Marketing Sherpa B2B Summit: Day 2

September 25, 2009

Emily Salus, Sr Mktg Mgr, CollabNet

Need to filter and control what becomes sales ready leads. Send only qualified leads to sales.

Steps:

  • Build the right team
  • Open communications
  • Agree on definition of sales ready lead – what does sales want to see?
  • Create a demonstration – only have one chance to make a first impression. Build it in a spreadsheet first to show what would happen in the future. Make sure you’re sending the right leads, not sending the ones they’re not going to follow up on anyways.
  • Roll-out

 Attributes to consider for the right leads:

  • Geo
  • Industry
  • Company rev / size
  • Role / Title
  • Recent activity – downloads, event participation
  • How recently did this activity happen

Scoring methodology:

Start with a round number as sales ready (i.e. 10 or 100)

Top level steps:

  • Implement
  • Gain near-term feedback
  • Measure results
    • Funnel – Web activity / Marketing Queue / Sales Queue
    • Waterfall – average time between the above buckets – relates to sales cycle
    • Flow – once in system, what is timing and success rate to get through Marketing and Sales funnels

Marketo is vendor

Objectives –

  • Increase quality of lead going to sales
  • Increase pace of lead to sales flow
  • Measure and analyze marketing and sales funnels – “how many leads of what quality do we need in order to hit our revenue targets?”

Michael Rapp, Mgr of eMedia, Fujitsu –

A very insightful presentation focused on driving marketing messages based upon the persona of the recipient / target, rather than role.

Buyers Persona Exercise:

  • Industry
  • Existing Customer
  • Department
  • Active contact
  • Role (not title)

 Market to the persona’s not to the channel or title.

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Marketing Sherpa B2B Summit: Day #1

September 24, 2009

sherpa-b2b-summit-sf-092309 As day one comes to a close I find myself having seen some GREAT B2B marketing best practice and some good case study. Below, my notes reflect much of my interest in the best practice presentations. Funny but true, I found myself at times so absorbed in the presentation that I didn’t take enough notes for this blog entry… I guess that this is a good thing, it says that the content was really very good!

Brian Carroll, CEO, InTouch

Nurturing (definition): Relevant and consistent dialog with potential customers regardless of their timing to buy.

Marketing should co-create lead nurturing process and lead it:

  • Take inactive leads back from sales – calculate from leads not touched in 90 days 

Five fundamentals necessary to enable a successful lead nurturing program

  1. Shift from campaigns to conversations
  2. Find the right amount of friction
  3. Develop the one team mindset
  4. Who should you re-engage first… recency,
  5. Script an opt-in process, messages and calls. 

 

Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Director MEC Labs (founder too!)

A highly engaging speaker with magnetism that drew the audience in very successfully. His presentation style is also very well honed… he successfully hung a thorough presentation on a short construct, allowing the audience to absorb his points well.

Here are his key points…

4 Conversion Impediments:

1. Lack of clarity

  • Where am I at?
  • The eye moves in a triangle when the user is trying to gain meaning… the goal is to make the page clear so that information is revealed appropriately, the eye path is more controlled.
  • What can I do here?
  • Why should I do it?

2. Undisciplined eye path

3. Insufficient value promise

4. Excessive friction

  • Quantity first page
  • Quality second page
  • Remarket to get quality data if user abandons

 

Then we worked through several real-life case studies of landing pages that were submitted by attendees… excellent learning and feedback for those who were brave enough to have their pages reviewed.

 

Erin Daly, PTC

Tactic #1: The data you have, and the data you don’t

Increase your footprint at existing accounts

Calculate the number of relevant contacts you have within target companies.

 

Tactic #2: Get contact that don’t know

Get third party endorsements – Analysts, media, etc.

Make sure your messages aligns.

 

Tactic #3: Engaging new contacts

“Risk” options from low to high:

  • White paper / report – 2 seconds to download, 10 mins to read
  • Webcast – 2 seconds to register, 30 mins to listen
  • Seminar – huge commitment in time and resources
  • Sales meeting – if not interested in product, the “date” is futile and boring… I don’t want to hear it, don’t have time for it.

 

Build integrated marketing relationship to move a person towards a sales relationship…

  • Don’t reach too far on the first “date”
  • Send value to list on the subject you’re wanting to promote, then solicit the webinar or higher reaching step. Since you’ve already fertilized the environment.

 

Tactic #4: Asking all the right questions

What to say when you don’t know what to say, surveys:

  • Low risk for response = lots of response
  • User 3rd party rental contacts + inhouse
  • Offer quick tell me more about yourself and I’ll give you a $10 retail card
  • Break into groups:
  1.  
    1. Take highly qualified leads and send to sales opportunities,
    2. Put the rest in nurturing campaigns

What works?

  • Flattery – you’re the best and it relates to you. Make sure recipients are qualified.
  • Laziness – low risk
  • Bribery – what’s in it for the recipient. Make sure incentives are achievable and realistic. You’re paying for recipient attention and information, not just response. Have everyone win something, even $5-$10, rather than a chance to win something larger.

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Consumer-centricity starts at home

June 11, 2009

To effectively position a business as centered around a target audience the whole organization needs to deliver a resounding brand message that is consistent with the strategy intent. Leadership style and a connection to the organization are equally important as messaging and marketing strategies when it comes time to deploy customer centric marketing strategies.

Pulling from notes and other articles, I’ve found several points that describe the customer-centric leader and things that marketers need to consider as they develop marketing strategy:

  • They see their team is the face of the company. Beyond ads or collateral or a website, your employees are delivering a clear message to your customers and prospects… is that message in line with your customer-centric aspirations?
  • They see trust as the lever to bring their teams in line with their customers. When you deliver a message to your customers, do they hear what you tried to say or do they parse words and wonder what you “really” tried to say. Consistency and sincerity deliver the environment for team members to foster a trust relationship with clients, and visa-versa. Trust is hard to get a first time and nearly impossible to get a second time.
  • They use customer insight as the guiding light for the organization. Largely it’s a communication issue; beyond gathering information, they seek to spread that information into broad areas of the company. Ironically, in most companies, the team members closest to the customer are the most likely to know what is working yet least likely to have a communication channel to upper management and product teams. Conversely, many top management teams sponsors consultant research projects to learn about their customers and then they don’t share the learning deeply into the organization.
  • They get their hands dirty. They go to clients, they engage with teams at different levels and internal organizations. More than a decade ago I worked at a global technology distributor and asked that I spend a few days working in a warehouse… it was probably the single best learning experience I had. I “knew” what it took to make the business operate, how difficult the operations part of that business was, and all of that helped me greatly understand how to communicate shipping issues to clients in the ensuing years.

Have you factored internal organizational dynamics into your customer-centric marketing strategy?

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Behavior, algorithms, consumer relevance and the advertiser

February 19, 2009

Can a single algorithm deliver relevance… across seasons, different web properties, between global cultures and among differing offering categories? Personally, I have troubles trying to predict behavior in the people I’ve known for many years. The human heart and mind act in sometimes strangely unpredictable ways. Isn’t that the part of humanity that’s really great? I think so!

Algorithms to deliver relevance need to accurately reflect consumer information – behavior, demo / psycho-graphics, and other.  The difficulty with this model is that only the smallest of slivers of a consumers life revolves around any single brand – though we would all like to believe differently:-)  Also, until you get reams of data surrounding an individual, how do you actually recommend. In the on line world this is particularly debilitating because over half of website traffic bounces from good sites right away and only a small sliver (used the word twice) of traffic actually makes it to a conversion… and an even smaller sliver (gotta stop using that word) comes back and makes it to a second second conversion. So, algorithmic personalization or recommendations really are only capable of helping a small portion of your consumers, after you get to know them.

An actuary can build statistical models that deal with vast population samples, telling the breakdown of what will proportionally happen in certain events. That’s interesting but it also deals with averages across large groups of people. Not necessarily valid to the point of algorithmically driven recommendations or optimization of an individual and their purchase potential or drivers.

I don’t intend to close the door on the subject, I do believe these approaches are helpful when other data is not available or when you have A LOT of information and you want to solve a retention / lifetime value issue… which are both great issues to solve. From my experience though, many brands believe they can use these technologies, in particular recommendation engines, to help solve an acquisition problem. Hmmm.

Love to hear your thoughts!

Mark

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What is behavioral targeting?

October 5, 2008

When you’re in a conversation and somebody uses this term, your first question should be… is this on-site or display ad behavioral targeting?

Typically, when referring to banner ads, behavioral targeting relates to the use of data regarding consumer behavior that’s learned across numerous domains. I’ve tracked a new industry group that’s tasked with defining standards and definitions for behavioral targeting, Behavioral Targeting Standards Consortium (BTSC). After reviewing the site once again before this post, it’s interesting that they don’t have any content yet regarding the accomplishment of this objective. Seems like it would be somewhat simple to define a market in broad terms, guess not.

On-site behavioral targeting is often times referred to simply as on-site targeting. Typically, it relates to individual consumer information that’s used to segment and them either serve a different experience on a website or measure the difference in reaction to particular aspects of a site by each segment.

This distinction is critical because it demonstrates how young the discourse is in the online industry. The idea that two words can mean very different things to two people who share a similar role should be rather concerning. And, is likely why we have confusion around many subjects.

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Behavior is only one datapoint

September 29, 2008

Much has been written about on-site consumer behavior and its applicability to targeting programs. Despite this, little is really known about types of behaviors that are tracked or trackable, and which ones are truly indicators of or useful as a high-value targeting mechanism. It’s possible that we’ve over-inflated the importance of behavior and overlooked other things that should be considered. And, in doing this, headed towards a focus on a technology solution that relies upon the use of highly personal consumer information to fuel its’ engine… raising the concern of consumer protection groups and the governments of many countries.

Types of behaviors that are tracked or track-able:

  • On-site, single domain behavior – probably the least contentious source of data, easily believed by consumers as a valuable source of data to help marketers connect with consumers. Often called re-marketing, in a recent MediaPost article, Jeff Hirsch, the CEO of Revenue Science and Behavioral Targeting Standards Consortiumfounding member, specifically stated that this a limited version of behavioral targeting.
  • Cross-domain behavior – algorithms consume a large quantity of data, including searches, product views, and domains visited in the attempt to identify a sense of interest on the part of an individual consumer so a marketer can target ad messages. The aggregation of this data can occur via cookie tracking across a network or more recently there’s been attempts to validate the process of intercepting and interpreting all web activity from ISPs (i.e. NebuAd), creepy.

However, in all the dialog about behavior, what other data points are available that marketers can use as targeting methodology? Or, from a more important strategic perspective, what is the objective of a marketing program and which data points can help the marketer accurately identify and target?

My assertion is that other data points are more effective at targeting, achieving marketer objectives. Here’s why I say this:

  • Today, only a minor portion of display ad spending is funded towards behavioral targeting. Display ads are largely brand oriented. Marketers tend to choose domains as their primary targeting mechanism. Behavioral targeting comes too late in the purchase cycle to affect brand preference and attitude, it’s more of a “hail-mary” or a direct response tool.
  • Virtually no on-site targeting is the result of multi-domain data aggregation.

What other data points are available, without any fancy technology:

  • Geography, language, and season – these have been used for generations in the offline environment very successfully, why don’t we use them on line more often? The interesting point is that these data points are largely available to everyone with very limited technology constraints. Between a site visitors IP address and their browser settings, these data points are easy to use. Whether display ad or on-site targeting, these are available today.
  • Returning customer or new prospect – again, these are largely available to marketers today. Why not use them? Certainly, every marketer would like to speak to a new prospect in different terms than they would an existing customer.

In a later post I’ll try to talk about targeting options that require more sophisticated technology. Until then, send me your thoughts!

Mark

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Opening day at Forrester’s Marketing Forum – the keynotes

April 8, 2008

Engagement. Not only is it the theme of the forum, it’s a solid description of the participants and our hosts… Engaged.

Recap of the keynote presentations…
Brian Haven kicked things off with a great presentation…

Engagement = fundamentally a different view of customers. Engagement is about relevance. It’s about developing strategies to find, monitor, measure and leverage the opinions and behaviors of a brands’ interaction with their market influencers.

Engagement model:

 

The emphasis of this model is to change the marketers view of the customer and the company’s relationship with them. The new view is a dialog. A dialog that involve motivated customers and gain their interaction with an organizations brand. The inner circle describes the process from the consumers perspective.

Mark

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Online consumers are driving changes in off-line purchase behavior

March 24, 2008

“…The sluggish economy is punctuating a cultural shift enabled by wired consumers accustomed to comparing prices and bargaining online, said Nancy F. Koehn, a retail historian at the Harvard Business School… Call it the eBay phenomenon…“

This quote is from an excellent article in the 3/23/08 New York Times. The author, Matt Richtell, sites quotes from spokes people and shoppers of stores including Home Depot, Ralph Lauren, Best Buy, and Circuit City. As well as analysts from Wachovia and Pacific Crest Securities.

Highlighted is the point that this is revolutionary as consumers shifted away from haggling as a method of conducting purchases back in the 1850’s. 

This is a great example of the consumer empowerment theme of this blog. In the ”About” section I described it further… driven by the adoption of technology and acquisition of the “perfect knowledge” typically held by the brand marketer, consumers have turned the hand of marketing teams for leading retailers. The NYT author described it as “…Savvy consumers, empowered by the Internet and encouraged by a slowing economy…”

It’s interesting to read examples of how consumers executed two key strategies:

  1. Online research -> developing a target product selection and then research prices. These prices were then used as ammo to drive sales people on the retail floor to lower their prices.
  2. Play “good cop / bad cop” with sales people.

In the end, consumers and their changing habits have changed the course for their relationship with selected brands. In this case, lowering prices.

Love to hear your thoughts -

Mark

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Behavioral decay

March 18, 2008

(be-hav-ior-al  de-cay) A new term that describes the rate at which a behaviorally targeted experience becomes irrelevant to the recipient. This rate is affected by the perceived value of the targeted experience, the perceived value of the desired outcome, and the degree of consideration involved with the activity.

When developing a targeting campaign, consider the lifespan you should attach to any given experience. Delivering a targeted experience beyond the user determined expectation for that message is not a positive to the recipient, and very well may be a negative.

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With every season… turn, turn, turn

March 18, 2008

A marketers’ world has typically changed with the turn of generations. However, the past 10 years have produced a chasm of change that have left many marketers reeling in their attempt to adapt.

Early on in the Internet era, people used to joke about “Internet years”, implying that time moved even faster than dog years.

The issue at hand is that online marketers built organizational structures and strategy that were built upon a premise that did not include learned marketing principle, even beyond the “dot bomb” days. Rather than focusing on targeting consumers and their needs, they focused on the optimization and development of technology or communication channels, such as email, banner ads or website.

Today, most online marketers are trying to manage systems that are not designed to address the problems of the day. The issue at hand is a massive shift in the needs and intellect of a consuming public, the developed systems view consumers as a more or less homogeneous group, leveraging the relationship with each across numerous silos. None of which can effectively leverage the learning of the other, or extend the relationship with customers beyond individual transactions.

I have to imagine that any CMO or CEO reading this blog entry would be hard pressed to support their current organizational, technology or budgetary systems as being sufficient. Hind sight is almost always 20/20. However, I wouldn’t necessarily suggest that the solution be a completely disruptive innovation.

As with most things in life, the 80/20 rule is a good approach to leading change. Start with the areas of your business that are most valuable from the perspective of the end recipient, the prospect or customer. Decompose your processes and high-value communication threads, across communication channels, and find the appropriate opportunities to continue a dialog. The solution doesn’t need to be end-to-end, especially from the beginning. Focus on the areas that are high-value and build your approach over time.

In the end, the leading issue to solve is strategic approach. Most companies have an organizational investment in channel based communications, while the solution lies in consumer based needs – acquisition, retention/up-sell.

I’d love to hear your thoughts -

Mark

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