Positioning is a funny thing. You want to hoist a flag that others will rally around--something unique and compelling, something easily understood and valued. It has to be different enough that you stand apart from the competition. But it has to be familiar enough that customers quickly understand what you're selling. That simple dichotomy--be different, be familiar--sometimes produces a viral feedback loop that can slow innovation across an entire industry.
Take the marketing software industry. A few years ago, I ran a research program at the CMO Council studying the adoption of CRM and related applications. At the time, I identified nearly a thousand vendors creating applications that in some way integrated with CRM. Campaign management.
Lead scoring. Sales force automation. You name it.
Some of these applications were truly innovative, some were flavor-of-the-month knock offs. Many were simply automating some small piece of annoying manual labor. But all were targetted toward the same audience--marketing executives. Now, historically, marketing executives haven't been the most sophisticated consumers of technology. Most marketers with the experience to be a senior executive today went to school before the rise of the Internet, and any new wave of technology can be a learning curve. There are plenty of savvy early adopters, to be sure, but taken as a whole, the marketing profession is still in the very early stages of technology adoption.
So when hundreds of technology vendors meet up with marketing executives, they have a fundamental challenge. How do you communicate a value proposition that senior marketing executives will understand and appreciate? Well, you listen of course. What do marketing executives say they need? Not surprisingly, marketing executives frequently list the challenges that keep them up at night. Generate actionable leads.
Demonstrate marketing ROI. Deliver performance metrics and accountability.
And this is where the ideal of differentiation meets the survival imperative of finding common ground with your customer.
As a wide spectrum of application vendors face the obstacle of communicating their Techonology Difference to non-technical marketing executives, the vendors tune their message to the familiar things marketing executives want to hear. Leads. Metrics. Accountability. ROI.
Which is fine in the isolation of a sales cycle, but rather problematic as a general trend. Soon, the vendors are all singing the same tune as a chorus, and everything starts sounding the same to marketers. Everything is about generating leads, delivering metrics, providing accountability.
And then you find, as I did when I was doing my study, that anything remotely related to CRM that you put in front of a marketer elicits the same response. "I already have Salesforce. Why do I need this?"
This is the Emperor's New Clothes Factory. Who's going to tell the Emperor he's naked when it's vastly easier to sell more nakedness? And there's plenty of nakedness to sell. Selling ROI is great, until marketers stop innovating in the absence of a proven business case. Selling metrics is fine, but to paraphrase Einstein, not everything that can be measured is important, and not everything that is important can be measured. Selling accountability is wonderful, but accountability doesn't guide execution.
The problem is a general trend toward easily digestable selling points that minimize innovation and slow the marketing technology adoption curve.
Sure marketers will figure this all out in time. SaaS applications are gradually pushing back IT control over marketing technology, and the emerging next generation of marketers has come of age in a far more wired world. But the evolutionary cycle is excrutiatingly slow and littered with dead bodies. Can't we speed this up?
What we need as a marketing ecosystem is a big crucible where enterprise marketers and technology vendors can meet outside of the selling cycle. A forum where marketers can learn about technology innovation, and where vendors--particularly their product marketing teams--can better understand enterprise marketing challenges. With more common ground in our understanding of the marketing challenges technology can solve, vendors can develop applications that are not only compellingly different, but meaningfully familiar.
As it happens, I'm in the planning stages of this year's Elite Retreat in Hawaii, and this issue is shaping up to be one our tracks. If you're a senior marketing executive with an interest in marketing technology, or a marketing technology vendor, drop me a note and let me know what you think.
Social Media & B2B Demand Generation
At CDI, a question we get asked often these days is: What are you doing in social media?
Perhaps a better question might be: What do social media have to do with demand generation? The answer is: plenty, but perhaps not in the way you’d think.
As a most basic example, blogs can be a highly effective lead generation vehicle, though most companies don’t take full advantage of their capability in this regard.
On our blog, Direct Connections, you’ll see e-mail and RSS subscription links featured prominently, plus a number of other, well: offers, because we designed the blog in large part as a way to generate leads (surprise, surprise.)
In contrast, however, my observation is that most corporate blogs – particularly in the high-tech B2B space in which we operate - will rarely contribute much to the lead funnel, except by accident, because they tend to come into being minus any particular mission, other than perhaps some vague notion of promulgating thought leadership. More’s the pity. Personally, I don’t see any issue with having “lead generation” be part of your blog’s explicit purpose, and then designing the blog accordingly.
So yes, you can generate leads through social media. However, where blogs and other vehicles may have the most potential in the context of B2B demand generation is not in lead acquisition, but rather in lead nurturing.
When we design lead nurturing strategies for clients, the most common objective is some variation on: “keeping in front of prospects so that they think of us when they’re ready to buy.” Even the most relevant, personalized e-mail content has the potential to wear out its welcome, but blogs (via e-mail and RSS subscriptions), Twitter feeds, MySpace and Facebook pages are an ideal complement to e-mail communication, perfect vehicles for maintaining your brand as “top of mind” with your chosen audience.
This was reinforced for me recently when I read a fascinating post at ReadWriteWeb about “brandstreaming,” a new concept in social media defined as “a consistent flow of content created by a brand.” And what is a “consistent flow of content” but merely another way of nurturing a business relationship?
What is your company doing to leverage social media and keep your brand top of mind? Not as much as some, I’ll wager. Take the example of Pandora, the online music service. Pandora’s social media initiatives include: Friendfeed, Twitter, Facebook, Get Satisfaction, Flickr, and MySpace.
That’s quite the checklist. To be fair, Pandora is a consumer brand, and on the social media bandwagon, B2C companies are miles in front of their B2B counterparts. Still it shows the potential.
Consider this. According to ReadWriteWeb:
“… content consumption outside of websites has increased 153% in the last 9 months, and 53% of online users are consuming content outside of a publisher’s site - through the use of widgets, RSS readers, social networks and mobile devices.”
Those are eye-opening statistics, and B2B companies aren’t immune from such trends. All this means that when you plan a lead nurturing strategy, e-mail may no longer be enough. Put another way: time to think outside the inbox.
Who Should You Interview (when writing)?
Let’s say you’ve been tasked to create a white paper (or an article, blog post, …). Who should you interview in the process of preparing to write?
This is an important question.
It came up while I was training a group of engineers on writing white papers.
Let me address it here…
First, are you doing interviews at all? If you’re not, you should. The best content is inside someone else’s head. Just think about all the time you spend reading and researching as part of your daily job. Now think about the experts you need to speak to. They have access to information you could never expect to find on your own.
So to the question: Who do I interview?
The first thing to think about is this, “What do I ‘not know’ and who has the knowledge I seek?”
As you prepare your project, a number of names will likely cycle through your mind.
When I do a white paper, here’s the types of folks I enjoy speaking to:
- Salespeople: These folks know how to best position messages for maximum uptake with customers.
- Product directors: These people tend to be responsible for the product, have thought about the industry issues and understand the needs of their customers.
- Marketing: Marketing people are sometimes guilty of drinking a bit too much of their own Kool-Aid, but can be excellent sources of information.
- Book authors: These guys (and gals) live on PR. Try getting a quote from them.
- Bloggers: The folks behind industry-specific blogs often have amazing access to information and people. Be sure not to overlook them.
Who am I missing? Lets hear from you…
Building a Marketing Funnel and More Lead Management Tips
I was recently interviewed for an article on lead management by Chris Koch who works for ITSMA, the Information Technology Services Marketing Association.
In the article titled, "Building a Marketing Funnel and Other Lead Management Tips," I give the five tips on how you can make your B2B lead management more effective, which are:
1. Create a marketing funnel.
2. Create a universal definition of a lead.
3. Use the phone.
4. Ask about goals—don’t sell.
5. Define lead nurturing—and the right people to nurture.
Here’s a short excerpt from my interview.
1. Create a marketing funnel.
Most organizations don’t have a marketing funnel; they have a sales funnel that looks more like a bucket with lots of holes in it where leads leak out. Marketing needs to create its own funnel to understand whether leads are sales ready or not.
The purpose of the marketing funnel is to bring leads into one spot and qualify them. By qualifying them, I mean that the leads are ready to talk to someone from a sales perspective. Then there is the hand-off process between marketing and sales. I find that connecting the marketing and sales funnel together is really a big challenge. You have to understand your sales process to know at what point the sales team views a lead as an opportunity and begins actively pursuing it.
Lead generation really is about building relationships. It’s how can I help my sales team build relationships with the right people and the right companies. The marketing funnel creates sales-ready leads and nurtures the leads that aren’t sales ready.
The bigger and better you make your marketing pipeline, ultimately the bigger and better you make your sales pipeline. In the end, this isn’t about generating more leads; it’s about generating actionable leads.
Continue reading Building a Marketing Funnel and Other Lead Management Tips
You're also invited to join me at MarketingSherpa's Demand Generation Summit at your choice of Boston (Oct 5-7) or San Francisco (Oct 26-28.) I'll be speaking on a "Playbook for Effective Lead Management." Netline (who brings you the Inspire blog and Smart Marketers newsletter) is the "Welcome" sponsor at the Demand Generation summit.
Register for the event before September 5th and save $300.