By Adam Needles, on September 7th, 2010
Labor Day always feels to me like the true indicator that Fall has arrived, and so the day after Labor Day feels like the ideal point to announce our Fall 2010 line-up for B2B Marketing University.
We’ve re-tooled our renowned B2B Marketing University (Twitter: #B2BUniversity) curriculum this Fall. The core concepts remain, but we’ve reshaped entire curriculum around one, uniting theme: The Art of Nurturing And we are kicking off this new curriculum next week in New York City.
Are you planning to join us?
 Source: Silverpop B2B Marketing University is a series of free — yes, stop right here for an extra second, we do all of this at no cost — educational events designed to help B2B marketers stay ahead of the curve in a challenging and constantly-evolving demand generation environment.
The original series kicked off last Fall 2009, and to date more than 1,000 attendees have joined us at events in Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Palo Alto, Seattle and Washington, DC. These events deliver world-class marketing education, and we’ve partnered with leading B2B marketing experts to teach our sessions (see below).
You don’t have to take our word for it, though. 90% of our attendees are ‘Net Promoters’ and would recommend this event to a colleague or peer. More than 98% of attendees said the topics covered were important or very important to their business role. In addition, many of our attendees have commented on the event series in their blogs and on Twitter. One Boston attendee noted on his blog, “I found the event to be very beneficial and learned quite a bit about B2B Marketing and the value of lead automation.”
We’ve had a year of great experiences, and we continue to improve our series.
I believe The Art of Nurturing thus represents our newest and most salient curriculum to date.
Continue reading B2B Marketing University Fall 2010: The Art of Nurturing
By Adam Needles, on August 25th, 2010
I spoke at a breakfast roundtable in late June — hosted by Silverpop partner AcquireB2B — that was presented for senior marketing and sales executives from B2B companies throughout the Boston/128 area. Those in the room were not early adopters of marketing automation technology, but they were all savvy leaders that realize their demand generation environment is changing and that their approaches must subsequently evolve.
These executives struck me as ‘down-to-basics’ types of business people. Their questions were very frank and straightforward. They wanted to be able to break everything into simple concepts and to relate the impact to their businesses. I should not have been surprised to get the simple request: “Can you explain the difference between CRM and marketing automation?”
Sure. Good question.
As I started to dig into the details with them, answering their questions, it became clear that there was significant interest in this issue. These sales and marketing executives needed the scoop. They wanted me to give the quick, high-level strategic case on one hand, and then they also wanted the down-and-dirty tactical details on the other hand.
It reminded me that it’s important to periodically revisit this topic — to make sure the distinctions are clear and to help educate the next generation of marketing automation adopters.
CRM and marketing automation have purposes and capabilities that are related and complementary but very different, and these differences are salient to what we’re trying to accomplish with B2B demand generation. Several CRM vendors in recent years have suggested that their platforms are capable of a range of marketing automation functions, yet this is a gross overstatement of these capabilities. Similarly, I’d be wary of the perspective of adopting marketing automation for B2B demand generation purposes without syncing it to a CRM platform.
The two are integral. You need both, but you need to understand what each one does for you, and what it doesn’t do.
Continue reading What’s the Difference Between CRM and Marketing Automation in B2B Demand Generation?
By Bill Nussey, on August 13th, 2010
My colleagues and I were excited to learn this morning about IBM’s acquisition of Unica — a company that we respect in our space and that also has been a Silverpop partner for a number of years. This deal is important validation of the role that marketing automation technology is playing in the future of marketing, in the near term, and also in the future of how businesses manage their demand over the longer term. It also highlights the emerging importance of analyzing and acting on the behaviors of customers — and their linkages to revenues — as the primary driver for marketing programs.
It’s an interesting and not all too surprising move for IBM, if you have been following their activity over the last few years. Their past acquisitions, including Cognos, SPSS and Coremetrics, have been very focused on the collection and analysis of consumer and B2B buyer behavior. With the acquisition of Unica, IBM clearly is acknowledging that the next step as a marketer, once you have strong insights, is to be able to act on those insights. Unica’s strengths in marketing resource management and in enterprise marketing management positions it well to help begin to bridge that gap.
 Source: Silverpop It’s also clear that this move is very much an enterprise story. We saw a similar move earlier this summer when Oracle “joined the party” with its acquisition of Market2Lead. Both Unica and Market2Lead targeted the largest enterprises — which have massive global marketing organizations and incredible marketing operations complexity. In these use cases, services and technology go hand-in-hand, as do core capabilities around marketing resource management and enterprise marketing management. So it makes sense for the two to pair up with Oracle and IBM.
Whereas global enterprises have both complex challenges and large amounts of resources, the story is different when you move beyond the Fortune 1000. Growth-stage companies need sophisticated processes and technologies that will help them do more with less, and efficiently build demand with marketing teams that can range from 3 to 10 employees — often on the lower end of that range. They also need flexible/agile infrastructure — the type that SaaS providers are bringing to the market. And they need education and resources to be empowered — a point Adam Needles highlighted on this blog earlier today.
It’s great to see growing attention being paid to marketing infrastructure, to the management of demand and to the importance of linking behaviors to revenue outcomes. And I’m pleased to see marketing automation emerging as the catalyst for this new direction in marketing.
By Adam Needles, on August 13th, 2010
I’ve been following the comment thread on Jep Castelein’s Lead Sloth post from earlier this week, “Will Marketing Automation Be Free?” What struck me about this ‘freemium model’ dialogue is that it is semantically interesting, but fundamentally focused in the wrong place. As important as your choice of marketing automation technology provider is — and it is important — I’d argue that the stumbling block for most B2B marketers attempting to take their demand generation to the next level is not access to the technology, itself. So giving it away for free doesn’t necessarily improve adoption rates.
The major obstacle today for the next generation of B2B demand generation is actually the ‘people and processes’ that must be in place to successfully leverage marketing automation technology. And this is a point backed up by stacks of recent research reports and commentaries by some of the best and brightest in B2B marketing today.
Continue reading Closing the Technology Innovation Vs. People/Process Stagnation Gap in Modern B2B Demand Generation
By Carlos Hidalgo, on August 5th, 2010
This is our third guest blog post written by Carlos Hidalgo of The Annuitas Group. Carlos’ post today analyzes several common misperceptions that B2B marketers have about lead management. As always, he helps us understand how evolving our demand generation strategies is about not only technology, but also people and processes. Today’s post is a great addition to this dialogue. ~ABN
Lead management continues to be a hot topic in the world of B2B marketing as we turn the corner and head into the second half of 2010. Over the last 12 months, marketing and sales dialogue increasingly has focused on how marketers can better engage with the more empowered B2B buyer and what they need to do in order to leverage the B2B buyer relationship.
As a leader in lead management process development, our firm has seen a lot of confusion in the market about what constitutes lead management. There is quite a bit of uncertainty on how companies should approach lead management and what it takes to achieve best practices. In addition to the confusion, we’ve also witnessed the emergence of many falsehoods about lead management.
In this post, we’ll dispel what we see as the Top 5 Myths of B2B Lead Management.
Continue reading The Five Myths of B2B Lead Management
By Bryan Brown, on July 30th, 2010
I’m excited to have one of my Silverpop colleagues, Bryan Brown, once again contributing to our Demand Generation blog. Bryan directs product strategy for Silverpop. He was a co-founder of Vtrenz, which became Engage B2B after Silverpop’s acquisition and which today is the basis for the marketing automation sophstication underlying our new converged email and marketing automation platform, Engage 8. Bryan has deep insight at the crossroads of marketing strategy and technology, and he spends a lot of time thinking about how to improve revenue attribution in a closed-loop B2B demand generation environment. This is where his piece today focuses — digging into the state of revenue attribution for B2B marketing and where it is headed. Welcome back, Bryan. ~ABN
I recently chatted with a few retail marketing customers of Silverpop. My discussion reminded me of what is a strong revenue analytics focus among many digital marketers in the mass consumer arena. With statistically-sound precision — and often without true ‘closed-loop’ systems in place — these consumer marketers can measure and forecast the revenue generated by specific marketing programs. It’s so thorough that they can tell you precisely the attribution of revenue down to a specific email message and within that message down to the various links, offers and content, itself. Of course, they can then ‘bubble up’ the attribution to types of email campaigns, product lines and database segments, and all of this can be reported with trending by any period.
This conversation helped me realize how much of the revenue attribution efforts by consumer marketers parallel where revenue attribution within B2B demand generation is heading these days. Yet at the same time, I was reminded of how difficult it still remains for B2B marketers to report on multi-point attribution of marketing programs — i.e., identifying the sequence of touches and content offers that are most likely to result in a positive revenue outcome. This is particularly difficult, given the complex, lengthy sales cycles in B2B marketing. Digital consumer marketers frequently are able to see the direct impact between a specific marketing program and a revenue outcome merely because they deal in terms of simple, lower-price-point, short-run decisions, which are often direct cause-and-effect scenarios. This type of buying decision simplifies revenue attribution and overall marketing-program analysis. B2B marketing — on the flip side — may have dozens of touch points with a prospect over many months before (s)he makes a purchase. In fact, according to MarketingSherpa, nearly 59% of B2B buying decisions will take place in a period greater than a single financial quarter.
This perhaps explains why The Lenskold Group noted in their recent “2010 Lead Generation Marketing ROI Study” that connecting the dots between a group of marketing tactics and a revenue outcome in B2B demand generation remains a major challenge:
When asked to describe their organization’s highest level of measurement capability to assess lead generation marketing, close to half marketers (44%) reported that they credit the last marketing touchpoint as the lead source. Twenty-one percent (21%) reported that they split credit across multiple touchpoints, an approach that acknowledges how marketing impact is dependent on more than just the last touchpoint generating the lead. Only 14% use the more reliable techniques of market testing or modeling to isolate the impact of specific tactics (11% and 3%, respectively), while the balance (20%) do not track leads to specific marketing touchpoints.
It’s common for B2B marketers to be able to identify the first and/or last touch points of B2B marketing programs with buyers today, but they continue to be challenged when it comes to identifying and modeling the middle-of-the-funnel touchpoints that resulted in a positive revenue outcome.
Continue reading Getting to More-granular Revenue Attribution for B2B Marketing Programs
By Kristin McKenna, on July 20th, 2010
With the dawn of Web 2.0 and all the latest and greatest demand generation technologies that go along with it, there have been reports B2B telemarketing is dead and buried. But I am going on record to say it isn’t so.
I am happy to report telemarketing has not left the building. It’s just had a makeover and may be unrecognizable. And I will be the first to say the outdated, cold-calling approach, which is all too often associated with telemarketing, has been replaced with a new, relationship-building coif.
And it looks good.
The New World of B2B Marketing
To understand the new nature of B2B marketing, we must first accept that the basics of marketing haven’t changed. In fact, with the newly-empowered B2B buyer, the basics are more important than ever, as Lisa Barone, Chief Branding Officer of Outspoken Media, describes in her blog, Old School vs. New School Marketing. Marketing is now and has always been about building relationships. The new tools used in marketing aren’t about out with the old, in with the new; they are about incorporating new tools with old techniques.
Continue reading It’s Aliiiiive! B2B Telemarketing Lives
By Adam Needles, on July 14th, 2010
The last year has brought growing dialogue around content marketing as an integral component of modern B2B demand generation.
First, we’ve seen increasing acknowledgement that, in a Web 2.0 world, the dynamics of the B2B buyer are shifting and that at the core of these new dynamics are fundamental shifts in buyers’ information consumption patterns. Buyers are doing more education on their own, ahead of speaking with a salesperson. Second, this has occurred in tandem with growing interest among B2B marketers both with inbound marketing strategies for lead generation and with marketing automation as a central platform for nurturing B2B prospects in a buyer-driven fashion.
Content marketing is the architecture behind information exchanged with the buyer before we can get them to ’sales ready’; it is the rationalization of what content that our prospective buyers need at various stages of the buying cycle and via what media and channels; and it is integral to the nurturing process. Content thus has moved from tactical to strategic.
But that realization was all just the ‘first evolution’ of content marketing. Now we are entering a second phase of dialogue and evolution around content marketing, where we’re talking about how to take it forward.
What is this second phase?
Continue reading B2B Content Marketing Strategy and Practice Is Steaming Full-speed-ahead. Are You Onboard?
By Adam Needles, on July 1st, 2010
Earlier this week, I attended the Sales 2.0 Boston conference (Twitter: #s20c) — where Silverpop was a Platinum sponsor and exhibitor. This follows my recent attendance at several other marketing conferences, including the Forrester Marketing Forum 2010 and the SiriusDecisions 2010 Summit, which I have also covered in recent blog posts.
All three events had strong B2B demand generation takeaways, but the focus of each was different. Forrester was targeted primarily at the enterprise marketer (and had a heavy B2C slant); SiriusDecisions was targeted probably 65%/35%, marketer/sales, and covered best practices for both enterprise and mid-market companies; and Sales 2.0 (as you might imagine by the title) mostly covered the sales team’s point of view in the demand generation equation, albeit with some strong B2B marketing insights, for just about any size organization.
 Source: Silverpop This sales focus was evident via the event’s theme, “Sales Productivity in the Cloud” (although what the event’s organizers meant by ‘the cloud’ — whether that was a SaaS thing, or more holistic — was never fully developed). And this focus was accompanied by a strong dialogue thread around the ability of B2B marketing and sales technologies to deliver the ‘most important currency’ to your sales organization — i.e., a salesperson’s time — as Polly Sumner, Chief Adoption Officer with Salesforce.com, highlighted in her morning keynote.
Another prevalent dialogue thread was how marketing and sales activities can become more accountable and predictable –at both a process and a technology level. This was a real emphasis of remarks by event chair, Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and CEO of Selling Power, the event’s producer.
One final and predominant dialogue thread was around the whirlwind of change we find ourselves in today as B2B marketing and sales professionals. There was a real sense that transformation is actively occurring around B2B demand generation practices — especially around marketing and sales roles — with activities increasingly aligning around the buying process.
“The idea behind the Sales 2.0 movement seems to be gaining momentum, especially as companies come out of the recessionary funk of last year,” noted a post on the Business Software Buzz blog that re-capped the event. “Businesses are looking to have increased growth and optimal sales strategies.”
Thereasa Fullner, a marketing leader with Salary.com and afternoon panelist, highlighted this fact when she commented, “The strongest trait you can have [in demand generation today] is to change and adapt.”
So between the two keynotes and the six panel sessions, what were the major takeaways from Sales 2.0 Boston on Monday?
Continue reading Sales 2.0 Boston: My Five B2B Demand Generation Takeaways
By Adam Needles, on June 23rd, 2010
Yesterday I spoke as part of BtoB Magazine’s Leading Edge demand generation virtual conference – talking about ”Connecting the Dots: Leveraging Content Marketing and Lead Nurturing Together for B2B Demand Generation.” I really like the topic, but I particularly like the idea of helping B2B marketers ‘connect the dots’ — something we try to do at Silverpop’s B2B Marketing University series (Twitter: #B2BUniversity). BTW — we are at the Dallas B2BMU event today.
With all of the strategic and technological insights flying around the B2B marketing universe these days, cutting through and figuring out where you should be investing your time and money can seem as challenging as tackling your actual B2B marketing projects. To that end, one concept I believe is misunderstood in the current environment — and with which we still very much need to connect the dots — is that of nurturing.
Too often we make nurturing synonymous simply with basic email nurturing or with drip nurturing campaigns — both tactical activities — but we miss the bigger picture. Nurturing prospect/customer relationships in B2B marketing and sales is not new, nor is it merely tactical. Arguably, nurturing has been at the center of nearly all B2B marketing and sales activities for decades. But as you might suspect, ’something’ seems to have changed; the nurturing dialogue and the nurturing activities we’re talking about these days seem very different from those in the past.
Today we’re less likely to reach out to a prospect to invite him/her to spend time with our sales representatives at our box seats at a baseball game, and we’re more likely to offer a series of relevant, content-based tools — such as a best practices workbook, an analyst report or an ROI calculator.
Things are changing, but what is driving this change? Two major forces:
- Changing information consumption patterns of buyers: On one hand, the methods through which buyers prefer to interact with our companies has changed. Buyers are less interested in the qualitative relationship than in the past, and they are more focused on the substantive and quantitative relationship than ever before. Content — substantive content — matters, as does when and where buyers seek this content. This content is more critical than ever to buyers’ decision-making, and with an overabundance of third-party and peer-to-peer content, the content we produce as B2B marketers must clear a higher and higher bar. Also, whereas in the past buyers might have called our sales representatives to get this information — or may have waited for these representatives to reach out to them directly — today they seek out this information proactively, on their own, via Web-based online, search and social media channels, and at their own pace. Today they call our sales teams last.
- Changing B2B marketing technology and tools: On the other hand, the tools at our disposal for communicating with and managing relationships with buyers have significantly changed. More than ever, our ability to reach Web 2.0-empowered buyers — via Web, social tools, email and mobile — has been augmented by CRM and marketing automation technology. This has helped us better engage buyers on a one-to-one basis.
The need to nurture in B2B marketing and sales has not changed, but the way we nurture — especially on the marketing side — has changed substantially.
Nurturing more than ever must be aligned with buyers’ decision-making processes; it must be integrative — leveraging engagement both via marketing and sales activities; and it’s most likely to be digital-content-centric for a substantial portion of the upstream engagement with a prospect, before a sales team member gets engaged. Today, “[t]he primary goal of lead nurturing for B2B marketers is to build a better relationship with your prospective buyers in their ‘upstream’ decision making,” explains Carlos Hidalgo of The Annuitas Group in a recent guest post on this blog.
Nurturing must be viewed strategically.
So what do you need to know to better understand this environment and to take your nurturing game to the next level?
Continue reading How Can You Make Nurturing More Strategic in Your B2B Demand Generation Efforts?
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