I've gotten a lot of great feedback on last week's blog post, "Viewing Sales/Marketing Mis-alignment Through Sales' Eyes," and it's driven some thoughtful conversation with people both within the sales and the marketing communities. Moreover, as I've been blogging, commenting and Tweeting on this topic over the past few weeks, I've noticed significant momentum around this dialogue. And I'm not the only one.

"The sales and marketing alignment movement is on," notes Craig Rosenberg, a.k.a. 'The Funnelholic' (Twitter: @funnelholic), in a recent blog post. "Everyone talks about it in the blogosphere and at conferences." Why is this?

I believe we are at a watershed moment in this dialogue. Seismic shifts in the B2B buyer process, in the roles of sales and marketing professionals and in the demand generation and marketing automation technology landscape have created a unique moment. The time is now to let go of long-held views, to embrace a new mindset (one I've referred to as an Engagement 2.0 mindset) and to build new processes and infrastructure to improve sales/marketing alignment -- focusing on building quality leads and supporting resultant sales through a well-tuned demand generation engine.

Round-up of Blogger Insights

To further propel this dialogue, I thought it would be valuable to connect people and ideas. So here is a round-up of insights on this topic from other bloggers -- all who write about sales and marketing issues:

> Robert Lesser (Twitter: @robertlesser), president of Canada-based Direct Impact Marketing, a B2B lead generation firm, posted on the MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog about the 'top ten signs' that a company has sales/marketing mis-alignment. His key insight also speaks to the organizational impact of mis-alignment: "Poor quality leads and a broken lead process are [the primary] warning signs that sales and marketing are not aligned."

> Chuck Besondy (Twitter: @cbesondy), a US-based sales/marketing staffing executive, added his thoughts (via a post on his firm's Executive Marketing blog) about the real cost to companies of sales/marketing mis-alignment. He believes that "... most companies have been driving in a misaligned state for so long they are settling for sub-par results and resigned to trying to solve the problem. Misalignment is the default situation in most B2B companies."

> Neil Edwards (Twitter: @themarketingeye), managing director of UK-based The Marketing Eye, a marketing agency, posted on his company's blog site about 'the great sales versus marketing debate.' He advocates for a holistic approach and points out that in the rush to empathize with sales, marketers must not lose sight of the bigger picture:

Let's be in no doubt, and I see this first hand in my own business, Sales is one of the most important components of the marketing strategy. If the leads aren't being found and converted, there is no long term to plan and position for, so the marketing department needs to get its finger out and do its bit to feed the machine.

But Sales is exactly that: one part of the marketing strategy and it puts the cart firmly in front of the horse to have Marketing reporting to Sales. All of the elements of product, price, place, promotion, people, process, physical evidence and positioning need to combine before a business can make friends with customers and sell the maximum number of units at the highest possible price.

> Craig Rosenberg (cited above), finally, echoes a point from my last post on the importance of marketing viewing itself from a sales point of view: "One of the keys to this sales and marketing 'glasnost' is for both sides to understand as much as they can about not only what each other does in the organization but general best practices for each specialty." (Note: His post -- linked above -- also has a great 'top ten' list of sales blogs to read.)

What other posts have you read recently on improving sales/marketing mis-alignment? Please share your perspectives and links here. In fact, it would be great if we could use this round-up as a starting place for building out a list of as many posts and points of view on this dialogue as possible.

Posted by Adam Needles at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've been blogging and Tweeting quite a bit on the theme of improving sales/marketing (mis-) alignment -- initially exploring the concept of Engagement 2.0 and most recently exploring the challenges marketers face in actually improving sales/marketing alignment. It's a timely issue. It's also particularly front and center for me given Silverpop just held its global sales meeting (which I had some Tweets from) last week.

It's great to have the opportunity as a marketer to participate in a sales summit. The most-significant take-away is hearing about the challenges and opportunities facing our business through the lens of the sales organization. This is a critical exercise to go through as a marketer.

"Marketing and sales look at the world through different lenses," notes a recent Silverpop white paper on improving alignment, "And that's not likely to change ... ." Thus, sales empathy is a critical component of building bottoms-up marketing programs, and it's more important than ever. The 2009 B2B Lead Generation Benchmark Study, co-authored by sales guru Mac McIntosh, noted that -- despite often opposite sales-team sentiments -- the bulk of marketing organizations really do play a critical role in demand generation: "A majority (60%) of the companies reported that their outside sales teams find less than half of the opportunities in the sales pipeline on their own ... ."

How Sales Views Marketing

So how does a sales organization view marketing? I've gotten a variety of perspectives from both sales professionals and industry gurus, but what stands out are two related questions sales professionals seem to lean on when assessing marketing:

> Does marketing actually add value? This may make most marketer's jaws drop, but it's a legitimate question. It requires a little bit of explanation, though. One seasoned sales professional I spoke with for this piece commented:

I would suggest marketers ask themselves this question before sending a lead over the fence to sales: Is this lead(s) that I have equal to or more worthy than a lead that a salesperson can get out of [a lead sourcing provider such as] Jigsaw where they already know the company's revenues, the title, the company vertical, the URL and so on?

This comment really gets at the heart of the demand chain and of marketing's critical role in demand generation. We often comment about how in the current B2B selling environment marketing must take on more responsibility than ever in lead nurturing and lead management. That also means that marketing must add more value than ever before, and that value must exceed what might be provided via an alternate demand generation channel (such as an online compiled lead sourcing provider).

Mike Damphousse, a demand generation expert, provides another perspective on the minimum threshold for added value in a recent piece on his Smashmouth Marketing blog:

There are lots of terms describing leads. ... Acronyms or not, my opinion is that when sales gets a lead ... it better meet three criteria:

1. It better be a company the rep wants to penetrate
2. It better be a person that has the role and responsibility to contribute to a decision
3. It better be someone that has an interest in what sales is about to talk to them about

> Can marketing demonstrate added value? This second point may be a bit more understandable for many marketers constantly asked about marketing measurement and return-on-investment (ROI) analysis. Regardless of whether you are, or are not, adding value in the demand chain, the question is whether this can be demonstrated.

Interestingly -- from a sales perspective -- how this is demonstrated doesn't have to be complicated. Another seasoned marketing professional pointed out to me that basic information about the content of campaigns, targeting, start/end dates and channels used go a long way towards solving the problem and towards understanding the role marketing played in adding value.

Assessing Marketing Through a Sales Lens

What are some incremental steps marketers can take to improve their empathy for the sales point of view? As an exercise, I took the two questions from above and placed them in a two-by-two matrix format. It really helped to clarify what might be defined as the four types of marketers in the eyes of sales. The ideal is being a 100% "aligned marketer" -- i.e., demonstrating and actually delivering value. And it goes without saying that the 100% "mis-aligned marketer" will not have his/her job for long.

What is interesting to think about is the other two types of marketers -- the ones who aren't 100% broken and could benefit from some help:

> The "spin doctor" is good at demonstrating value -- probably using skewed top-down metrics -- but is actually not delivering value that is greater than what might be achieved via an alternate demand generation channel. This type of marketer could benefit from better campaign-level insights, to understand what is working and what is not, and actually improve the ROI of marketing activities.

> The "silent operative" is getting it right but can't show the causal connection in the demand chain. This type of marketer is a strong candidate for closed-loop analytics that provide lead-level insights -- demonstrating the connection between marketing investment and results.

Technology can't change the lens of sales or marketing, but it can play a key role in improving alignment -- especially for a spin doctor or a silent operative. A marketing automation platform can help tune campaigns, and if integrated with a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, it can also deliver critical closed-loop analytics. And leveraging the lead scoring capabilities of a marketing automation platform can provide a common basis for sales and marketing to talk about added value -- serving as a common "lingua franca" for sales/marketing alignment. It's a start!

What are your experiences as a marketer (or sales professional) in closing the gap between the two different lenses?

Posted by Adam Needles at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

To achieve the highest ROS ("return on slides") from your Webinars, you must generate a high number of registrants, get as many of them to attend as you can, deliver a valuable and informative experience during the presentation and leverage the Webinars as part of your lead-nurturing program.

Email delivers on its cross-channel potential as the key value driver for effective promotion and follow-up:

>Invitation: Use your existing client, prospect, newsletter and Webinar email lists to generate a large number of registrants cost effectively.
-Stand alone email invitation series (initial and follow-up) presents the value proposition and benefits of attending the Webinar and event details.
-Promotions within your existing newsletters can range from the title, date and registration link to a short article on the Webinar topic itself and registration link.
-Send the initial invite at least 2 to 4 weeks ahead, although you can test this for effectiveness.
-If you send a second invitation, exclude those who have already registered.
-Consider encouraging employees to incorporate Webinar information and a registration link in their email signatures.

>Confirmation: The confirmation email, usually generated by your Webinar technology system and sent immediately after registration, restates the Webinar time, date and topic, login instructions, system requirements and an "Add to Calendar" option.

>Reminder: These emails remind your registrants of the Webinar date and time and restate the topic and speaker information, access link and login instructions. Your Webinar technology usually generates these, but you should customize content and timing.
-Typical send times are a few hours before the Webinar begins, and a day or two before.
-Consider sending a first reminder a week or so before the Webinar for people who signed up far in advance.

>Follow up: After the Webinar, communicate to both the attendees and registrants who didn't attend. The email content for each audience is almost the same, but you should personalize the emails to reflect their attendance or non-attendance.
-The subject line and content can reflect "thank you for attending" to attendees and "sorry we missed you" to no-shows. Both should have links to material presented during the Webinar (PPT or PDF version of the slides, white papers, studies, articles) and the recorded presentation.
-These emails should be sent within a few days following the Webinar.

>Ongoing Webinar Notifications: If you conduct Webinars regularly (at least monthly), consider creating a separate email channel just for content notifications such as Webinars, white papers, podcasts and studies. Add this channel to your newsletter subscription page, and promote it to your subscribers as well as prospects.

>Lead Nurturing: Webinars are now a staple of B2B lead nurturing programs. Make sure your email nurture program incorporates both archived and upcoming Webinar promotions. Additionally, include Webinar attendance and registration data in your lead scoring process if possible.

Want more details? Sign up for "Using Email to Promote Your Webcast," my Webinar with David Pitta of BrightTalk on July 15.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 8:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My last blog post explored the idea of Engagement 2.0 - an evolutionary idea I presented at the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) events in Portland and Seattle last week. The concept is two-fold: One, that the new era of B2B marketing requires a new mindset for the B2B marketing organization - active engagement as much with prospects/customers as with the sales organization. And two, that it suggests a new role for marketing both as the catalyst in dialogue with potential buyers and also as the critical link in the demand chain, "incubating" raw leads into mature opportunities and delivering them to sales.

In an interesting blog post I read recently, SiriusDecisions did a great job of characterizing this macro environment, discussing the related issue in B2B marketing as being that of the advent of Buyer 2.0 - which is the reason everything has changed.

The evidence of this new environment and of the need for Engagement 2.0 seems to be everywhere, but as with any new concept, it is important to make sure it's built on a solid foundation. So over the past week, I've begun doing research to further analyze why we as marketers still seem to be falling very short of the Engagement 2.0 aspiration. In fact, why is it that while sales collaboration is the stated goal, more often than not sales antagonism remains? And why is it that the relationship between most sales and marketing teams remains very static, even though Buyer 2.0 is such a complex, dynamic and iterative target?

Here are some interesting view points and data I've run across this week that help us further understand this phenomenon:

> We get things turned around; it's not just about making marketing/sales more efficient, it's also about better understanding and responding to the modern B2B buyer - i.e., being more "buyer centric" with our marketing strategy and systems: The revolution in B2B is not really in how we market or sell; it is really in how B2B buyers buy. And so the onus is on us as B2B marketers to respond to this evolution, but it requires recognizing this causal relationship. The changing buyer is changing how we market; not the other way around. SiriusDecisions addressed this in their recent post on Buyer 2.0, cited above:

Technology is the driver behind the shift in buyer/selling behaviors, but more so in terms of its impact on the buyer rather than the seller. Buying 2.0 amplifies the power technology has given buyers and further increases marketing's role throughout the buying process beyond demand creation. Buyers seek out knowledge in their education phase independent of a campaign or cold call. Content, collaboration and knowledge drives marketing's messaging impact into the opportunity. Pipeline acceleration initiatives and nurturing strategies further influence the buying dynamic. Measuring marketing's contribution and improving its ability to target their initiatives puts marketing in the cross-hairs of sales productivity. Sales and marketing integration is a requirement for success in the next "new" economy.

> Our process for lead management and for ultimate lead hand-off remains static, one-way and not collaborative: I was reading an excerpt of MarketingSherpa's recent B2B Benchmark Report, and noted that only 28% of marketing organizations "have a process for handing leads back to marketing." And this was the lowest priority among a number of factors MarketingSherpa surveyed B2B marketers about as they parsed the maturity of B2B marketers' marketing/sales processes. The implication? Marketing organizations remain in a "lead generation" mindset, but once leads are handed off to sales, too often there is not continuous tracking, "engagement" and collaboration (even though marketers on a separate question indicated by a 45% margin that they "collaborate with sales to define sales-ready leads"). So if a lead cools, it is more likely to be discarded, versus routing it back into a nurturing campaign. This is a static/one-way lead management mindset and does not indicate the type of collaboration required for Engagement 2.0 or to respond to Buyer 2.0.

> It's not just a marketing thing; sales is unprepared for its new role with this new buyer: Too often we focus on what marketing needs to do to fix the situation, but there are two sides to a relationship. One result of being engaged later and later in the traditional sales cycle is that sales teams have less ability to have real influence over the buying process. Most B2B buyers have already done their research, analysis and assessments by the time they engage a sales person. Where sales team members could at one time play a key catalyst role in the consultative selling process - with the ability to learn and get to know the buyer along the way - now they must come to the table ready to close the deal.

And as Michael Gerard, a research vice president with analyst firm IDC, pointed out in a recent blog piece, there is little room for error:

[B]uyers will tell you that, in this economy, they no longer have tolerance for uninformed vendor representatives who come through their doors. The sales rep must come to a meeting prepared to discuss the buyer's specific business - yet 31% of sales reps are not prepared with even a basic level of Web information available before taking a buyer's valuable time. Only 16% are extremely prepared - these are the reps positioned to take share for the companies they represent.

This requires a new posture for sales team members - who must be more prepared than ever. But it also requires a new posture for marketing team members - who must close the gap, who must manage the dialogue, and who must turn over to sales not only a marketing-qualified lead, but also the background and insight on that lead sales needs to successfully close the opportunity.

What do you think? What evidence have you seen that we are challenged as marketers in embracing an Engagement 2.0 mindset?

Posted by Adam Needles at 4:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This week I've had the good fortune to be able to present at the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) events in Portland and Seattle. It's been a great experience - giving me the opportunity to hear first hand some of the challenges and opportunities B2B marketers face, as well as to engage with others in the online marketing automation segment.

I've also had the opportunity to present on a topic I've been thinking about quite a bit over the past few weeks - the topic of engagement marketing and what it means for the modern B2B marketer (which I touched on a bit in my last blog post). In particular, I've been testing out a new concept I'm calling Engagement 2.0 and which I'd like to get your input on here. I'll explain.

We spend a lot of time as B2B marketers talking about the importance of customer engagement. First, relationships are everything in B2B marketing, where unit volume tends to be low but deal size is typically significant. Second, with the emergence of the Internet as a tool for B2B buyer education and an almost universal drive towards greater bottom-line accountability and transparency of business expenses, we've seen a permanent power shift from B2B vendor to prospective B2B customer. This has resulted in a new marketing dynamic that favors responding to customer "pull" over a traditional marketing "push" mentality. Howard Sewell highlights some of the implications of this new reality in a post on his Direct Connections blog this week that I think is worth a quick read.

Paul Greenberg also writes about this in his book, CRM at the Speed of Light: "No longer is the corporation the fulcrum around which customer groups and suppliers revolve. … [T]he customer is now the pivot point." And data from MarketingSherpa indicates there are 5-6X more leads that are longer-term and must be patiently nurtured than those that are ready to immediately convert to a sale. We're waiting on and responding to prospects much more than they are waiting on us.

Yet engaging with prospective customers is more challenging than ever...particularly for the sales organization. Not only does the B2B buyer have more power - and more communication channels to leverage - than ever, but sales teams must contend with being brought into the buying cycle later and later in the buying process. At this point, the sales team has less opportunity to influence decision making and is at a loss for the type of intelligence that is critical for guiding a deal to closure.

Laura Ramos with Forrester touched on this in a recent blog post on sales-marketing alignment: "As any rep can tell marketing, no two deals close the same. Learning how buyers buy is a huge challenge in B2B made more complex by the myriad of digital channels that buyers now use.”

Marketing - more than ever - is the critical link. Marketing must not only nurture prospects through a longer stretch of the sales funnel, but it also must serve as the eyes and the ears for the sales team before they are able to connect with prospects. Thus, the relationship between marketing and sales is more important than ever before. In fact, I would say that it is equally critical, today, for B2B marketing organizations to be engaged with their sales organization as they are with their illusive and empowered prospective customer.

Enter my concept for Engagement 2.0.
I believe that the new era of B2B marketing we find ourselves in requires a new mindset for the B2B marketing organization - active engagement both with prospects/customers and with the sales organization. Marketing must be a newly-vital link in the demand generation value chain and must view the sales team as its customer.

This requires a new mindset - one that brings with it a new set of responsibilities…and a broader charter for marketing. While marketing must still serve as a catalyst in generating initial awareness and interest from prospects, it also must maintain a holistic perspective and must serve as a catalyst in ensuring prospects mature and eventually convert into sales. Marketing must serve as the leader in overseeing the end-to-end demand generation process at its company and it must be the steward of best practices for lead management. And marketers must focus on building internal systems that provide transparency into the efficiency of the demand generation process and support continuous, bi-lateral flow of information between marketing and sales.

Engagement 2.0 is a new collaborative model for customer conversion through alignment between prospects, marketing and sales. And it is starting to catch on.

Jep Castelein, who writes the Lead Sloth blog, noted increasing evidence of this new mindset and collaboration while attending the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco in March of this year. "So many people still think that 'Sales 2.0' is only about sales. Not surprising, as it says 'sales' and does not mention marketing," commented Castelein in a blog post. "The reality is different: successful implementation of Sales 2.0 requires close collaboration between sales and marketing. For example, David Solinger explained that Ariba now has precise metrics [for] how many leads they need to close a specific amount of business. That is only possible when sales and marketing work closely together."

What do you think about this concept of Engagement 2.0 and this new mindset for marketing?

I'd appreciate your feedback and thoughts here and/or via Twitter (via @abneedles). Also, in future posts, I'll talk more about best practices for Engagement 2.0 – something I'm covering in my OMS presentations this week.

Posted by Adam Needles at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)