If you type “shorten the sales cycle” into Google you get over 200,000 hits with tips and tricks to get customers to close faster.  The advice ranges from making your value proposition more compelling to better targeting potential buyers to using the latest technology to cyber-stalk your prospects.  Each of these things is generally a good idea and I won’t argue against any of them (but be careful on the stalking, no matter what the context, people don’t like to feel like companies are spying on them).  But I will argue that a shorter sales cycle actually shouldn’t be your goal.  I realize this may cause your sales metric dashboard to implode, so let me explain.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a quick close.  But the way customers buy has changed so drastically in the last few years that a short sales cycle can be one of the signs that you are capturing the wrong kind of demand.  More on the different kinds of demand in a bit – first let’s examine how the purchase process has changed. Read More »

Last week, we told you about how to identify the worst marketers on your team. But that raises an inevitable question: how do you identify the best marketers you have? The best trait to measure isn’t agility, it’s something else – and you can test yourself for it here.

To recap where we’ve been so far: most marketing organizations are responding to a faster-paced consumer environment by – at least from a staffing perspective – by seeking “agile” marketers: in other words, digitally-savvy employees that love change, fast-decision making, and experimentation; and are willing to learn, network, and collaborate to adapt to changing consumer realities. But as we told you last week, people with all of these characteristics do not exist – and people that only have some of these characteristics are some of the worst-performing marketers on teams today. One of the most dangerous things marketing leaders can do, from a hiring perspective, is focus their energies on “agile” marketers.  Read More »

So, in a post last week, we told you all about the 5 varieties of modern marketer. To refresh your memory, we surveyed over 500 marketers at large-enterprise B2Cs on a variety of topics related to how they work best, and the marketers we surveyed sorted themselves into five buckets: Adapters, Connectors, Doers, Fast Movers, and Focusers. (Check last week’s post for a more in-depth discussion of the characteristics of these groups).

What we didn’t tell you was that in addition to asking marketers about their work habits, we also asked their bosses to rate their performance. Specifically, we asked team leaders to rate their marketers’ judgment, ability to learn and adapt, and overall effectiveness on a scale of 1-7 – and what we found surprised us. Agile marketers – the people marketing leaders have spent years searching for – do not exist, and marketers with some agile traits are likely to be among the worst marketers on the team.

Here’s the first thing that knocked us over: there is no such thing as an agile marketer. As we interviewed marketing leaders about the kinds of marketers they were looking to hire, we made a list of their seven most desired characteristics:

• Digital savvy and early adoption of new technology
• Love of change and comfort with ambiguity
• Fast decision making and bias to action
• Data focus and strong analytic skills
• Strong learning posture
• Willingness to experiment
• Strong networking and collaboration skills

Literally none of the 500+ marketers we surveyed were strong in each characteristic.  Most people we surveyed had some of the characteristics of an agile marketer, but none had all. Marketing leaders looking for completely-agile marketers are on a wild goose chase: they do not exist.

So, you might say – let’s settle for second best. Hire folks with some of these characteristics and trust that the team as a whole will be “agile”. That’s what marketing leaders are doing, in effect, and that’s where they’ve really gone wrong. Why? Because the people with some agile traits also have other traits that aren’t very good at all – traits that make them among the worst marketers on the team. Of the five profiles mentioned above, three – Adapters, Connectors, and Fast Movers – are “near-agile”, meaning they feature some of the seven agility traits we tested for in our study. Adapters are slightly more effective than average – but only slightly. However, Connectors and Fast Movers are markedly below-average performers. They feature low analytic maturity, poor follow-through, discomfort with ambiguity, and poor judgment.

These findings have huge ramifications for the way Marketing has been planning and staffing for the future. While attempting to hire for a busy, digital, always-on future, they’re actively damaging the capabilities of the marketing organization by hiring teams capable of putting on great one or two-day social media campaigns, but who are incapable of doing anything much more in-depth than that.

However, there is a second quality that the highest performing marketers share (you can test yourself for this quality here, and we’ll talk about it more next week) – and marketing leaders should immediately shift their teams from agility to something that better correlates with performance.

MLC members, if you’d like to skip ahead, you can review our findings by starting here.

The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once said – “Knowing others is wisdom, but knowing yourself is enlightenment.” All of us struggle to achieve enlightenment, but only a few of us achieve it. Marketers for sure can truly appreciate how hard it is to be enlightened – it’s a struggle to define your value proposition, it’s a struggle to know what we do and who we are.

It is not uncommon for companies to redefine value propositions periodically, even though they haven’t essentially changed their business. It’s not an easy or cheap exercise either. But knowing yourself shouldn’t be so hard. We’ve outlined three steps below, that will help you write a value proposition that really defines you:

1. Know what business you’re really in – That sounds like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? If you manage facilities, you’re in the facilities management business, isn’t it? Not really, as Aramark found. Aramark drills deeper into the outcomes it helps its customer achieve. As a result of the exercise, the company found it services help customers achieve much more than just facilities management. It helps them improve efficiency of business operations – now that is the business Aramark is really in. By redefining their business, Aramark saw a 20-fold increase in business conversations.
2. Define what you really do – “We sell electrical appliances that are durable and value for money”. Well, not everyone is looking for that. Go back to your segmentation schema. What do the customers really want? Compare that to your offerings in each segment, like General Electric did. Come up with a differentiated and granular list of things you really help your customers achieve. That is what you really do.
3. Emphasize how you’re really different – If you have achieved the above two steps, congratulations on having earned self-realization! Now your task is to see how your real self is different from others. MLC has a couple resources that can help you identify your unique strengths, benchmark them against competitors and match your strengths to sources of customer value.

And just to reassure you, the path to enlightenment is not a lonely one. Beginning December this year, MLC and our sister program SEC are conducting a series of workshops that will not only enable you to identify your unique differentiators, but also help with embedding them in your messaging. To sign up for you workshop, contact your account manager today.

(This post originally appeared on Forbes.com. It’s presented here with a few edits.)

In my earlier post, I wrote that leading marketers are creating content that teaches customers something new about their business, and that motivates action.  They then structure that content into paths that progressively disrupt the customers’ thinking about their own business.  In this post, I want to lay out what these disruptive content paths actually look like and how they work using an example based on real practice.  It’s a long post, so I hope you’ll bear with me.

To get into disruptive content paths, we first need to take a step back.  Based on years of CEB research, we’ve observed leading commercial teams orienting their sales activity to what we have come to call “commercial insight”.  A commercial insight is an insight about the customer’s business that re-frames the way customers assign value to the areas where the supplier outperforms competitors.   My colleagues here at CEB, Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson, have written extensively about commercial insight in a book called The Challenger Sale. (Shameless plug—it actually makes for pretty good plane reading, so look for it at the next airport bookstore you find yourself in.)

For purpose of illustration, let’s take a hypothetical example* of a commercial insight.  Let’s say you supply ultrasound medical equipment to obstetricians.  You have a unique design and manufacturing capability that enables you to develop especially lightweight, ergonomic ultrasound equipment.

Your commercial insight involves absenteeism rates for ultrasound technicians.  Using their hands and wrists all day causes techs to get carpal tunnel syndrome, which leads them to call in sick fairly frequently.  Most obstetricians view this absenteeism problem as just a cost of doing business.  They believe it happens because any human being using their hands and wrists like that all day long is going to suffer from carpal tunnel.

But, being a savvy marketer, you dig in further.  Through research, you discover that this carpal tunnel is actually caused more by the ultrasound equipment than by the hand and wrist motions.  Relatedly, you find that with lighter, ergonomically designed equipment, you can dramatically reduce the incidence of carpal tunnel.  That’s your commercial insight.  You can use the insight to teach the customer something new about their business that they didn’t appreciate before.  You have re-framed the way the customer thinks about her business in a way that favors your competitive differentiator.

Notice how commercial insight goes well beyond thought leadership.  In the ultrasound equipment category, most thought leadership would focus on development of new technologies, perhaps development of portability in ultrasound devices.  It would be very technology-led, high on features and benefits of the technology.  It might inform the customer about something new, but it would fall far short on actually changing the customer’s view of their own business, and motivating them to act.

We’ve developed a hierarchy of the different types of commercial information we see marketing teams putting into the marketplace.  To qualify as thought leadership, information needs to pass a credibility/relevance test, as well as a newsworthiness test in the minds of customers.  It needs to tell the customer something new.  But that’s not a very high bar.  Insight and commercial insight are about changing the way the customer thinks of their world (i.e., it “breaks their frame”), and in a way that leads back to you uniquely as a supplier.

Okay, so that’s commercial insight.  Now, at bare minimum, as a marketer at this hypothetical ultrasound manufacturer, you’d want to equip your salesforce to deliver this commercial insight in a really compelling way.  Again, that’s all well detailed in The Challenger Sale.

But that’s not enough.  Because in today’s information environment, most of your customers have long since landed on their key buying criteria by the time they’re talking to your sales reps.  Influencing them away from those criteria is like trying to re-shape already dried cement.  Ain’t gonna happen.  Especially if the customer’s procurement team is involved in the sale.

That’s where we found leading marketers using content marketing in a very specific way.  They engineer a “disruptive content path”, which is a series of connected content items that accomplish three things with the customer:

1. Sparks the customer to explore her existing mental model about how something works in her business.
2. Introduces a disruptive idea that upsets that existing mental model.

Confronts the customer with the disruptive idea in the customer’s terms.

So, to take the ultrasound equipment example, here’s what a disruptive content path might look like.

Spark—the kinds of content you’d have here include:

• Infographics, blog posts and the like on the average yearly cost of ultrasound tech absenteeism to a typical practice.
• Content that teases the link between absenteeism, carpal tunnel and ultrasound equipment.

With this content, you’re just trying to get that obstetrician to reconsider the cost of absenteeism in managing her practice, and to provoke her into exploring a little more.

Introduce—here you might have content like:

• A short white paper with evidence about the hidden impact of absenteeism on patient satisfaction.
• A video testimonial of an obstetrician talking about the tech absenteeism problem in her business, and how there were some hidden costs she didn’t fully appreciate.
• Third party medical studies on the link between ergonomic design of tools and severity of carpal tunnel syndrome.

The content here dials up the pain of the problem.  It also introduces the disruptive idea, which is that ultrasound equipment is actually the main culprit behind tech absenteeism, not the nature of the tech’s job.  For your customer, the obstetrician, this content suggests that a really painful problem in her business is actually much more controllable than she appreciated.  You just taught the customer something new about her business.

Confront—this is where you’d want content like:

• An online benchmarking tool that invites the obstetrician to share a little about her practice and in return receive comparative information on how absenteeism affects other practices like hers. Or,
• A pain calculator, where the obstetrician can plug in a few parameters about the size of her practice, how many techs she has, how many patients she has, and then get an estimate of how much absenteeism is costing her, including hidden costs.

This is information the customer can’t easily get herself, and she’d have a tough time debating it!  You’ve just enabled the customer to size her own (underappreciated) problem in her own terms. Now you’ve given the customer motivation to act.

Spark.  Introduce.  Confront.

That’s what your content needs to do.  If you’re creating content that doesn’t clearly lie on a disruptive path like this, we’d argue you should stop it.  Kill it.  Never create it in the first place.  Period.

Too much mediocre content is being created in the name of looking smart or being helpful.  We know that doesn’t move the commercial needle (see my last blog post on the two qualities of Content Marketing that Matter Most ), and only adds to the noise.

That’s a high level view on what your content should be doing to your customers, and what the leading Challenger commercial organizations are doing with their content marketing efforts.  For those readers who have read the Challenger Sale, this is in many ways what Challenger Marketing looks like.  If you’d like to take a deeper dive to learn more about our findings, drop us a line.  pspenner@executiveboard.com

*By hypothetical example, I really do mean that this is made up strictly for purposes of illustration.  I don’t actually know if there is an ultrasound tech absenteeism problem.  I’ve seen parallels in other healthcare fields, so this is very plausible.  But please don’t quote me on knowledge of ultrasound techs in the obstetrics field.

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“Marketing is a consumer of data.”

We’ve heard these words on member calls, discussing how the marketing function is vying to consume and understand the information coming from today’s world of “Big Data”.  In a way, within an organization, Marketing is the customer of both market research and data-analytics functions.  (For more on data analytics, see our resource center.)  And in this supplier-consumer relationship, one of the most coveted products is customer understanding.

However, when approaching their research/analytics functions for answers, Marketing often makes three costly errors:

Mistake #1: Taking a 360⁰ approach when you don’t know what you’re looking for.

We’ve heard that today’s marketers want to understand everything about their customers so that they know “where”, “when”, and “how” to hit “who” most efficiently.  But that is every bit as complicated as it sounds.

Intuitively, a comprehensive approach is great when you don’t know which piece of information is going to be most relevant to your decision-making… spread that net as wide as possible, right?  However, the more you invest in breadth, the less you have left to invest in depth.   Understanding every habit and interest of your customer won’t help drive sales if those variables aren’t directly linkable to the purchase path.

Remedy: A relatively low risk process is to start by measuring your existing highest value customers, mapping their purchase paths, and isolating leverage points (i.e. areas of highest marginal impact).  Your prospects should mirror your highest value customers (establishing the “who”), and the leverage points will provide insight as to “where”, “when”, and “how”.  Read more about how Foxtrot used this process to decrease customer attrition rates by 30% and boost customer value by 15%.

Mistake #2: Panning for gold & seeking silver bullets.

With so many decision-making stakeholders involved, marketers are constantly looking for that one piece of information – a silver bullet – that everyone and anyone can understand and get excited about.  They then use that nugget to drive alignment for everything from content creation to customer service.

There are three problems with this mindset.  First, in today’s world of too much information, finding that “sound bite” often requires oversimplification, which unfortunately runs opposite to targeting and nurturing efforts where details really matter.   Second, silver bullets tend to be surprising and unexpected, which means that marketers likely don’t know where (or if) they’ll find it.  This means marketers will be running down too many random rabbit holes and losing focus on higher order goals really matter.  And third, once you’ve found one, it’s hard to refrain from trying to squeeze it into every conversation or context.

Remedy: Clarify – to yourself as well as to your researchers/analysts – the specific business goal(s) you’re trying to address in your search.  Then frame inquiries with concrete questions answerable with data, preferably ones that can validate or disprove hypotheses (e.g., ask them “Do our repurchase rates correlate with behaviors x, y, or z?” rather than “How do our customers behave?”).

Mistake #3: Understanding everyone and everything when few matter.

Based on research from our sister program, when it comes collective decision making, 10% of stakeholders wield five times more influence than the average stakeholder.  We also heard that for one daily deal company, zip code and gender predicted 90% of purchase interest.  That means that if you’re spending most of your research investments on more than a selective set of variables or customer profiles, you’re probably wasting your time.

Remedy: Unfortunately, fixing this requires upfront investments that may not pay off in the short run, as it’s no easy task to isolate the few variables/stakeholders who matter.  We don’t have all the answers here, but if you’ve had success on this front, we’d love to hear from you!

What do you think?  Are these challenges that you’re facing?  Have you had success overcoming or avoiding these potholes?  Here at the CEB-Marketing Leadership Council, we’re just kicking off our 2012-2013 research projects, so we’d love to hear your thoughts!

Despite marketers’ best efforts to appear helpful and smart and non-biased, when it comes down to it, we are ultimately trying to sell something – and customers know it.  Customers’ skepticism at the commercial agenda lurking behind everything we tell them is palpable, and it seems to be growing.  While it is possible that humans in general are just becoming more cynical, customers have likely always been fairly distrustful, but had little choice but to listen to us.  Suppliers used to be the primary (if not only) source of information about a purchase.  But things have changed.  In today’s world of technological innovation that makes finding and sharing information so easy, customers don’t feel like they need us anymore – at least not until they have figured out all the important stuff.

The fact that customers are doing all they can to avoid us, doesn’t make it any less critical to get our perspective into their consideration set and influence them to buy into our vision of the problem and the solution.  But how do we do that if they won’t listen to us?  We influence them through someone they will listen to.  At the top of that list are people like them – colleagues, peers, and other customers.  Of course the idea of customer advocates is nothing new, but the way the best companies are hunting for and amplifying those advocates is changing.  They have figured out some new rules to up the impact of advocacy, including: Read More »

Look around you. See the guy over there checking his stocks and playing SongPop on Facebook, thinking no one can see? And the lady in the corner, whose been on the phone with the ad agency all day, trying to get the copy right on your new print campaign? And that new hire, the one who seemingly refreshes Mashable 5 times an hour, looking for the hottest new social trend that your brand can take advantage of? If you’ve ever wondered why folks with such radically different orientations have come together in one function – or wondered what the right mix of these personalities is – MLC’s major 2012 research project for B2Cs is right up your alley.

The menagerie of modern marketing has gotten even more complex in recent years, as the marketing functions of most B2C firms have grown and now often encompasses diverse fields like digital, social, mobile, customer service, and strategy. A lot of energy, in particular, has gone into hiring “agile” marketers – marketers who are digitally savvy, curious and comfortable with ambiguity, comfortable with fast decision-making and data, and who are strong networkers. The idea is that folks like this will be able to better-navigate the fast-moving consumer world, and just might drag the rest of their organizations with them into the bright, digital future.

We received so many questions around hiring – “how do we find agile marketers?” – that we decided to dedicate our research project into what kinds of marketers best drive performance. We did a survey of over 500 marketers in Fortune 500, B2C marketing functions, and we identified 5 distinct types of marketers living in organizations today: Read More »

Brainstorms occupy a weirdly paradoxical place in the business world. Ostensibly they’re about escaping expectations and allowing for free thought, but free thought often leads to a terrible place: the endless, meandering, pointless brainstorm.

It might just be my pet peeve, but to me, there is literally nothing more soul-sucking in office life than a poorly-directed brainstorming exercise. In a previous job, we used to have endless – 3+ hour – brainstorming sessions about how we could make a client “the Apple of (insert industry here)”. And so I’m sensitive to time-wasting brainstorms, and I’m willing to bet your employees are, too.

So I took a look through MLC’s case studies to find out some of the essential elements of a productive brainstorm. None of our cases talk about brainstorming specifically, but many include brainstorms as a necessary step of a larger process. All the brainstorms had a few things in common: Read More »

Have you booked a conference room yet? Grab one before someone else nabs it. Boardrooms around the world will be full of hubbub as the final quarter approaches – it’s planning time! It’s a time to reflect back on the year that was, and plan for the year ahead. Sounds dreamy – but we all know in reality it’s far from it.

As with any passionate discussion, planning meetings can be a time where everyone wants to present their view point as strongly as they can. However, when everyone speaks, there is noise. At its best, the noise slows down meeting progress and at worse, results in no progress at all.

Planning meetings do not have to be painful. In fact, if conducted correctly, they allow everyone the chance to speak and at the same time, arrive at concrete decisions. If this sounds something like you want to achieve, worry not! MLC’s Planning and Measurement Topic Center has rich resources to help you out. For a quick read, we’ve presented below three best practices marketers can use to make planning sessions more effective. Read More »