Marketing Clique

Marketing automation software continues to gain momentum. The reason marketing automation has become so appealing is because it allows businesses to do more with less—more marketing and sales with fewer marketers and salespeople. And one of the helpful side effects of the software implementation process is that it encourages a much-needed alignment of marketing and sales.

But the real value of anything a business implements is how it will help to attract and retain customers. A company's decision about which marketing automation software to purchase and how to implement it once they have committed to it are paramount. And the purchase decision can have a profound impact on marketing, sales, and IT.

Use marketing automation for lead nurturing

The most appealing aspect of marketing automation is the ability to automatically manage a lead—managing the buyer who has decided to begin evaluating your product but who is not quite ready to pull the trigger and sign on the dotted line. Traditionally, salespeople have managed this process. But salespeople get antsy, call the prospect too much, and if the prospect doesn't buy in a "reasonable" amount of time the salesperson moves on too soon. But what if that buyer is on one of those long and winding roads to purchase? What if there are little nuggets of value you can spoon feed the buyer during that long-and-drawn-out buying process? Lead management software helps salespeople spend more time with fewer prospects.

Use marketing automation to deliver the right value to the right prospect at the right time

The beauty of being able to automatically score a lead and begin the whole nurturing process is that you can begin to segment your marketing efforts. Naturally, there are some prospects for whom you want to roll out the red carpet. And while you certainly don't want to dismiss the other prospects, perhaps you know that they can be effectively developed without as much attention.

Demand generation is most effective when you're delivering something of value during the research phase before a buyer purchases.

Traditional pamphlets and brochures filled with marketing jargon just don’t cut it anymore. Buyers are looking for informative and interesting content that provides actual value and education. They expect vendors to provide them the content they need throughout the sales cycle. Increasingly, the first two-thirds of that cycle is spent researching the market and vendors, without regular contact with a sales rep. To remain top of mind with the buyer and claim the "thought leadership" position, marketers are deploying marketing automation to provide a steady stream of educational content for buyers.
—Lauren Carlson, Tailwinds for Marketing Automation Software

I think Lauren has a strong point. But what is that pearl of value that we should be giving away to our prospect? This is where the collaboration between marketing and sales can really pay off. Sales will reveal what the buyers are asking for, and marketing can help to develop the types of valuable devlierables that can be used during the lead nurturing process. These deliverables are apt to be different for different types of buyers.

Beware of the overuse of email

A recent Forrester Research report points out that marketers are overusing the email feature in marketing automation. Just because you've got a marketing automation tool that can deliver a customized email every week doesn't mean that will be the most effective deliverable for the prospect.

• If you can imagine that your qualified prospects are simply customers that haven't yet officially signed on, what would you be providing them? Is there anything you can provide that will be valuable for them and not incrementally cost you and your team substantially more time and money to deliver?

I think marketing automation is here to stay and it's an exciting new development in the whole world of customer relationship management (CRM). But like many other evolutions at the crossroads of IT and business there is due diligence that needs to happen before the purchase, and cogent analysis of the planning process once you're ready to go live.

I look forward to your feedback!

I recently listened to a presentation by a marketing executive from a very visible, ostensibly easy-to-reach company. At the end of her PowerPoint presentation there was the quintessential how to contact me slide. Her presentation was fine, up until then. She looked up at her how to contact me slide on the presentation screen and began gloating that she's hard to reach; that she doesn't answer phone calls; travels a lot, and receives such an extreme volume of email that if she doesn't recognize the sender she's unlikely to respond.

The response from many in the audience was a nervous grin and a knowing nod, as if they too were so damn busy they didn't have time to communicate either. My reaction, however, was a gagging in my throat, and I think a few others felt the same.

Given the convergence of sales and marketing, I think it's incredibly important to meet customers where they're at. If a client or prospect "reaches out to you," it's a good thing to respond. In other words, they're not going to respect the idea that you're so busy that you don't have time.

The same goes internally. If you're a big, important executive who has an army of people who report to you, take the time to connect with your tribe. It's good for everyone. Employees are an important variable in the success quotient. Umm, they're human.

The convergence of sales and marketing means that marketing has to be more accessible

The lines are blurring. The roles are converging. Times are different in the B2B lead generation world. Be accessible. I'm not suggesting that you be available 24/7. But if you supposedly make yourself available via telephone, email, IM, then be prepared to use those tools when people are trying to contact you.

The CEO of a very well-known company I used to work for once explained to me:

"Greg, I always answer my phone and respond to emails. Why? Not because I know who everyone is. Quite the opposite—because I don't know who everyone is. It could be someone who helps me and my business. Quite often it is. I'm still in control. If I'm through with the telephone conversation I let the person know. Likewise, I'll tell the person via email what to expect as a next step, and sometimes it's 'don't bother following up with me any further.'"

I can tell you, first-hand, that he held true to his communication ideals. He responded to all direct communications. We were in a taxi together, after hours, and his cell phone (a number he provided on his business card!) rang. He didn't know who it was, didn't recognize the number. It turned out to be a reporter from the Wall Street Journal. She was on deadline, needed to crank out an article within the hour, and wanted a quote from my boss. He gave her a snappy quote. It appeared in the WSJ the following day, was read by many thousands of businesspeople and furthered my boss' position (and our company's) as an authority in the marketplace.

It's somewhat of a surprise, but marketing and sales still rely heavily on paper-based collateral. The reality is that businesspeople of all generations will still hold onto and study something that's printed on paper.

Given the evergreen approach of using paper in your marketing and sales efforts, put your best foot forward:

Business Cards - A crisp, professionally-design business card still makes a favorable impression. Some of what happens is subconscious: people get an impression of your company's quality and style. A thin, flimsy card may give the wrong impression.

Marketing & Sales Collateral - B2B sales collateral has changed. Partly because of a growing trend to becoming more open, authentic, and transparent, there is a willingness to share information that builds trust with buyers. Sellers add value by providing helpful information that benefits the buyers, regardless of whether they buy. For example, marketing automation SaaS company, Marketo, offers a formidable resources page on their website. Marketo's Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing is an exceptionally well designed [paper] guide that adds value to any marketer who's trying to figure out lead nurturing.

• If you're going to hand out whitepapers, or other paper marketing collateral at a conference or trade show, make sure they're quality. Yes, most people will throw them away before they leave. But you've got a chance to make an impression. What kind of impression do you want to make?

Proposals - Once you are ready to propose, it's a good practice to provide a paper-based proposal for your prospect. Ideally, the proposal will be something you can present to the prospect in person. These days it's becoming increasingly common for proposals to be delivered as attachments to emails. But if you get a chance to deliver a beautiful full color paper proposal, do it.

Hand-written Thank-you Notes - Diana Huff recently wrote about 7 Old Fashioned Marketing Tips That Set You Apart. She reminds us that the hand-written thank-you note is a welcome differentiator in today's digital world. I couldn't agree more. Sending your client a hand-written not on quality stationery makes a statement about you and your business. Show your clients and prospects that you have some class and care about their business, personally. It's okay to be personally grateful in a professional relationship.

Training & Instruction Guides - If your product or service requires training, there's another opportunity to show off your brand and create a favorable marketing impression. Training collateral is all-too-often overlooked as a branding and marketing opportunity. Take the time to ensure your training materials are presented in a way that allows your company's product or service to be presented optimally.

Can you think of any other paper-based opportunities for your company to step it up? Let me know if you have an example, positive, or negative, that illustrates the importance of paper-based collateral in today's digital world.

Thanks for reading this digital post. If we end up doing business together maybe I'll send you a hand-written note!

Marketing and sales is the life engine of most B2B and B2C companies. This increased reliance on marketing and sales working together – to coordinate and design effective revenue generation plans together – is both strategic and tactical. But given the cost of turnover at an estimated 150% of an employee's total compensation package, and the average sales and marketing tenure of less than 2 years, why do companies continue to fall short with the most important element of their company?

I don't claim to have all of the answers, but I can offer three ways to help:

1. Make your company more cult-like. No, I'm not joking. When marketing and salespeople feel that their company has purpose, and that they're part of it, they begin operating from an intrinsic standpoint. They will contribute more to the company's overall success, both externally and internally.

Purpose drives employee engagement, which is intuitive -- people feel great about working for a company that is making a difference in the world. My view is that brands that are not driven by purpose will have a tougher time acquiring talent, especially as globalization and the influx of younger workers shape the composition of our employee base.
—Erin Mulligan Nelson, June 2010 AdAge article

2. Realize that sales and marketing are melding. When you need marketing at a meeting, invite sales. When you need sales at a meeting, invite marketing. The two work together. If you encourage the two groups to work more closely it will help the bottom line, and esprit de corps.

3. Encourage an open organization. Companies that operate with more open principles can benefit. Marketing and salespeople will gleen the benefits of an open organization. Want to know if your organization is truly open? Take a look at this Openness Audit from Charlene Li's new book Open Leadership:

As if you need more data, Forrester Research has forecasted that the number of people with mobile Net access will double by 2014, and 80% of mobile users will be using third-generation (3G) handsets.

What does this mean?

It means there are no more viable excuses not to begin integrating mobile with your B2B marketing efforts. Your customers and prospects are using mobile devices running on the top 4 smart phone platforms:

1. iPhone
2. BlackBerry
3. Windows Mobile
4. Google Android

B2B Mobile Marketing Opportunities Are All Around Us!

• Do you have a light, scaled-down .mobi version of your website? Work with a mobile consultant and consider what types of information would present well.
• Salespeople and marketers are constantly trying to reach buyers who are traveling. They're in airports, hotels... everywhere except in front of their laptop! And when they're on their laptop, it's late at night, in their hotel room, they're tired, and focused on urgent emails and presentations. If a salesperson knows someone is traveling, s/he can send a link to a .mobi site that the recipient can comfortably read on their smart phone while waiting in an airport, or wherever.
• Mobile display advertising networks have improved. There are now plenty of behaviorally-targeted (BT) display advertising opportunities.
• Mobile video is exploding. If you have a video that can be re-purposed for mobile, do it now!
• Your email newsletter, or drip campaign, is being read on mobile devices. Include links to a .mobi version, with the opportunity to see content on a mobile device. Mobilize your B2B lead generation!
• At a trade show? Check out the location-based mobile services that are out there. Bluetooth hubs make it possible to do proximity B2B marketing (200-300 feet).
• Mobile B2B search marketing (including PPC) on Google, Yahoo!, Bing.
• SMS alerts.

Mobile B2B marketing can give you a competitive advantage

Most B2B marketers are still shy about testing mobile. Maybe they dipped their toe in the water a couple of years ago and didn't see much success. Premature abandonment was common. But there's a lot of value in meeting customers where they're at. The time is ripe to try again!

Proposals present another ideal time for marketing and sales to buddy up. According to the Sant Corporation, a leading proposal automation software company, many organizations' proposals are hastily assembled. Unfortunately, salespeople end up sending out what amounts to a jalopy–an amalgamation of disparate proposals they've sent to a variety of prospects.

Unfortunately, most salespeople resort to "cloning" as a means of getting their proposals done quickly. They borrow a proposal that somebody else has written for a different client, use the Find/Replace function in Microsoft Word to change the client's name, and print it! That's about as personalized as a can of spinach. (Plus they run the risk of having the wrong client's name show up somewhere in that proposal. You can imagine what that does for rapport and credibility.) —How to Write a Winning Proposal, Sant Corporation

The proposal is the ultimate opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge of your prospect's business challenge and how you propose helping them to solve it. While the proposal ought to be all about your prospect, it's also a time to show off your company's branding. Use this opportunity to produce a document that exudes professionalism–a foreshadowing of what it's going to be like working with your organization.

The proposal is clearly one of the most critical elements of the sales process. Research supports that the sales process, along with product and service featuers are most important to the buyer.

• Related Post: 2 Ways to Beef Up Your B2B Sales Process

Marketing and sales distilled into one document

Since the proposal is a personalized summary of what your company is going to deliver, it's a marketing project. But since it's about closing business, it's a sales project. Therefore, marketing and sales need to sit down together and agree on how proposals should be structured, from a branding and marketing standpoint. That doesn't mean that salespeople need to be sending out "boilerplate" proposals. But it does mean that your company's proposals can have a consistent look and feel–branded, instead of the jalopy that normally gets sent out.

If you have a growing team of salespeople and there is an increasing volume of proposals, sales letters, and responses to RFPs being delivered to prospects, consider hiring a professional company like Sant Corporation to support your efforts to becoming more streamlined.

Dos and Don'ts

• Do make the proposal about the prospect. Of course you need to describe your organization's approach to solving their business problem, but keep it focused on them.
• Do use consistent, branded verbiage to describe your company's products and services. It reduces confusion and makes deliverables easier to explain.
• Do keep the proposal as brief as possible. Ideally, a proposal is being sent to a prospect once there has been agreement that it is time to formalize a relationship. In a perfect scenario, the proposal is simply a way to summarize what you and the prospect have already agreed to, informally. If you haven't verbally agreed to anything it might be too early for the proposal.
• Don't deliver the proposal as a PowerPoint presentation. It's not a presentation, or a pitch. It's a proposal. That doesn't mean you can't get buy in and a verbal agreement to work together using a pitch or a presentation.
• Don't use the proposal as a detailed project overview. I know it's tempting, because your delivery team doesn't want to get roped into an underpriced project. But the project timeline and detailed description should be a separate document.
• Don't use the proposal as a master service agreement (MSA). The proposal doesn't have to be the document that gets dragged through legal. The MSA is that bugger. The MSA is a dry, boring, chocked-full-of-legalese document that only lawyers should read.
• Don't give away the farm! Some proposals end up being so detailed that a wavering prospect can take the proposal and turn your services into a commodity by pricing out each deliverable.
• Do have your colleagues proofread it before it goes out the door.
• Do consider sending a hard copy via FedEx, especially if you think the prospect is receiving multiple bids. A FedEx delivery still commands an air of urgency, importance, and curiosity in the business world. It's good insurance that your proposal will get opened.
• Do keep in mind that your proposal may be read by a number of different people, not just the recipient. So resist being overly familiar. Explain products, services, and deliverables in an easy-to-read format.

McKinsey just released a study that examines the results from a new survey of 1,200 purchasing decision makers in SMBs and large companies in the United States and Europe. Among other things, the report reveals what salespeople are doing to sabotage the process of B2B sales.

The study found that customers will normally cite price as being the single most influential factor in their decision. But upon closer examination of how customers rated a vendor's overall performance, product features and the sales experience were valued as being the most important. Sales manages a critical role, but a timely and intelligent hand off from marketing is paramount.

Of the many habits that undermine the sales experience, two that are relatively easy to fix accounted for 55 percent of the behavior customers described as “most destructive”: failing to have adequate product knowledge and contacting customers too frequently (exhibit). Only 3 percent said they weren’t contacted enough, suggesting customers are open to fewer, more meaningful interactions. —McKinsey report, The Basics of business-to-business sales success

Marketing Automation Makes Sales More Successful

Given the facts that:

1. salespeople have the nasty habit of pestering customers too frequently, and
2. buyers crave more information about product and service features

it makes perfect sense that vendors spend time coming up with a way to harness the reach and frequency of marketing automation.

Marketing automation software, like Eloqua, Marketo, Genius, Silverpop, allows vendors to creatively design lead management flows that meet customers where they're at. A well designed marketing automation flow is respectful of a buyers' time, delivers appropriate, well-written, and consistently presented information, all leading to a more appropriate hand off to sales. Too often, sales is given a "lead" before the buyer is ready to begin interacting with sales. By using marketing automation, buyers are methodically delivered information until they reach a pre-determined threshold where the hand off to sales occurs.

Genius.com has released findings from their Genius and BtoB Magazine Marketer Skills Survey. The survey data and qualitative commentary highlight the evolving role of the B2B marketer. Interestingly, one of the key findings validates the core focus of this blog, Marketing Clique:

And they [marketing and sales] aren’t getting together in the same room either. 58 percent of those surveyed indicated that they met with sales just once a month or less for discussions on strategy, success metrics or marketing campaigns. 8 percent, or nearly 1 out of 10, admitted to never meeting with their sales counterparts. While some of these responses can be dismissed because of increased workloads and location issues, the lack of interaction and collaboration nonetheless suggests an unfortunate outcome: sales and marketing continued to be as misaligned as ever. —Genius and BtoB Magazine Marketer Skills Survey

Sales and marketing increasingly have the same goal

My opinion is that sales and marketing are converging. Successful marketers will realize that their organization's success is ultimately going to be measured by how much revenue is being generated over the shortest amount of time. That's just life in the big city. The relationship between sales and marketing must evolve and become more intimate. For better, or worse, this new research from Genius.com helps to validate it—marketing and sales still need to cozy up!

Tear Down That Wall!

It's here. Sales and marketing are quickly converging. Buyers have changed the way they buy. Sellers, then, need to change they way they sell. Sales needs to cozy up to marketing. Marketing needs to suck it up and realize they're really "sales reps" in disguise... Eeew!

“If you look at the sales and marketing funnel, people are envisioning a blend, a fusion,” said Geoff Rego, CEO and co-founder of Market2Lead. “Marketing is sales, for all practical matters, because no prospect wants to talk to the sales guys anymore. The buying cycle has changed completely.”—Geoff Rego, CEO, Market2Lead (acquired by Oracle), excerpt from B2B Online article.

What has changed?

• Buyers now have more decision-making information at their disposal
• Buyers now have more control over how they digest product and service information
• Buyers do not want to be dependent on sales reps to pitch product information
• There is more risk associated with bringing on additional sales reps and expecting them to produce short-term results
• Sales collateral can be quickly and efficiently disseminated over the Web, thereby reducing workload on sales
• Leads can be coached from many different sources, simultaneously, and scored for their relevancy over time
• Sales does not have to follow up on and develop every single lead that comes in through marketing
• Social media marketing is real
• Marketing drives sales' success
• Sales drives marketing's success

What has stayed the same?

• People still make decisions based on emotion
• Buyers' due diligence will be based on how much risk is associated with the decision they're making
• Many companies still live and die by quarterly performance
• The sales pipeline is still critical
• Most organizations have a tough time with accurate forecasts because salespeople tend to either overestimate or sandbag, and marketing is unrealistic
• Most companies will be slow to react to the new tools that have become available
• Technology is not a "silver bullet"

Sales & Marketing Need to Buddy Up

The reality of most products, especially in the B2B world, and regardless of how easy a company thinks it should be to sell, is that there are complicating factors in the sales process - things that can retard the buying process. Most products and services are not complicated by the seller; rather, the buyer harbors difficult-to-predict decision-making criteria, most of which is around mitigating risk. Marketing, therefore, needs to align with sales to understand where automation may be helpful, how to more accurately score leads, and how to work with sales to develop a more accurate sales pipeline to keep the executive team and investors better informed and establish realistic expectations.

Conclusion

Sales and marketing are melding. This symbiotic relationship is important in any organization, but is accentuated where sales pipelines tend to be longer, and there is more risk surrounding the acquisition of the product or service. There is more that marketing can do to help sales be successful. Much of that will be rooted in marketing automation, lead generation, and lead scoring. Likewise, there is more that sales can do help marketing be more successful, like assuming ownership of a lead at the appropriate time and therefore realizing a more desirable close ratio.

The marriage of marketing and sales is an exciting relationship, but there will be many questions about how to properly develop, deploy, and measure its success. I look forward to sharing more thoughts in upcoming posts!