Lucia Litman is a researcher with the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for heads of Sales. She generously agreed to give us her opinion on the landscape of office fantasy football.

Football season is here! Not only does this mean that ESPN finally has something to show other than boring baseball highlights (with apologies to the baseball fans out there) – but it also means its fantasy season. Below are a set of guidelines specific to office leagues to guide those of you that may be new at fantasy football, or new at fantasy football in a work setting.

Trash Talking: A Breakdown

If you are anything like me, you have the pleasure of watching your team destroy your competition week in and week out. Striking the right balance between professionalism and reminding everyone who they really should be afraid of in the office is nearly as difficult as deciding who to start every week-especially if the person you beat is your boss.

My suggestion: when you see your boss- wait to see if he or she brings up the game. If the loss is mentioned, it is fair game to unload on him or her.  If the game isn’t mentioned- don’t bring it up and take the high road and walk away – your boss is definitely thinking about it, even if nothing was said.

Acceptable forms of trash talking at the workplace:

• Self-Promotion – Remind everyone where your team stands in the league. Just be careful not to go overboard – it’s already lonely at the top.
• Stat-Based Trash Talk – If your stud RB put up the numbers, then all you’re doing is stating the facts, right? But just like self-promoting, less is more. You don’t want to be that nerd who could work for Elias Sports Bureau because you knew that Aaron Rodgers puts up over 350 passing yards on late afternoon games when there’s a full moon out.

Stay clear of profanity in the office:

• Crude and Obscene – Come on, isn’t it bad enough that your boss took Tim Tebow with the #1 pick? No need to take it to the next level by calling him a %&@#in’ idiot, especially on company email.
• Personal Insults – Keep it related to how awful their fantasy team is and keep it in good fun.

Team Names

Dedication and respect mandate a creative name-either an insult directed at another member in your league, a player you despise, or an inappropriate pun. Office leagues however require a new type of creativity-one that should still be funny and clever, but not something you are embarrassed to say out loud to your boss.  Save your clever, but extremely inappropriate, team names for your personal league with friends.

Trades

There are two very different pieces of advice for office trade rules that are based on your position in the company. If you’re the boss, take advantage of your status. But, if you’re a lowly first year, hold your ground! First, if you are the boss, take advantage of that.  Use your position to justify offering your old, banged up WR for your new collegiate hire’s healthy Running Back. Make sure to mention this trade face-to-face in the office, just to remind the poor first year exactly who you are, and that you are asking for something.  Feel free to leave a business card on the newbie’s desk with a personal reminder of the proposed trade as well.

If you are a first year analyst, fight the powers that be!  Don’t attempt to brown-nose the boss by accepting awful trades.  Just because you took your boss’s RB who got injured and is no longer starting, does not mean that you are getting promoted anytime soon.

Celebration Emails

If you’ve drafted as well as I did and haven’t gotten fired because you’ve followed my advice, congratulations! You won your league and now is your time to gloat. Being in a work league does not take this right away from you.  However, before you press ‘send’ on your very well written email tearing everyone else down, make sure that nothing in the email makes you an HR liability.  Because you are champion, you earned your right to trash talk everyone else, which means you can go slightly beyond insulting draft picks and team performances.  Still, keep personal jabs at a minimum – you still have to work with these schlups. I’d recommend calling people out for idiotic fantasy behaviors – i.e. forgetting to start a defense, or starting an injured player as a good way to add insult to the injury of having lost the league.

Register here for the webinar with Intuit (October 4^th at 8am PT, 11am ET, 4pm GMT)

• Does your team regularly find ways to generate $0.5 million in incremental revenue with less than two weeks of development time?
• Do you – and everyone on your team – have a solid understanding of the latest and most actionable findings from customer psychology?
• Do you take a hypothesis-based (test-and-learn) approach to marketing?  And are your hypotheses always grounded in powerful psychological principles?

If you answered ‘no’ to any of these, check out Intuit’s super-simple process for systematizing use of behavioral economics — the study of how we make purchase decisions in all sorts of surprising ways.

By taking our natural decision-making techniques into account, Marketing can dramatically boost sales – without expensive product updates.  Often, a small change in how an offer is positioned or framed can make a huge difference (as Marketing has long known).  You never see anyone advertise “10% fat”; it’s always “90% lean”, for example.  But though Marketing has haphazardly used these principles forever and great marketers intuitively “get” decision-making psychology, few companies have been systematic about applying behavioral economics.  But that’s all changing…

In recent years, a slew of studies and books on behavioral economics (Thinking Fast and Slow, Predictably Irrational, How We Decide, etc.) have raised the discipline’s profile and got marketers to take notice.  These studies coincided with a greater push for Marketing to become more scientific: to rely less on gut when making decisions and be less swayed by cool, flashy ideas or novelty.  In response, we’ve seen a range of behavioral economics applications at member companies.

We’ve heard of marketers teaching sales reps to use behavioral economics, as one example.  Instead of providing the typical soft skills training on how to adapt your language based on who you’re talking to, these companies teach reps how to use language to frame offers more compellingly.  It’s simpler (since it requires minimal personalization) and far more powerful.  The same techniques work well in call centers too.  In a series of experiments, CEB has found that customers respond very differently to the same service outcome if the call center rep phrases it differently.

Intuit is one company that’s been particularly successful in this area.  With help from behavioral economics experts, Intuit has created the ultimate psychology cheat sheet: a one-page reminder of the most actionable aspects of decision-making psychology, including how we process information, how we assess value, and how emotions and social norms influence our decisions. They’ve also put processes in place to encourage, routinize, and simplify use of the principles.  And it’s paid off.  Intuit has already run tons of behavioral economics experiments and seen stellar results.

Members, to learn more about how Intuit applies behavioral economics and see examples of the principles in action, please join us next week when Lisa Marco-Pritchard, Leader of Central Marketing Excellence and Innovation at Intuit, will share their work in more detail.

CEB presented our latest research on B2B digital marketing at Google’s recent ThinkB2B symposium.  Our detailed research and recommendations will be available next week, but in the meantime here are a few highlights and observations on the keynote address given by Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland A’s, and how his thinking applies to digital marketing in the B2B space.

Beane presented some of the strategies chronicled in Michael Lewis’ excellent book,  Moneyball.  The primary theme of his presentation was the importance of measuring the right things.  In baseball, with all of the statistics captured, it would be easy to assume the right things are being measured and that the free market of baseball teams properly assigned values to those statistics.  Beane showed how this was simply not the case.

A little background:  Beane’s Oakland A’s have a much smaller budget than their big market competitors like the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.  If Beane valued baseball players the same way as all of the other teams, the A’s would have much inferior talent, which would lead to losses.  The problem for Beane is how to buy better talent at a lower price by finding inefficiencies in the market that prices baseball players (and the statistics that they produce).

When the A’s analyzed the statistics of events in baseball that are easily measured, they found some stats that appeared to help teams win games, but actually don’t.  One example Beane highlighted is stolen bases.  Steals superficially appear to help teams score runs (and win games) as they measure players advancing around the bases.  The problem is that the cost of steals is the risk of being thrown out.  Outs in baseball are a limited resource, and the cost of outs generated by failed steal attempts outweighs the benefit.  Beane concluded that stolen bases are not the right thing to count and stopped paying for steals.

What does this teach us as B2B marketers?  Are there similar examples where we are paying for things that aren’t helping us win? Read More »

We recently polled B2B CMOs on their top priorities for next year and “Digital integration” came pretty high on the list.  Since buyers increasingly delay contact with Sales in order to do their own supplier research online, digital is a pretty hot topic for B2Bs.  That’s why most invest almost 15% of marcomm budget in digital and emerging channels (and even higher for B2B services). But the big question is how to tie those digital channels together with the rest of Marketing’s work.

A lot of digital integration efforts center on linking up different channels, e.g., creating an online presence to get more value out of your trade shows or linking online communities to your website.  And that’s obviously valuable, but if it happens at the channel-by-channel level, it doesn’t ensure that digital is driving your main objectives.

If you’ve been reading our blog for a while, you’ll know that disrupting customers’ purchase criteria by teaching customers something new about their business is the best way to drive sales and should be Marketing’s primary goal. That’s because most suppliers all reach the minimum threshold required on standard criteria – so you need to introduce new criteria to stand out.  And introducing a new criterion means telling customers that their current view of the world is flawed.  Digital media can help introduce doubt around current assumptions, disseminate new ideas broadly, and add social proof/credible support to those new ideas.

Here’s a quick summary of how to integrate digital into your disruption or commercial insight efforts, including tips from best-practice companies. Read More »

Consumers will soon have new opportunities to use big data to quantify their bodies even more precisely.  As Corey wrote last year, the quantified self movement is growing, as everyday people are tracking data from their bodies – everything from their moods to their diets to their workouts.  As the New York Times Bits blog wrote, companies are working on new products that will help these consumers track themselves even more: a “stretchable electronic” patch that will measure brain activity, hydration levels, and body temperature; a microchip pill that will emit waves containing data to a sensor; and skin patches with micro needle sensors that track changes in the bloodstream.

These products have a potential to be incredibly helpful to many.  Many runners can only get an incredibly rough estimation of hydration levels by weighing themselves pre- and post- runs on hot summer days; a patch that would tell them how much water they need to re-hydrate would simplify their hydration while making it more exact.  And many diabetics would make use of a sensor that tracks their glucose levels throughout the day, arming them with the knowledge to prevent spikes and valleys.

But as I wrote last year, getting insight from big data requires big judgment.  Trusting too much in the data (which 43% of employees do) leads to poor decision quality, as does ignoring data (which 19% of employees do).  Big judgment requires a deep knowledge of the industry that, coupled with big data, allows for high-quality decisions to be made.  As our data showed, most employees don’t exercise this judgment in their work lives.

So are consumers any different?  Unfortunately, their judgment could be even worse than employees’.  Read More »

Brands need to connect on emotion. I don’t think anyone really argues with that. But the industries where this is probably most important are ones essential to our life and livelihoods – and, outside of food and healthcare, nothing’s more essential than the industry that takes care of your money.

It’s not a secret that banks have had a rough ride the last few years. A financial crisis, general global economic weakness, and some outrage-inducing publicity nightmares have raised consumers’ mistrust of large banks, and it suggests that it’s time to begin connecting with consumers on a different level. But how can banking brands figure out where to place their chips when it comes to emotional differentiation?

A few years back, we told you that marketing strategies keying on emotion and shared values are the best way to build loyalty. That’s still true, but in this year’s research process, we came across an even faster way to take the emotional temperature of key consumer segments. Zulu, a major North American bank, developed a process in consultation with vendors that quickly maps the emotional landscape of important segments, identifying emotions consumers associate with their brand and competitor brands, and outlining emotional growth opportunities – areas of emotion that no one owns. They then use this emotional data to inform key strategic considerations, like new product development and marcomm planning.

Zulu’s approach involves two steps:

1. Mapping the emotional landscape
2. Leveraging emotional data to inform marketing strategy

MLC members, click here to learn more about Zulu’s emotional differentiation process.

Your customers live in a noisy environment.  They are constantly bombarded with messages.  You’re trying to break through and it’s tough.

At best, a typical B2B supplier can expect to get 12% of a customer’s total share of attention across the purchase process.

That statistic comes from comprehensive research on B2B buying and content marketing that we here at CEB have just completed.  The findings suggest the environment is even tougher than most marketers fully realized.  We know from our work last year that the average B2B customer is nearly 60% of the way through the purchase decision before engaging supplier sales reps.  That’s because customers can learn on their own with the vast amount of information at their fingertips through the Internet.

Enter: content marketing.  The promise of content marketing is that if I can look smart enough and be helpful enough to customers with my content, I’ll get their attention, trust and maybe even their affinity.  This promise can drive leads and consideration.  In other words, content marketing can generate demand.

But to do this, I have to target my content and make it truly relevant.

Here’s where marketing automation comes to the rescue!  Or does it? We found an interesting dynamic about marketing automation.  You might call it love-hate. Read More »

Marketers don’t need any introduction to the ongoing search for higher-ROI marketing activities. As budget pressures mount and the range of potential marketing activities expands, marketing leaders are on the hunt to ensure the things they do generate positive value for their business.

While the focus on results is smart, the way many marketing leaders have implemented it is not. By focusing on response rates – things like open and click-through rates, offer redemption, and in-store traffic – marketers in many companies have been incented to over-discount and over-communicate, creating discount-dependent, low-margin customers and wasting discounts on high-value customers already inclined to buy.

But what if – instead of using precious marketing dollars to raise customer volumes – you could direct spend in a way that builds a more valuable customer? Using advanced data and analytics, Foxtrot – our pseudonym for a global Fortune 500 retailer that sells to both consumers and businesses – has figured out how to do exactly that.

They do this by:

1. Identifying the factors high-value customers have in common, and using those factors to identify high-potential customers
2. Mapping the “development path” for high-value customers, determining the buying behaviors that ultimately lead to high-value status
3. Using marketing spend to incent high-potential customers to emulate their high-value peers.

MLC members, read more about how Foxtrot successfully develops high-value customers, and register for an upcoming webinar featuring an explanation of their tactics.

In the B2B world, it’s impossible to avoid just how much more important marketing is these days. With traditional, relationship-based selling coming under continued and unprecedented pressure from budget concerns and scrutiny, suppliers are finding that new strategies for keeping customers engaged and prices afloat is for salespeople to challenge key assumptions about the industries they sell in and how their products fit. The Sales Executive Council, MLC’s sister program for heads of sales, originated a wildly-popular sales methodology based on this insight called The Challenger Sale, which helps reps aggressively attack customer misconceptions and turn the resulting new understanding to the supplier’s advantage.

Here’s the thing, though, about the Challenger Sale: it’s impossible to scale without serious, serious investment in Marketing. In order to equip all your reps to use this methodology, you need some sense of what misconceptions are out there in the market, as well as standard, smart objections to those misconceptions that spin the new understanding to the supplier’s advantage. In other words: market research, customer understanding and messaging – three key marketing activities. This need is becoming so important, in fact, that we’ve created a brand-new resource for Marketers interested in adopting the Challenger methodology in their organizations as well as a live event, an introduction to Challenger Messaging, that we encourage all B2B marketers to try and attend.

But once you’ve got the messages, then what do you do? As we noted last year, the way B2B marketers are scaling fast is by embracing automation - but lots are doing it in a haphazard way. There’s a lot of vendor hype out there that’s promising unrealistic returns from automation. “Just buy our solution,” they say. “You’ll see returns right away!”. The reality is not so simple. Here are the three biggest obstacles our members are facing when it comes to squeezing returns from marketing automation, and some tips on solving them: Read More »

We all know that it’s harder than ever for consumer brands to cut through the noise and really reach their target audience these days. With a plethora of media options available to them, consumers are beginning to craft worlds around themselves that are increasingly impenetrable by traditional differentiation tactics. This process has been going on for some time – in fact, we’ve been talking about it since 2004 or so. But as digital adoption continues apace, we’re quickly reaching a tipping point where more and more consumers will be unreachable with one-size-fits-all tactics. Read More »