Through these special blog postings, our goal is to offer advice and insights from top B2B marketers. Recently, Rick Kean, managing partner of the Business Marketing Institute and former executive director of the Business Marketing Association, responded to our questions. From his responses you'll learn what strategies he has seen work the best for connecting sales and marketing teams and what business practices he'd like to see disappear. Enjoy.

1. What's the main goal of the Business Marketing Institute?

To educate and train B2B marketers in the knowledge and skills necessary to execute marketing programs. B2B marketing people are rarely professionally educated or trained for their jobs. Imagine that occurring in accounting, engineering or even sales.

2. What strategy have you seen work the best for connecting sales and marketing teams?

CRM, because it holds both marketing and sales accountable. The powerful collaborative planning, execution and analysis tools in CRM systems promote transparency in the marketing and sales process. That makes it easier to not only track, measure and assess the progress and status of every marketing program, but the subsequent sales productivity as well.

3. What kind of results have you seen from marketing teams that are required to report directly to sales? And would you like to see this practice radiate to more B2B companies?

There's a lot of noise these days about how marketing staffs have to defend their turf in companies, and how marketing managers need to justify their function - for example, by measuring the ROI of their marketing efforts. I see desperate marketers grasping for these straws whenever the marketing manager has separated him/herself from their obligation to serve their company's sales team. And the fact that this is such a popular topic tells me there's a lot of ineffective marketing going on out there. When their ads and mailings are pulling good sales leads, I never see marketing managers thinking they have to justify their roles or quantify their marketing programs. I only see it when sales departments are grumbling that their company's expensive, fluffy advertising program isn't generating any actionable sales response in the form of qualified sales leads and inquiries. When a marketing manager is working with sales to develop ads, mailings and other deliverables that effectively sell their company's product, and these marketing activities are keeping the company's sales team supplied with a steady stream of high-quality leads, and the marketing manager is out front, looking for ways to open new business opportunities in the marketing program, the marketing department is never asked to justify itself.

4. What are the most beneficial business trends you've seen emerge in the last year?

A trend back to where we came from: sales support. B2B marketing exists for the same reason it always has - to generate sales response in the form of inquiries, sales leads, orders and new business for your company's sales team. Sales leads are the currency we have to deal with.

The first step in developing marketing programs that generate sales response is clear, effective presentation of your company's products' or services' most compelling benefits. And this clear salesman-like presentation, when used in copy and layout for all marketing projects and combined with strong offers and a call to action, tells the reader:
-What you're selling
-What's so good about it
-Why you need it
-And what they need to do next to buy it

5. What business practices would you like to disappear?

All the people infected with jargon that continually try to make our business more complicated than it is. You'll find them everywhere. They're at both B2B marketing companies and on the agency side. They're the "experts" who will tell you that "you need to re-contextualize your business model," by "maximizing the brand experience," to "mobilize the user clickpath," so that you'll be "acquiring mindshare," when what you really need to do is figure out how to get your marketing program back on track and get your sales up next month. If you're a young person in B2B marketing, my best advice is to tune out every expert you meet and do your best to unlearn most of what you were taught in your college marketing classes, if you actually ever had a college marketing class.

6. What's your advice to company officials who view marketing as a discretionary budget item during a recession?

CEOs tend to be left-brain thinkers. They believe that profitability is a direct result of something they do - like speeding up production or cutting costs. And like their peers they were, in the recent past, obsessively devoting themselves to managing the supply side of their businesses, property, plants and equipment. All that mattered was managing these industrial-age assets to earn higher financial returns.

It's hard for them to acknowledge that profitability is a product of what customers think and do. Where does all of our revenue come from? From products? From brands? From our loyalty programs? No, all of our revenue comes from customers. And finding customers for the products and services we have available is what the business is all about and what marketers are supposed to be doing. When marketing becomes less about "top line" revenue and more about "brand" or "awareness," linkage to the sales teams and their needs to actually drive revenue breaks down. In many cases, a huge inefficiency actually starts to occur as sales, left without any real support on the preference and purchase phases, creates their own marketing services organization, frequently called field marketing. Marketing should serve a two-pronged role in B2B: It is both the staff service function to sales in the here and now, and the advance new business-building function for the company. We need to make management understand that.

7. What business book would you recommend to B2B marketers?

"Tested Advertising Methods" by John Caples, a classical master of ad copywriting in the 1930s, '40s and '50s. His principles were that plain words and basic appeals sell products. And, by staying focused on reality in your advertising copy, you can make simple, plain and direct ad sales approaches that beat creative "impactful" or emotional appeals every time. Times may change, but people and their motivations don't. Any marketing program can be made more effective by using the same basic appeals, updated of course with modern production values. The hottest ticket in marketing today is Google AdWords-type keyword and search engine marketing programs, where advertisers write short, text-only ads designed to draw clicks from targeted keyword searches relating to specialized products. And where do you think the top copywriters who write these tight, compelling, must-sell-it headlines and one-line copy tags go for copywriting ideas and advice? Yep, they've studied and copied the techniques of John Caples and others that were used more than 50 years ago.

8. What makes you happy about going to work every day?

It's our turn. Companies need marketing...again. The end of the supply economy and the beginning of the demand economy demands growth, and particularly organic growth. That's the big agenda item today. Companies have made tremendous improvements in quality and productivity by working and re-working the tangible parts of their business, like manufacturing, pricing and distribution, but the opportunities to drive incremental growth are drying up. And in the quest for organic growth, marketing has become the change agent, transforming companies from the classic, industrial-age "selling what we make" organizations into customer-centric value providers.

Posted by Will Schnabel at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The tip this week comes from a Senior Account Manager in our Fargo office, Lorael Arnquist. She has more than eight years of high tech marketing experience and has spent over four years deploying, implementing and optimizing lead management solutions.

Data is the heart of all you do as a marketer. Without clean, accurate, complete data, all the whiz-bang features in the world (CRM integrations, ROI reports, automated campaigns, etc.) are no good. All this great functionality revolves around the data in your database. Here are five tips for keeping your data in order:

1) Keep it clean. The heart of marketing automation is a centralized database. It's important to perform regular maintenance and keep your database free of duplicates. If data is disparate and fragmented across duplicate records, you won't be able to see the big picture of your contacts' actions and responses.

2) Focus on email addresses. Email is a critical ingredient in the marketing mix. Email addresses must be accurate, working addresses, but it's equally important to analyze your database to see who hasn't taken any actions - such as submitting surveys, clicking links in emails or visiting your website - on your communications. Depending on the length of your sales cycle, if people haven't interacted with you during the past six to nine months , you should consider removing them from your marketing database or at the very least suppressing them from receiving email messages to enhance deliverability.

3) Progressively capture more data. The more information you gather from prospects the better, because you can incorporate it into your lead-score model, as well as your lead-management and lead-nurturing programs. The information you gather - including BANT, demographic and firmagraphic - gives you an indication of who your targets are, what their needs and preferences are, and where there are opportunities for relationships.

4) "Standardize" your data. Data comes into the marketing automation system through multiple sources: integration, manual imports and forms. The goal is to align the data for targeted segmentation. Standardizing data can include formatting all your state and country values (e.g. making all variations of USA, U.S. U.S.A. into US), categorizing job titles/functions (e.g. changing VP of Mktg and Vice President of Marketing into VP of Marketing) and more. This can be a painstaking process as you initially prepare your data for implementation or integration with a CRM system, but the benefits of doing this will pay off. Once you have your initial batch of data standardized, make the most of dropdowns on survey forms, limit use of open text fields, and run manual one-off data file imports through a standardization "key" prior to importing into your marketing automation system.

5) Identify segmentation opportunities. The more targeted your communications, the more effective your marketing efforts will be. Take an inventory of all the data you have available today and analyze it to pinpoint areas for segmentation. Find similarities and differences in your segments and break out your audience by needs, interests and behaviors. Engage prospects and customers on their own terms, be relevant and provide value at the right time, place and in the best format.

The benefits of keeping the data clean, accurate and standardized will be realized in all areas of your efforts - improved email deliverability, a centralized marketing history, targeted communications and more comprehensive lead-score models - all positively impacting your company's bottom line.

Posted by Will Schnabel at 5:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Through these special blog postings, our goal is to offer advice and insights from top B2B marketers. Recently, I had the opportunity to correspond with Dan Kersh, head of online, The Curious Group, from the UK, and Silverpop's latest strategic partnership. From his responses, you'll learn how he got started in digital marketing and what impact he thinks the current economic crisis has had on the European B2B marketing industry.

1. How did you get started in online marketing?

Having actually studied graphic design and typography in the early 90's, falling into marketing was in part by chance. Being a designer sometimes gave me the opportunity to sit in front of clients and listen to the wider business issues. Perhaps it was this listening and my untrained marketing eye that helped me see past the ways marketing has always been run, and with this I could offer a different point of view.

It was, however, my foray into digital that fully landed me in the world of marketing. Having set up a digital business just over 5 years ago I had to think on my feet, and there was certainly no time to ponder over pixels. I had to be able to convince clients why they should spend their budgets with Curious, and back then why digital would be an important player in the marketing mix.

2. What do you view as the biggest challenge facing marketers for the remainder of 2009?

For 2009 and beyond, the biggest challenge will be the expansion of technology and what technology creates. Keeping up with what is new and hedging your bets on the best thing out there is tough. Boundaries are constantly changing, while our time to think becomes less. The worry is that with so much information to consume, marketers may end up only using headlines rather than be able to delve into the details. This won't be for the want of trying, but it will simply be due to the fact that there is too much information to digest. With the evolution of technology growing at such a pace, how can digesting all this information that it produces happen?

3. The Curious Group works with companies from many different industries. What's a common challenge your clients experience in their global marketing efforts?

Well, one that springs to mind is pulling content together. Many clients have a loose idea of what they want to say in their head, but when it comes down to putting the content on paper, be that words or imagery, they really struggle. Pretty much every client we have worked with finds this a challenge, and this is probably because pinning down the people with the knowledge is hard to do. You tend to find that you need to go on a treasure hunt, as it's often the case that even in global organizations, very few people have the real key knowledge. It never ceases to amaze me that solutions or products inside these large organizations are only truly understood by a few select individuals and that marketing never bothered to engage with these early doers in any given project. With this in mind, we always tend to highlight this as a risk factor at the beginning of a project.

4. What's the biggest impact the current economic crisis has had on the online industry?

Curious has so far been fortunate not to see much change in marketing spend, and after speaking with many industry peers it seems that if you're in the digital environment you can see some reward in such a crisis. The demand for measuring campaigns and seeking ROI means digital has an advantage over traditional forms of media. My only concern is that the traditional houses will (some already are) look to piggy back on the digital bandwagon and profess they're digital experts. This obviously has implications if client-side marketers are not that savvy on digital, and we have to be wary of such implications.

Perhaps it is the pressure for online to deliver (as everyone now looks to digital as the frontrunner) may prove to be the biggest challenge ahead.

5. What are some of the newest ideas that you and your clients are now exploring?

Well, one idea is something we've created in house for clients to use. As a design and marketing agency, we were often at the mercy of the client when it came to passing on content. This held us up at the build stage when it came to the creation of the solution.

So around 18 months ago we took it upon ourselves to create a design and build tool for global clients. Quite simply, it's an email build tool that can import any piece of content and create emails and landing pages on the fly. We then can hand over that content to the good people at Silverpop to send the mail out. The build can be exported in html-friendly formats and imported into the sending tool. The fact that it handles every major global language has helped our client base build marketing campaigns on the fly, essentially cutting down the full process from circa 25 days to circa three days. If you have time, take a look at the site at www.iamconstruct.com.

6. Will email continue to be an effective channel for B2B marketing? How will it evolve?

Undoubtedly—email is already providing a worthwhile channel within B2B, and one could suggest it's far more effective than consumer, perhaps because the relevance and targeting is more refined. I tend to find that you come across more nuggets within the B2B mailings than site search itself.

As for how it will evolve, I think it's all about how we deliver content and in what format. The inbox can take on many a different guise; it need not only be Outlook. We can read via RSS, handheld and so on. With this in mind, it will be the evolution of technology that will ultimately dictate the future of email. As long as we understand it, B2B will remain effective.

7. What business book would you recommend for B2B marketers?

Well, I'm currently reading The 80 Minute MBA (kind of fits with my life) by Richard Reeves and John Knell. Looking back, one book that influenced me (even beyond business) and probably millions of others was Stephen R. Covey's 7 Habits...
I enjoy philosophy and was keen to make a mark in the industry, and this book was a great place to start.

8. What's the best advice you ever received, and where did it come from?

"If you get up in the morning, you have chances."
Great words of wisdom from my grandfather.

Posted by Will Schnabel at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm just returning from the SIIA's 2009 Software Summit and CODiE Awards gala in San Francisco. Even with the slowdown in the economy, I continued to hear story after story of software companies not just surviving, but thriving. This is especially true in the SaaS arena, where the benefits of the pay-for-only-what-you-need model becomes even more appealing for companies. Plus, many of the newest up-and-coming segments are providing rapid ROI and increased efficiency savings. Music to any CIO and CFO involved.

And the Winner Is…

The most exciting part of the event was the awards gala, providing CODiE awards to categories across education, content, and software. The awards are recognition by our peers as to the innovativeness of the solution as well as the impact it has to business operations. What made it exciting was to see many of Silverpop’s own customers and partners nominated for many of the awards. While there, I ran into Onvia (Best Vertical Market Business Content Solution), Fortify Software (Best Software Testing Solution), Numara Software (Best Business Productivity Solution), and Intacct (Best Financial Software Solution).

Silverpop was fortunate to have our own Engage B2B solution nominated for the top software category of Best Business Software Solution. Interesting enough, this category's finalists spanned the functional gamut from business planning (Adaptive Planning), design (Adobe Systems), workforce management (Tenrox Corporation), sales and service (Salesforce.com) and last but not least, demand generation and marketing (Silverpop Engage B2B).

Even though we didn't win (yes, it was Salesforce.com's night!), we were truly happy to be a finalist. More importantly, I think this is a great acknowledgement by the software industry of the innovation happening with marketing technologies, as well as the impact that the new, modern marketing automation solutions can have on a company' success.

Congratulations to the entire SIIA organization, judges, nominees and CODiE winners for continuing to strive for excellence in our industry.

Posted by Will Schnabel at 1:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)