Hello from Las Vegas! CEB is hosting our third annual Sales and Marketing Summit this week at the Cosmopolitan, and the official CEB portion of the conference got off to a great start this morning thanks to Brent Adamson. Brent reminded conference attendees of the central problem facing Sales and Marketing organizations today: how do you compete in a world where your customer is your competition?

Let’s break this down a bit. Your competition is your competition, right? How can your customers be threatening your position in the marketplace? Here’s why: the changing information consumption habits of your customers – in other words, what they’re doing in the 57% of the purchase process that is typically completed by the time your buyers contact Sales – are leading to commoditization and, ultimately, irrelevance. It’s like buying a car: no one shows up at the dealership anymore and asks to be shown some cars; rather, buyers go into dealer interactions knowing almost exactly what they want. How are they able to do this? The internet. Thanks to the web, most customers have a pretty good idea – if not an exact one – of what kind of car they want, and this is a process that has led to car dealers essentially becoming fulfillment agents. As Brent joked this morning, Marketing and Sales are on a similar “one-way freight train to RFP Station” if they can’t figure out how their customers learn and respond to it – and nothing threatens your company’s position in the marketplace more than this set of buyer dynamics.

The internet isn’t going away. Buyers will – from now on – be able to get information about their purchases before they make them. Marketing must begin to harness this information in a way that actively challenges customer assumptions about how their businesses work, and subsequently use this new understanding to point to unique supplier differentiators.

That’s the theme and central message of this year’s summit: how can the commercial organization – Sales AND Marketing – achieve this goal? Stay tuned to Wide Angle and our Twitter feed to learn how the best commercial organizations in the world are tackling the problem, and check out the following blog posts from perspectives form individual panels and presentations:

How Eloqua Maps Content to the Sales Cycle

Getting Commercial Insight Right

With less than two weeks to go until Election Day, political campaigns in the United States are heating up. With control of both the presidency and Congress at stake, all parties are using new-to-politics techniques to reach more voters. Most of these strategies are old hat to marketers, who have been gradually incorporating them for the last few years. But since the political cycle only really heats up every four years, campaigns must learn all new technologies quickly – and when the stakes are high.

Here are five new trends these campaigns have faced:

• Always-on marketing. The 2008 campaigns relied heavily on social media, and the 2012 presidential campaigns have gone further to adopt real-time marketing. Both Romney and Obama have jumped on “flash” messaging opportunities when the other has had a slip-up. Romney’s staff capitalized on Obama’s “You didn’t build that” statement by quickly flooding the networks and digital channels with ads showing Romney’s support for small businesses, and Obama followed suit with ads attacking Romney’s statement that he would cut funding for PBS. This always-on marketing approach allows campaigns to benefit from these short-lived opportunities to shift public opinion in their favor.
• Advanced analytics. Since the last presidential election, there have been major advances in data mining and analytics. Cloud computing allows marketers to gather, store, and analyze more data to better target (and even microtarget) communications and offers to their customers. Political groups are taking advantage of this new opportunity to deliver more targeted ads. The campaigns collect data ranging from past voting records to home ownership to web site visits (from browser cookies) to determine which ads will be most likely to swing your vote. These analytics efforts allow campaigns to reach very specific demographics, sending the most resonant messages to each voter.
• New social platforms. Social media was big in the ’08 election – there’s no debate about that. But since then, many new social platforms have emerged, such as Pinterest. And since Pinterest is populated by women (who are highly sought-after by both Republicans and Democrats), it presents new opportunities to engage at a more personal level with this group. Both the First Lady and Ann Romney have engaged tens of thousands of Pinterest users by pinning recipes, patriotic pictures, and family pictures. Fortunately for both campaigns, these campaign-endorsed Pinterest boards have far more followers than the tongue-in-cheek FakeMittRomney and Fake Michelle Obama, which include such gems as “A Good Starter Yacht” (under fake Mitt Romney’s Great Deals board, of course) and “Twinsies with Jill!” (one of fake Michelle Obama’s boards, featuring pictures of the First Lady and Jill Biden in coordinating outfits).
• Streaming video. While marketers have been adapting to the shift from traditional television to online streaming services like Hulu Plus and Netflix, this is only the second election to see this trend. But both the Democrats and Republicans are using this platform heavily; as a coveted female voter in a swing state, almost half of my ads on Hulu Plus are now political. However, it’s occasionally made clear just how new these new streaming platforms are, and how campaigns still have room to improve their streaming strategies: I’ll sometimes get ads urging me to “Click Here” while watching shows through my TV.
• Fighting stronger third-party challengers. Marketers have recently faced more competition from small, nimble upstarts that offer a few products to a relatively niche community. While Republicans and Democrats have long faced third-party candidates, this year’s third-party candidates are arguably stronger than they have been in several election cycles. They may not be featured much (if at all) in the debates or the media, but some of these candidates may influence the outcome of the election. Just as legacy companies have had to adapt to fight these upstarts, Republicans and Democrats are being forced to address the concerns of voters who are deciding between a third-party candidate and a more mainstream choice.

Marketers, what marketing techniques have you seen in the presidential campaigns? Have they been mostly well-executed, or have you seen major misses? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

So, at this point, I think most B2B marketers are sold on the value of content marketing. You guys know the drill: budget pressures are erasing former sources of differentiation (like long-standing buyer relationships) and pushing us as suppliers into commoditization; shifts in information consumption (like the rise of the internet) has led to non-supplier sources of information crowding out our own messages and create the risk of irrelevance. So we say – if you can’t beat budget pressures and the information revolution, join them! Serving as an information broker will help re-insert our offering into the conversation and differentiate us as a supplier.

At least, so the story goes. But as recent MLC work has made clear, content marketing doesn’t always achieve those goals. More often than not, the content we’re churning out as B2B marketers serves only to add to the noise your buyers have to filter through to find true insight; in a perverse sense, doing content marketing – at least in the way most companies do it – actually hurts your chances of influencing the buying process. And that’s the deadly trap of content marketing. Read More »

It’s day two of CEB’s 2012 Sales and Marketing Summit. We’ve just had a hugely informative panel discussion on building a commercial insight engine with Lori Morell and Fran Walsh from Kimberly Clark-Professional as well as Keith Clements and Paul Brown from DENTSPLY.

Here’s a quick summary of the most practical advice shared on a) how to develop commercial insights and b) how to get sales reps to use your insights effectively. Read More »

MLC is here in Las Vegas this week for CEB’s 2012 Sales and Marketing Summit, and we’ve started the conference off right with an insightful presentation by Eloqua’s Heather Foeh. Heather took us through Eloqua’s approach to content marketing – and, as we’ve been reiterating for the last few weeks, what makes the approach notable is its discipline and tight integration with customer needs and business outcomes.

To sum it up, Eloqua segments potential customers in four ways, and aims particular kinds of content at each group:

1. Suspects - people who may, in any conceivable way, influence the buying process. This group appreciates content that is low-involvement, catchy, cool, and helps them demonstrate thought leadership – things like infographics and blog posts. This content should not be commercial or gated – gates and sales pitches turn suspects off.
2. Prospects – prospects are suspects who have supplied personal information in exchange for more content. They’re motivated primarily by fear – fear that they may miss out on a key trend, or that their lack of understanding of a particular topic might lead to negative business results. Prospects appreciate content that’s a bit more involved – things like Eloqua’s Grande Guides: mid-length pieces of content designed to be consumed in the same time it takes to drink a grande coffee. This content can be a bit more commercial, but shouldn’t be overly so and shouldn’t be gated.
3. Leads – leads are prospects that have met some behavioral or demographic criteria as decided by Sales AND Marketing. How to determine a lead? There’s no one-size-fits-all guide – criteria will be highly organization-specific. But in order to do it well, lead scoring must be automated – automation allows for evolving criteria and removes elements of subjectivity to build consistent lead pipelines. The goal of lead scoring is to “kiss frogs” – and only deliver the highest-quality leads to Sales. Leads, as they’re further down the buying path, appreciate higher-involvement content with a more explicitly commercial bent – pieces like whitepapers, case studies, demo videos, and product comparisons. At this stage, content should come from a Sales representative.
4. Opportunities – opportunities are leads who are ready to buy. Content at this stage should be geared at helping the opportunity actually make the buying decision. One interesting element in Eloqua’s approach is that Marketing continues to message to opportunities even as Sales attempts to close the deal – a feat requiring impressive coordination between the two teams.

Eloqua’s approach illustrates the differences between typical content marketing plans and more advanced approaches: their content is explicitly designed to teach and is tailored for each stage of the buying process. To check out the full presentation, visit Eloqua’s Slideshare page.

In recent weeks, we’ve taken you on a high-level tour of our latest research for B2Cs, “Building Marketing Teams for the Future: Winning In a Volatile Environment“. To recap: first, we told you about the five varieties of modern marketer, and gave you a sense of the strengths and weaknesses of each type. Then, we talked about the ways that not all of these varieties are equal, and the thing that predicts which marketers will perform worst in today’s environment. Then, we talked about the one quality that best predicts high-performing marketers.

To sum it up, the essential ingredient to being a high-performing marketer in the volatile marketplace we operate in is called grit. It’s similar to “determination”, “discipline”, or “hard work”, except that gritty people typically direct their hard work in specific ways. One can work hard at anything, really, but gritty people work hard at long-term goals and are excellent at filtering out things that conflict with them. But, here’s the thing: grit isn’t particularly trainable. Individuals can do some things to maximize their grit, but in general, the grittiness you have is the grittiness you’ve got (you can test yourself for it here).

Armed with the knowledge that grit makes for the best marketers – and that it’s difficult to train for grit – marketing leaders’ first job is to shift organizational priorities so that grit is better-rewarded in hiring and promotion decisions. We certainly don’t advocate going out and replacing the whole marketing team. But a few slight tweaks can, over time, re-shape your organization into one that is much grittier overall.

Here are three steps to get started:

Score resumes/CVs for evidence of grit. Look at candidate resumes for evidence of perseverance in the face of setbacks. Give them credit for holding a job for multiple years, achievements requiring long-term efforts, and a consistent theme across jobs and hobbies. MLC members can access a resume scoring tool here.

Interview and test for grit. Listen for proactive mentions of tenacity and perseverance. MLC members can access an interview guide here.

Incorporate grit into performance reviews. Goal employees on their ability to sustain pursuit of higher-order goals, ability to resist distraction and short-term gains, ability to overcome setbacks to achieve goals, and their ability to persevere for long periods of time without feedback.

MLC members, for more on hiring for grit, check out our tools page. Stay tuned for next week, when we’ll discuss how to help the marketers you’ve already got become more gritty.

(MLC’s new research into digital marketing for B2Bs, co-authored with Google, is out! Click here to read more.)
Ah, the old days of B2B marketing. Way back when, offerings weren’t so complicated, customers didn’t do a whole lot of research on their own, and salespeople could expect to have their customers’ attention across all of the critical inflection points in the sales process.

We’re not in that world anymore, as you’ve certainly noticed. Buyers are able to connect to each other and to non-supplier sources of information with ease, and the result is that they’re typically 57% of the way through the purchase process before they contact Sales. Inside that 57%, buyers are willing to consider supplier information – but B2B marketers aren’t doing a good job of getting their voices heard.

One of the biggest reasons for this is that buyer research is happening mostly via the digital channel – a place where many B2B marketing organizations are uncomfortable – and B2Bs simply aren’t integrating digital well with other campaigns. Most B2Bs are making investments in digital, sure – but many treat digital tactics like an afterthought in campaign planning, fail to manage their online presence in a coherent way, fail to structure digital marketing well, and waste resources by failing to identify synergies between channels.

Here’s the thing: simply integrating digital into campaigns isn’t enough; integration is needed across all of Marketing’s activities in order to cope with the always-on world of the web. And while you can make simple process tweaks to achieve digital integration at the campaign level, the complete digital integration B2Bs should be shooting for has to come from organizational changes.

To deliver true digital integration, companies like EMC, Xerox, General Eletric and Telus are rethinking the way they’ve structured teams with the aim of enabling their marketers to react to the new world of digital. Recently, MLC partnered with Google to take a look at how this is happening, and we’ve recently released a brand-new white paper, “The Digital Evolution of B2B Marketing”, which we’ve made available to members here. Click on “Digital Integration” to learn what you can begin doing today to prepare your organization for the digital future.

In future weeks, we’ll talk more about the other things B2Bs must do to fully embrace digital – so stay tuned, and if you’re so inclined, read ahead!

In Charles Duhigg’s recent book “The Power of Habit”, he explores the mechanisms behind our powerful, almost unthinking deferral to the usual. It was hard not to see parallels in the marketing world since marketers are creatures of habit like everyone else. In our B2C study this year, we looked at what separates great marketing teams from average ones in today’s VUCA (volatile, unpredictable, chaotic, ambiguous) environment with big data following on the heels of social media. As it turns out, differences in team performance are best explained by differences in habit formation, a subject the book investigates in depth.
One thing the book brought to mind for me was a (warning: very macabre) natural experiment done in MLC’s hometown of Washington, DC, back in the 1980’s. In DC’s Northwest quadrant, there are two bridges over Rock Creek just one block from each other – the Duke Ellington Bridge and the William Howard Taft Bridge. In 1985, three people committed suicide by jumping off the Ellington Bridge in a 10-day span, and the neighborhood began lobbying for the barrier along the bridge’s sidewalk to be raised – in order to hinder would-be jumpers from making a potentially-fatal mistake.

It’s DC, however, and even bridges are political. The National Trust for Historic Preservation – attempting to protect the bridge as a historical landmark – argued that suicide barriers didn’t work. If you want to commit suicide, they said, a barrier will just make you go elsewhere. And since the Ellington’s neighbor, the Taft, was mere feet away, opponents said that the problem of suicides along that section of Rock Creek wouldn’t even improve – they’d just shift to another bridge.

But the opponents were wrong. Five years after the Ellington barrier finally went up, a study showed that suicides off that bridge were eliminated completely, while the suicide rate at the Taft Bridge remained unchanged, and jumping suicides across DC – a city of two rivers, a major creek, and many bridges – decreased by 50%. In other words, jumpers – a group shown by psychological studies to be among the most impulsive of suicide victims – had had the impulse, journeyed to the Ellington Bridge to jump, found themselves stymied by the barrier and then reconsidered.

What this story illustrates is the importance of building mechanisms that cause people to re-think impulsive actions that can lead to negative outcomes – ones that persuade rather than prohibit, that wean people off what is automatic by increasing the cost of pursuing that option. Adapting to today’s business world isn’t nearly as important as preventing suicide, but mechanisms that serve to shut off our impulses and compel rational thought are extremely valuable in any volatile business setting.

Why? In a murky, fast moving environment full of “bright shiny objects” like Pinterest, our natural inclination – our impulse, if you will – is often to chase the newest things. Smart marketing teams avoid costly mistakes by building mechanisms that require marketers to reason through their choices, putting the focus back on key business goals that are fundamental to long term growth.

One example of a mechanism that does in a marketing setting this is the Social Media Plan-on-a-Page, a hypothesis-driven experimentation plan that puts business goals in context and links them up to key implementation steps and success metrics. Two things are key here: one, it’s a “one page” exercise meant to be simple and concise; two, it’s a chance to expose weak or non-existent links to business value before committing any resources. The template for the Plan-on-a-Page can be found here but if you were to simply talk yourself through it in condensed form it would go something like this:

“We want to accomplish business objective X that captures strategic opportunity Y in which our company enjoys a protected advantage, and given targeted audience dynamics in demographic/geography/channel Z, we decide to conduct experiment Alpha in (targeted channel) where the outcome will be measured by success metrics one, two and three.”

Sounds easy, but filling in the blanks is quite difficult if your case is weak. The same logic holds whether you’re evaluating your Facebook presence or assessing the value of adopting a new mobile technology.

These mechanisms are of course not “fail-proof”, just like speed bumps don’t course-correct your car, and to put them there requires top-down leadership plus consistent enforcement. In a VUCA world, they give necessary pause, which is often all we need to look around, reorient, and realize we need to work differently.

MLC members – interested in learning how to integrate data and analytics into your marketers’ workflow? Check out our latest research.

The arrival of Big Data and “automated decision making” has lead to much hand wringing. Finance expert Nassim Nicholas Taleb, for example, said that his biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal. One could imagine saying the same of Target’s pregnancy detecting model, hiring via algorithm or more futuristically, destruction by weapons with “artificial conscience”. However, most of us wouldn’t want to go back to the good old days of (mostly) data free decision making for the same reason one wouldn’t want to be the lone horse and buggy in a F1 race. In a world of turbo-charged decision making, opting out is hardly an option, as W. Edwards Deming wryly put it– “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”

What I would say (and I’m certainly not the first) is that Big Data calls for Big Decisions: as data become varied and more plentiful, we are called to make more, not fewer decisions. The lazy bum in us asked a hard question and hoped for an easy answer – why can’t it be problem in, data magic, decision out? It can’t be when “big” in Big Data denotes not just the size of the dataset but also the complex and often latent relationships in the background tying disparate pieces of information together. It can’t be when “big” in “Big Decision” means stretching your comfort zone, admitting your intuition may be wrong, and making peace with the fact that data offers directional guidance, not precise measurements (despite being numeric). Playing blackjack perfectly (by counting cards) doesn’t mean you’ll win every time, you win only when you’re in the game long enough, the same is true for Big Data.

And staying in the game means there’re a few things to keep in mind when handling Big Data: Read More »

As Shelley wrote last month, managing channel partnerships can really be a struggle for marketers, from correctly communicating your value proposition to end customers to selling your product over those of your competitors. Tackling these challenges is becoming increasingly difficult in today’s world, with many marketing budgets facing limitations (thank you, flailing world economy!).

This is particularly true for the incentives piece of the equation. CEB research has found that only 15% of channel partners sell for only one supplier, which means that the other 85% is choosing between you and your competitors. How can marketers influence and motivate channel partners to prioritize selling their products when they can’t offer the highest sales-volume-based rewards?

We at MLC are currently working on a research project to answer that question, which is coming your way in early December. In the meantime, I want to share a few findings from the Enterprise Council on Small Business, one of our sister CEB programs. They surveyed over 200 channel partners to better understand supplier-channel partnerships. Read More »