse lot. And that has big implications for marketers.

To market to these people effectively, you’re going to have to get to know them as being part of multiple, unique segments. That means understanding not just the top 10 IT drivers for 2009 as predicted by Gartner or Forrester. It means understanding different CIO roles, skills, aspirations, and business contexts.

CIOs are in fact so different that marketing to them all with the same message means that you’ll be irrelevant at best, and offensive at worst to most of the people you’re trying to reach.

CIOs are not all the same
When I was at CIO, I was very frustrated with the findings from our State of the CIO survey because they were relentlessly identical from year to year. But I know that in speaking to hundreds of CIOs, very few fit into the exact same mold. I found that every CIO I spoke to had at least a few unique issues—whether it is unique industry requirements, organizational complexities, or other things that they were grappling with that I hadn’t heard from anyone else.

So one year when I ran the State of the CIO survey we decided to take a deeper look at this data. We came up with some interesting insights.

For example, we’ve long thought that CIOs in smaller organizations are hamstrung by a lack of discretionary budget to work with, small staffs, and a lack of access to the CEO in the business.

So we started pulling factors like these together, and sure enough, new insights began to emerge. We began to see the CIO in more segmented way, with different drivers and motivations.

This led to what we started calling the “CIO archetypes.” Since I did the original archetypes work at CIO, they’ve morphed a little bit. We originally had four, but today they’ve been reduced to three, and the names have changed:

Function Head. These CIOs focus on keeping the lights on, on the IT utility, and are usually at smaller organizations or divisions within larger organizations.

Transformational Leader. These CIOs tend to be in larger companies and generally serve multiple business entities. Because they have this cross-business visibility, they have the opportunity to become business process experts and use IT to make those processes more efficient and effective. Following through on those process opportunities requires more than programming and project management skills, however. They focus on processes and standards, different organizations, and they do a lot of work on governance; especially concerning what elements of IT are shared and what are local.

Business Strategist. These lucky devils have access to the business and are involved in strategic planning. The best have built up their business skills through direct experience. Others are successful CIOs who take on complementary business roles in addition to IT such as supply chain, for example.

Though CIO no longer tracks a fourth category, I think it’s important to mention:

Turnaround Artist. These are a small, powerful minority of CIOs who defy categorization. You can find the Turnaround Artists in any of the archetypes, but they have one important issue that marketers need to be aware of: they’ve been brought into fix what the business thinks is a broken IT department.

Can you see how these different archetypes have different needs and interests? Have you tried to segment your CIO audience?

Filed Under: Customer Relationships Tagged With: , , , ,

Four reasons to stop measuring marketing

July 31, 2009 by

It’s time to declare marketing metrics a failure once and for all. ITSMA research has long showed that when we do it at all, we do it poorly. It’s difficult to parse out the contribution that marketing makes to a sale and it’s even more difficult to get salespeople to spend the time figuring out/checking the box/giving credit in the quest to determine whether marketing played a role in making the sale.

So we should just stop. Now.

I’ve had some good conversations this week with ITSMA’s Julie Schwartz and with lead management guru Brian Carroll and we all agree that in the broadest sense, measuring marketing misses the point. We should be measuring revenue and what Julie calls the Cost per Order Dollar (CPOD). Both marketing and sales should work together to reduce CPOD because that’s what really matters in terms of marketing’s contribution to the business. In this report (free with guest registration), Julie points out that marketing’s primary role is to make sales more efficient. Period.

Stop apportioning blame
So why do we continue to measure marketing separately from sales? If we started measuring CPOD and tracked it year over year, we would know that marketing was doing its job without forcing the annual showdown between marketing and the business in which marketing stands before the firing squad to justify its mere existence.

As Brian pointed out to me this week, this is all about growing revenue. It’s time to measure sales and marketing together in that process.

So here are some simple rules to think about:

  1. Stop measuring marketing in isolation. Marketing and sales are both part of the same process: raising revenue. Measure CPOD instead.
  2. Create a unified lead process. You need a closed-loop lead process that tracks prospect activity from beginning to end (and back again, in the case of lead nurturing) that is supported by a system (see this post for more on that).
  3. Get adult supervision. In working with companies to develop lead management programs, Brian has found that the most successful companies have a CEO who does not try to parse marketing from sales and assign credit/blame to each. He or she emphasizes one revenue generating process that both groups contribute to.
  4. Create content that is tied to (and signals) the different stages of the buying process. As we in B2B focus more and more on trying to pull in prospects through thought leadership, we need to understand that our life’s blood is the Epiphany Stage of the buying process. We need marketing content specifically targeted at that stage, as well as the more traditional stages like awareness and interest. When we create content targeted to specific buying stages—and get sales to agree to that categorization—we no longer need to get salespeople to check off the box for marketing’s contribution; that contribution will become implicit.

What would you add to this list?

Filed Under: ITSMA Research, Marketing Automation, Marketing Metrics and Analytics, Sales and Marketing Collaboration Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

How old-school data capture is poisoning marketing and what to do about it

July 10, 2009 by

As social media becomes more prevalent in marketing, we’re going to have to rethink how we gather information from prospects.

We’re starting to see social media have a positive impact on driving traffic to websites and on lead generation. In our recent Web 2.0 survey, (all ITSMA clients can download this executive summary), we found that “increased web traffic” was the most frequently cited benefit of Web 2.0 efforts so far (by 67% of respondents). “Increased lead generation” was farther down the list—24% are seeing it.

Now that may be due in part to the fact that most B2B marketers have only recently begun using Web 2.0 in their marketing—fewer than 35% of marketers in our survey have been using blogs or podcasts for more than one year, and just 3% have been using social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) for at least that long.

Social media and lead generation go together
But there is a natural link between social media and lead generation. It is a natural way to drive traffic back to your site for registration—as long as you have great content to offer. And those who are beyond the experimental stage with social media are already seeing this benefit (24% ain’t bad given the nascent nature of this stuff). Indeed, some B2B early adopters are seeing 10-15% of their lead totals generated through social media, according to this survey by DemandGenReport.

Given the potential for lead generation through social media, the question then becomes how much information should we try to get from people coming to us through social media? I think the inherently casual (social!) nature of social media means that we should err on the side of less information.

Should we not capture any data at all?
B2B marketer Tom Bottom got me thinking about this issue this week with a daring post that questions whether we should be doing any data capture at all. He argues that putting a data form in front of a prospect displays a lack of confidence in the quality of our work and at worst drives people into the arms of competitors. In the epiphany stage of the buying process, we should be offering people great information, not turning them off by trying to sleaze information out of them when they’re nowhere near being ready to buy. Data gathering should be reserved for the interest phase, when people are creating a short list of providers and will more willingly put up with being a prisoner of data capture.

Meanwhile, Blake Hinckley cites a stat from Marketing Sherpa that says that the data we’re capturing is garbage anyway because 71% of people lie on the forms. I’m a little skeptical about taking that stat at face value. There are plenty of cells on data forms (too many, in most cases) so people may be lying about things that don’t really matter anyway. In my experience, IT prospects tend to lie about their titles and their level of interest because they’re afraid that they won’t get the best content or treatment if they admit that they’re trapped on the help desk instead of wielding that big stick of decision-making. But is that lead totally useless? I don’t think so.

Get data through actions, not words
But Blake is on to something when he talks about a concept called passive profiling, in which marketers gather data based on the kinds of content they are offering to prospects rather than through forms. Prospects are only required to give up their names and emails to access content that then tells the marketers how interested the prospects really are. He offers a great example from a client:

“For example, in our campaign with Level 3, a leading fiber-based communications company, we tracked whether prospects downloaded a vbook. Since the vbook explains the need for reliable connectivity (Level 3’s product), if the user browsed through several sections, we could reliably consider them a warm lead. The vbook also contained a Level 3 Network Map embedded as a PDF. If prospects downloaded it, we can assume they were checking if their building or business is within Level 3’s fiber network. PDF-checkers were hot leads, interested in Level 3’s solution, so we quickly passed these leads off to Level 3’s sales team to make the call in time.”

Sync your content to the stages of the buying process
He later says that the decision between active and passive profiling shouldn’t be so binary—that you can mix a little bit of both. But I think that assumes that we are actively (sorry) thinking about how much data we should be capturing before we start to piss people off. I don’t think we’re doing that. By default, we try to get as much as we can, because we figure sales is going to rip us up if we don’t—or because we figure free content (that wasn’t free to us—we killed ourselves creating it) should have to come at some kind of price.

But I think Tom has a great point when he says that there’s not much reason to be asking people for a lot of information during the early stages of the buying process. That’s why it’s important to sync your content to the different phases of the buying process and let that drive the kind of data you try to gather.

Stop collecting this data
For the epiphany and interest stages of the buying process (which is where most of us play anyway), I think we need to practice passive profiling wherever possible, and when it isn’t possible, we should slash the data forms to the bare minimum. Here’s what I think the forms should ask for:

  • Name
  • E-mail
  • Would you like to subscribe to content about this business issue? (Writing clear headlines and descriptions is important.)

That’s it.

Things to banish forever:

  • Address (Why would I want to engage with anyone who wants to send me snail mail?)
  • Title (totally meaningless and a prime reason to lie)
  • Company (so we’re a client/not a client; what does that have to do with anything at this stage of the buying process?)
  • Level of interest (we’re here because we’re interested in learning about business issues, not your products)
  • Budget (with the complexity of the stuff we’re selling, this data would be crap anyway)
  • Phone (c’mon—it’s a new century)

Data forms act like social media doesn’t exist. A combination of conversational engagement and great thought leadership content are what we need to engage with customers in the coming years, not qualification forms.

What do you think?

Check out the B2B Marketing Zone

In keeping with my recent post about being part of the B2B online marketers guild, I wanted to point you to the B2B Marketing Zone, where Tony Karrer has done a nice job of building a list of relevant B2B marketing blogs (including mine—thanks, Tony!) and offers a handy summary of all of them so you don’t have to visit a bunch of different sites to see what’s going on. Another great example of the aggregation blog strategy that I was talking about.

Filed Under: Lead Generation, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , ,

Three steps for B2B marketers to build a personal social media presence

June 26, 2009 by

In my last post, I hope I convinced you why you should establish a personal presence in social media even if your company hasn’t done so yet. That was the why of social media.

This time, I’d like to concentrate on the how. I’m going to attempt to explain it by humbly offering my own initiation into social media as a guide. When I despair at ever mastering all the social media tools that exist out there, I remind myself (as I hope you will) that at its core social media is all about communication and that marketers are all expert communicators. We’ve already mastered the hardest part; the tools are something that anyone can learn.

In pursuing a personal presence in social media, I had it easier than you will. My job is to learn about how to become a better B2B marketer and to share what I learn with others. You may have to adopt a more split business personality (and do more work). You shouldn’t just get involved in social media to the extent necessary to do your day job. To get better, you should think of yourself as part of the emerging guild of B2B marketers in social media. You stand a better chance of learning more about how to accomplish your goals at work if you can engage with a community of people that face all the same challenges you face.

I think of Paul Dunay as one of the model citizens of this online B2B guild. Paul has been a B2B marketer for years for companies like BearingPoint and Avaya and has accomplished quite a bit with social media in those jobs. But his personal presence in social media is based on sharing best practices in B2B and social media generally—there’s nary a mention of his company or his day job.

So now that we have established your personal social media goal—to be a valued member of the online B2B marketing guild—let’s talk about how you go about building your presence.

I approached my initiation by thinking of it broadly in terms of communications rather than specific tools—because the sheer number of social media tools is overwhelming. There are three broad ways that marketers use social media (I go into these in more detail in this post):

Step 1. Monitor

Monitoring is finding and tracking the conversations that are occurring about B2B marketing online. Monitoring is the foundation of your personal presence. Before you can begin talking, you have to listen. You need to identify the most important influencers in you market and track those conversations.

Pick an RSS tool. One of the best ways to start is with RSS. There are a million tools out there for doing this, and you can integrate RSS feeds into your browser but I find that cluttered and distracting. I use SharpReader, which is free and open source and lets you scroll through headlines without having to read individual items, which saves a lot of time.

Now, I have to admit that I’m not a diligent RSS follower. I mostly use it as a platform for determining the blogs I like best and then follow them through good old-fashioned e-mail (the tool that most bloggers use to do this is Feedburner). SharpReader is more a reference database for the blogs that I like rather than a day-to-day tool. But it’s nice to have them all in one place.

Pick blogs to follow. Here are some important B2B blogs that I track:

Here are some important social media blogs that I track:

There are tons more blogs out there, but I’m picky. I’m interested in good guild members who think and are willing to share.

Use Twitter for monitoring. Another way to monitor the online B2B marketing guild is through Twitter. Twitter is a fantastic tool for learning and sharing, as I explain in this post. “Following” is a non-threatening way to build up your network of contacts without having to know any of them. To me, it’s the missing link between monitoring blogs and connecting with people through social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. I’d like to be able to connect with more B2B colleagues through LinkedIn and Facebook, but sending invites to people who I only know through their blog posts or their professional credentials seems incredibly presumptuous. I won’t do it. And the few times I’ve accepted invites from people on this basis I’ve usually lived to regret it. Either we turn out to have nothing in common or they try to hit me up for work.

But Twitter lets you start to build a professional relationship without getting in each other’s face. It’s like being at a cocktail party where you see a circle of people having an interesting conversation that you can just break into—without having to know any of them or having to say something interesting. You can just listen. Even better, you’re able to send those people a signal that you think that what they have to say is interesting enough to follow. And that can be a nice ego stroke for them (if they don’t already have 40,000 followers). If they follow you, then you can start to build ties through re-tweeting and direct messages.

Pick a tool for managing Twitter. As soon as you join Twitter, however, you’ll realize how poor the site is for managing your Twitter presence. You’re better off getting a dedicated tool that lets you manage the flow of information. Here again, there are a bunch of tools available, but the one that works for most people is Tweetdeck. It’s a nicely designed dashboard that lets you create columns for different categories of tweets. For example, I have a column that does a running search for “B2B.” It’s a great source of content and for people that I may want to follow. By default, Tweetdeck has columns for tweets by the people you follow and for any direct messages (messages that only the two of you can see, not your followers) that you receive from people. The best way to figure out how to use Tweetdeck is to hover your mouse over the image that comes with each tweet you receive. You’ll see options for reply (send a message to the twitterer that everyone following you can see), re-tweet (you think the tweet you’ve received is cool so you’re sending it out to all of your followers), or send a direct message.

I started by following the bloggers I like, as well as friends and colleagues. You will find that as you start tweeting (make sure your Twitter bio mentions B2B and marketing somewhere so that people can find you through Twitter search) people will just start following you. You can accept their follows or reject them (there are many spammers out there). But finding people is tedious and time consuming.

Tools for figuring out whom to follow. Of course, there are tools for making searching for people to follow on Twitter less painful. I use a free tool called TwiPing that lets you see who is following others in your network. So for example, if you decide to follow me (@ckochster—Twitter names always have the @ in front of them), you can use TwiPing to show you all the people who follow me. You can “mass follow” my followers to instantly build up your network, or pick through the contacts individually (their bio information is included). Other good tools for bulking up your network include:

  • MrTweet—Recommends people based on direct interactions that your followers have had with others outside your network.
  • WeFollow
  • Twitseeker—Find people based on the subjects they twitter about the most.

For more Twitter tools than you could ever possibly use, check out The Ultimate List of Twitter Tools.

I don’t believe a bigger network is necessarily better. And don’t go nuts with following others. If you follow many more people than follow you, everyone might start to think you’re a spammer. I think following between 100-200 quality B2B twitterers should give you enough to think about. (For more on Twitter etiquette, see Twitter Bible: Everything You Need To Know About Twitter.)

Step 2. Engage

When you are ready to move beyond reading others’ blogs and tweets, you can start to engage as an active member of the online B2B guild.

Use Twitter to engage through linking. Twitter is a great way to engage because the 140-character limit means that Twitter is for linking, not thinking. As you dig through the blogs, newsletters, online publications and other things you read regularly, twitter the stuff you find interesting and add a line or two of commentary. The quality of your followers will go up, because they can see what you’re interested in through your tweets, and you’ll be able to engage in more direct dialog with the members of your Twitter community. Be sure to get an account at Ping.fm so that when you twitter, you can automatically have your tweets show up on the other social networks of your choosing.

Transfer Twitter relationships to LinkedIn and Facebook. After you’ve created a link with someone on Twitter (they follow you, too) and you’ve exchanged a few direct messages, you have an excuse to invite them to connect on LinkedIn or Facebook so that you can getting to know one another better. There are all sorts of opinions about whether LinkedIn or Facebook is better for business contacts. Facebook is quickly crossing over to business from its beginnings as a personal network. But for now, LinkedIn is still considered more appropriate for business networking.

Join LinkedIn and Facebook groups and answer questions. Perhaps more important than building up the number of your connections on LinkedIn and Facebook is joining groups of like-minded professionals and engaging in conversations and answering questions. For example, we just happen to have an ITSMA group on LinkedIn that you can join. You can post news articles, ask questions, and answer other peoples’ questions. Other B2B-oriented groups on LinkedIn include:

Step 3. Manage

Managing means that you take an active role in creating conversations and fostering a community. Here are some ways to do it:

Decide whether to do a blog. I’d recommend against it unless you write regularly as part of your day job. Obviously, writing is hard. Worse, there are a million marketing blogs out there already. To stand out, you really have to think and contribute unique ideas. I’ve been blogging for years, beginning when I was at CIO magazine, and I still find it difficult after all these years.

But there really is no better way to serve the guild than to start a blog. If you’re worried about having enough to say, create a blog designed to be a service to your readers. Some blogs thrive by being filters rather than thought leaders. They summarize content from other blogs and thread multiple external posts on a topic together to add more context and meaning. They also assemble subject-specific lists of content and update them as needed. A good example of this kind of blogging is Junta42, which has a post called 42+ Social Media Tools that is regularly updated with contributions from readers. These lists are great traffic drivers and make their creators very popular among guild members (who often do most of the work in the end!).

If you decide to take the plunge and start a blog, WordPress is the way to go. It’s free, open source, and incredibly rich. It has blossomed from a blogging tool into a full-blown website content management system (in fact, it is now the content management system for ITSMA.com)—though it’s still incredibly easy to use for newbies. WordPress also has a great support community. I was able to get this blog up and running in less than one hour.

Start your own online group. Besides creating online communities in business-oriented third-party hosted social media venues like LinkedIn, you can also start guild-related wikis. Wetpaint offers a nice free wiki.

Regardless of where or how you start your own group, be prepared to invest a lot of time and content. Research shows that even in vibrant online communities, fewer than 10% of members contribute any content and fewer than 2% take an active role in starting and leading discussions. For now, you’re better off taking advantage of the scale of a LinkedIn or Facebook to draw attention to your group and build it than trying to create a community on your own.

If you work in a big company and would like to be a good guild leader for your internal marketing colleagues, you should check out Yammer. Many companies are having great success using Yammer as a kind of guerilla knowledge management system.

I hope this post is helpful. It is offered in the spirit of the guild. I hope you will comment and add in your suggestions to help B2B marketers build their personal presences online. I will update the post with new links as I get them.

Filed Under: Blogging, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Five reasons why B2B marketers should be in social media even if their companies are not

June 25, 2009 by

To be successful with social media marketing, we are going to have to become social media guinea pigs. We are accustomed to creating programs and campaigns and then standing back and observing them. Social media will demand involvement that is much more personal. That’s why it’s important for us to start building our expertise in social media today, even if social media isn’t yet at the top of our marketing agenda (and our research shows that among B2B marketers, it is not).

Here are five reasons why you need to get good at this stuff before your company does:

  • Social media is real time. Social media is always on. Conversations about your company don’t stop when your call center closes or you empty your email inbox. Much of the thrill for Twitter users is the synchronous, real-time nature of this streaming flow of conversation. The river of words flows by and you can jump in or watch it disappear around the bend. That presents a big challenge for marketers trying to monitor what’s being said about their brands. You need to be involved in social media to monitor it.
  • Social media is two-way. Social media is conversation and community through sharing. Social media is, by definition, two-way. That’s very different from our traditional marketing campaigns and programs, which are based in unilaterally developed messages that are broadcast—and then abandoned to fend for themselves. Social media marketing does not emerge fully formed, ready to go out and conquer the world; it is the needy kid parked on the couch who talks back and requires constant attention and support. You need to learn how to develop messages from within social media, not from outside it—and then you need to nurture those messages continuously over time.
  • Social media disrupts marketing structures and processes. When you construct and control the messages and programs yourself, you can go home at the end of the day with a clear conscience. Hierarchical structures and linear processes work fine because everything has a timeline and a beginning, middle, and end (launch). Social media launches every week, or every day—and sometimes, when you least expect it. Few marketing groups are creating dedicated social media teams or roles, so most marketers will see social media intrude upon and disrupt the work patterns and expectations we have all come to understand. Developing a personal understanding of how it all works will make it less disruptive.
  • Social media is a social—not a business—phenomenon. Marketing and business are joined at the hip. Changes in one automatically affect the other. But social media is developing in a separate world: popular culture. The effects on business and marketing are less direct and harder to predict and absorb. Mark Zuckerberg has made more progress in socializing the web in the last two years with Facebook than Ray Ozzie has in 20 years (anybody remember Lotus Notes and groupware?).
    The real innovation in social media is happening outside of the worlds of business and IT—and then pushing inexorably into the enterprise as employees fight to bring the ease of communication they have at home with them to work. The line between our business lives and personal lives have never been blurrier. Developing a personal presence in social media will bring that line into better focus and make your social media marketing efforts more effective.
  • Social media causes fear. Buried beneath our demands for an ROI accounting of the value of social media is something more primitive: fear. Anything that has the power to destroy industries (journalism) and redefine politics (the Obama campaign—actually the Howard Dean campaign, but nobody remembers him) has the power to inspire fear. That’s because humans are hard wired to resist change (the unfamiliar could get us killed in our caveman days).
    Longtime social media evangelist Stowe Boyd points out that businesses had the same concerns about putting telephones on the desks of employees in the years after WWII (they’ll just waste people’s time, they’re a security threat, the direct link to revenue isn’t there) that they’re voicing about social media today.
    Of course, those concerns were and are legitimate, but no doubt they are also rooted in our fear that perhaps this stuff really will change all the business habits we’ve grown so comfortable with over the past century. (And for the record, the definitive ROI study on the use of telephone communications in business never arrived—the telephone moved directly to unquestioned necessity within a few years.)
    Don’t stop waiting for proof of social media ROI, but question the logic that resists doing anything until that proof arrives. Don’t assume that your company or your marketing group is being smart by waiting; assume that at least some of that resistance is grounded in fear and complacency. Even more reason to build your personal expertise while others wait.

What do you think?

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , , ,
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