Over the past few weeks I've been on the road with our B2B Marketing University series -- most recently in Palo Alto and Boston, and this week in Atlanta. The first two events were attended by more than 330 B2B marketers, and we anticipate 175 attendees this Thursday here in Atlanta.

Given the large turnout of B2B marketers, we've seized the opportunity to get a better sense of what is on marketers' minds -- conducting a pre-event survey for all of our events. The results are just in from Atlanta, and I'm analyzing them alongside Palo Alto and Boston.

We asked a series of questions about B2B marketers' greatest challenges, as well as the current state of their adoption of key marketing technologies.

The results were interesting -- providing a solid glimpse into the current landscape -- and so I thought I'd share the results from two of these questions with you.

Note that for both charts n = 232.


What issues are most 'top of mind' for B2B marketers?

The first question looked at those issues that are most 'top of mind' with B2B marketers. We asked them to rank their top issue from a menu of eight choices.

The number-one topic was 'social media/inbound marketing' with 56% of respondents saying this is their top issue.

Number two and three issues were marketing automation and marketing accountability/ROI, together almost tied for a close second at 37% and 36% of respondents, respectively.

What is your current CRM platform?

The second question looked at the current CRM platform B2B marketers are using.

The response to this question was eye-popping with Salesforce.com by far the number-one-most-adopted platform -- by a landslide.

Number two was 'no CRM platform' or a non-brand-name CRM platform.

Honorable mentions came in from the Oracle/Siebel/Peoplesoft family of platforms -- which in total had a strong showing in fourth place -- and Microsoft Dynamics CRM -- which came in a close fifth.

Clearly the favorite among B2B Marketers today is Salesforce.com by a significant margin.

Posted by Adam Needles at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I posted a new piece on my Propelling Brands blog this past week that examines the application of buyer personas in the B2B marketing arena -- which I wanted to follow up on.

B2B marketers find a growing challenge when it comes to actually implementing their marketing automation campaigns. First, complex, multi-step logic can be tough to visualize and model without really understanding your target audience and the nature of the interaction you seek to drive. Second, populating content for multiple marketing automation campaigns across buyer segments and stages of the buying cycle can be ... well ... daunting. This is especially true at a time when B2B marketing is more than ever 'bottoms-up' and relationship-driven environment -- a challenge to scale.

Yet marketing automation campaigns are a critical tool for the 'brave new world' of B2B marketing that has emerged over the past decade. They help us power a more buyer-centric marketing approach through 'mass one-to-one' marketing. This shifts the core of how we engage with buyers in our marketing from a legacy of push/interruptive tactics to a future of pull/responsive tactics.

To effectively implement marketing automation campaigns today, B2B marketers must find a balance -- understanding how granular to go with segmented campaigns, while still achieving the type of scale marketing that led you to adopting marketing automation in the first place.

Buyer personas can play a key role in managing this balance, but they are widely misunderstood and misused. So I wanted to take a deeper look at what buyer personas mean to B2B marketers -- building on my previous post -- and examine how we can be most successful in using them to drive our marketing automation campaigns.

Continue reading "Four Keys for Success Using Buyer Personas to Focus B2B Marketing Automation Campaigns" »

Posted by Adam Needles at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week marks the first stop in our new B2B Marketing University series -- a program we're taking on the road to help educate marketers about a rapidly-changing B2B environment. We have great content and great partners for Palo Alto (and also for our upcoming events in Boston, Atlanta and Seattle) that will cover a number of new strategies and tactics for addressing these dynamics. (Hope you'll join us.)

Success with these new strategies and tactics requires embracing the context surrounding the 'brave new world' of B2B marketing that we face today. In particular -- and at the core of this brave new world -- is a changing B2B buyer. I've covered this in two recent blog posts -- one post looking at the data that supports a changing buyer on my Propelling Brands blog and a second post here on the Demand Generation blog that captured some of the implications. "[I]t's impossible to talk about a changing environment for marketing technology without talking about how the nature of the B2B buyer also is rapidly changing," I noted in my Propelling Brands post. "The two are inextricably intertwined in a new reality that is both a cause and effect of the digital age we live in."

Recognizing, understanding and responding to this change at a buyer level substantially helps focus our marketing programs. It reminds us that being 'buyer-centric' is critical and that effective B2B marketing -- given a permanent shift in buyer power -- must mold around this process and respond to buyer pull, rather than attempting interruptive and disingenuous 'push' tactics.

"In the future [marketing] is all about conversations," commented Richard Bush of Base One at an EMEA B2B conference for Silverpop I hosted this past week in London. (BTW -- If you are interested in checking out our B2B dialogue in London last week, do a Twitter search under hash tag 'SVPcc09.')

This is the context I've covered in my past posts. But how can B2B marketers better respond to this evolving environment?

Continue reading "Seven Principles for Building More Buyer-centric B2B Marketing Programs" »

Posted by Adam Needles at 9:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday I published a piece on my personal blog, Propelling Brands, that tackled an important area of inquiry: It's clear that B2B marketing is rapidly evolving; more recently, the dialogue has shifted to re-framing this evolution around what is a changing nature of the B2B buyer. This is a given. "But where is the hard data that this evolution is really occurring?" I asked. "We're changing how we go to market -- and there is plenty of data pointing to shifting spending by marketers -- but how do we know that our shifted spending will better align with B2B buyers' shifting needs and preferences?"

The Propelling Brands piece thus presented a 'bread basket' of proof points from recent data and research findings by firms including Enquiro, Forrester, MarketingSherpa and SiriusDecisions and really supported the thesis of how B2B marketing is changing. The major points of synthesis are that B2B buyers:

> Are increasingly turning to online sources, earlier in their process, to research purchases before ever calling a 'live' sales rep

> Are increasingly leveraging social media -- especially peer communication, such as Twitter, blogs, etc. -- in the information collection phase of the buying process

> Are pursuing their buying process more 'massively multi-channel' than ever before; however, channel weightings and their sequence vary by the phase of the buying process

> Manifest themselves more than ever as a complex, savvy 'buying unit,' rather than simply as a single decision-maker

But what are the implications for B2B marketers of this changing environment?

My post today will dig into implications and leverage insights from a leading analyst who has been closely following the changing B2B marketing dynamic.

Continue reading "So the Nature of the B2B Buyer Is Changing? So What?: Understanding the New Sales Funnel Via Meg Heuer of SiriusDecisions" »

Posted by Adam Needles at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Our focus on this blog is typically on best practices for B2B marketing and on thought leadership around the major opportunities and challenges facing B2B marketers today. So it's not often we do a blog piece directly focused on our marketing automation platform, per se. But I was recently asked to contribute a guest blog piece to the ReachForce blog, "The B2B Lead," on our platform and how it is different from other leading marketing automation platforms. The piece is titled, "What is Silverpop Engage B2B? -- Marketing Automation Who's Who," and it was published yesterday.

Putting together this post was a great thought exercise. In approaching it, I tried to not focus so much on features and functions -- as these are constantly changing -- and instead focused on how I think Silverpop approaches the market differently with its Engage B2B platform.

After all, the point of marketing automation is to really to help marketers improve how they market; thus, evaluating which marketing automation platform is best for a given marketing organization requires understanding their specific challenges and opportunities. In the B2B marketing arena, much of the challenge (and opportunity) is related to seismic changes around the B2B buyer -- what the SiriusDecisions team calls 'Buyer 2.0' -- which is a good starting place.

So I thought I would share an excerpt of this post with you and invite your feedback on my thinking.

Continue reading "Judging Marketing Automation Vendors Based on Their Approach to Helping Marketers Address the 'Brave New World' of B2B Marketing" »

Posted by Adam Needles at 4:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I gave a presentation last week at CRM Magazine's annual CRM Evolution summit in New York City on 'strategic' marketing automation. What was I trying to get at with this spin on the topic? Well, it's easy to show -- technically -- what automation does, but I thought it was more compelling to focus on a strategic view of what we are really trying to accomplish. What is underlying and driving the need for B2B marketing organizations to adopt marketing automation?

It comes down to the simple context of managing buyer dialogue -- a concept I touched on in another recent blog piece on sales/marketing alignment. You want to manage a one-on-one, upstream (i.e., pre-sales) dialogue with a B2B buyer that builds purchase momentum and that consequently hands off a high-quality Marketing Qualified Lead to your sales colleague (who should then pick up the dialogue from where you left off). Yet in order to close a sufficient volume of downstream sales, you must manage quite a large volume of these upstream 'one-on-one' conversations ... and on a massive scale. SiriusDecisions reported at their May annual Summit that in 2009 the average B2B marketing organization started 1,000 of these conversations for every 2.31 deals closed.

What does this have to do with the relevance of content and campaigns?

I think most marketers would acknowledge the buyer dialogue context when speaking strategically about CRM and marketing automation. And data shows that taking the buyer-centered approach in marketing pays off. "Campaigns that are [buyer] event-triggered have a five-times better success rate," noted a recent article on destinationCRM.com," and highly-targeted ... campaigns, whereby the customer finds you, have shown 10 times the success rate over those that are intrusive."

Yet -- too often as marketers -- we completely forget the dialogue context as we develop content and campaigns and put together our lead management strategy. Should we use a white paper to generate leads? What should we say in a follow-up e-mail from a tradeshow? How should our search engine optimization and lead nurturing integrate in our overall marketing strategy?

Continue reading "Keeping Your B2B Marketing Content and Campaigns Relevant by Leveraging Buyer Context" »

Posted by Adam Needles at 7:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One theme that has been consistent in my conversations with B2B marketers over the past few months is this: Lead scoring is one of the greatest opportunities and challenges when it comes to implementing and tuning their marketing automation processes and systems. Marketers tend to get the basics -- especially when it comes to core ideas such as scoring against target demographics and applying 'BANT' analysis (i.e., budget, authority, needs and timing). But B2B marketers seem to really stumble in taking their scoring and subsequent routing and nurturing to the next level. In fact, in research Silverpop is releasing this week, my colleagues found that 53% of B2B marketers still don't score, and 69% don't nurture (which requires some level of scoring and is a casualty of low scoring rates).

This issue is especially front and center for me, given I'm in the midst of developing my presentation for a lead scoring Webinar I'm giving with the folks at Target Marketing on Thursday. My presentation will be rooted in the basics, but I'm increasingly of the mindset that such a Webinar also needs to cover the 'advanced' issues, too. After all, this seems to be where scoring falls down.

What are these advanced 'lead scoring secrets'?

So while my Webinar will go into more details -- and also ground these 'advanced' topics in context and frameworks -- I thought I'd present some of the working insights I think can really help B2B marketers take their games to the next level ... and find real success with scoring. So here goes:

> Build the concepts of dialogue and momentum into your model: Given an environment in which B2B buyers have more information power than ever, and sales teams are being pulled into the buyer dialogue later and later, a new opportunity has emerged for B2B marketing organizations to be the organizational 'point person' on engaging with, managing and providing continuity in the pre-sale dialogue with buyers. The goal is simple -- nurturing a lead until it is sales ready -- but to do this marketers have to operate like a tenured sales professional, carefully managing the nurturing process in response to the buyer's signals.

"Industry statistics show that up to 40% of leads may make their first purchase after having been in the 'remarketing database' [i.e., nurturing pool] for 18 months or longer," notes David Taber in a recent Computerworld piece. "This is the whole purpose of marketing automation systems ..."

Yet the sales concepts of building a dialogue with a prospect and of understanding when a buyer gains momentum too often are not at the heart of scoring -- especially when there is over-reliance on demographic and BANT data. Moreover, behavioral score components should distinguish between activity that is increasing versus activity that is decreasing.

SiriusDecisions explains in a recent research brief that your scoring must understand "... the 'arc of activity' that buyers tend to use." Combinations of activity that build on each other -- as a consistent 'dialogue' and that demonstrate momentum in propensity to buy -- should increase the score. Similarly, lead scores should 'decay' after periods of inactivity -- demonstrating declining momentum.

> Leverage insights from the communication channel and the nature of the information 'consumed' by the prospect to better assess a buyer's relative maturity: This builds on the previous point and is perhaps one of the most mis-understood of the factors that go into 'great' lead scoring. Research into integrated marketing communication programs and buyers' information search patterns show that different communication channels and types of information are sought at different stages in the buying process. (Note that this pattern will differ by company, product and industry.) Observing this activity can indicate the relative maturity (and momentum) of the buyer in their search process; thus, it should be a key factor in increasing and decreasing a lead's score.

> Make sure your lead score captures insights from both online AND offline activity: This also builds on the previous point and is another area that B2B marketers fail to fully integrate into their scoring methodology. If your score only takes into account online activity, it is not a complete picture. Make sure that event attendance, inbound calls and other offline behaviors that are integral to the buyer's process -- and that also indicate relative maturity and momentum -- are baked into your scoring methodology.

> Expect your scoring model to change: Before you can even build your scoring model, you will have to examine past campaigns and historical data and conduct conversations with both marketing and sales team members. You will need to look for correlations that exist in your core business logic between marketing/sales actions and propensity to buy. You will make initial assumptions about relationships between factors and build initial score models ... and yet your model still won't be right.

"All successful [marketing] processes are ongoing in nature," explains Steve Gershik in a past post on his blog, The Innovative Marketer. "Tweak your programs, tweak your scores, change the metrics you look at to analyze the scores of your leads. Be open and flexible when you get started and you'll find you have a program that your whole team, marketing and sales, buy into."

It is only through constant testing and monitoring that your lead model will mature. But this makes sense. After all, what you are building in the lead score model is the heart of an ongoing set of demand-generation process -- a lead factory -- that requires care and maintenance. Silverpop's Lead Management Workbook adds: "A solid lead-scoring approach not only helps you to rank prospects against each other, but can smooth the lead flow and help you build a more powerful and accountable marketing organization based on rigorous analysis and testing, rather than intuition and educated guesswork."

> Constantly re-assess lead score data: Underlying your changing model is a constantly-changing set of behavioral data from your buyers. Maintaining accurate scores requires constantly re-assessing and updating the data. "Allow scores to be updated with third-party information such as data-appends or data entry by your sales force," suggests the Lead Management Workbook (cited above). "Automatically add new data as it is gathered over time and re-score leads."

> Work on tuning the relative 'elasticity' of variables in your model: Perhaps the most fundamental 'integrity' issue for lead score models -- firmly rooted in the disciplines of economics and of linear regression -- is the idea of relative elasticities. I.e., different elements of your score will have varying degrees of impact on a prospect's 'propensity to buy.' So make sure your scoring model reflects this.

"The actual score doesn't matter," explains Steve Gershik (cited above). "The important thing is that the point value is relative to other activities so in the end, the higher the score, the more actionable the lead is."

SiriusDecisions discussed this issue in a recent brief, "When Good Lead Scoring Models Go Bad." In one section of their brief, they call out the importance of tuning elasticity in the overall weighting of variables in a scoring model:

While it may be tempting to take five variables in an overall scoring model and weight them all equally at 20 percent of a prospect's overall viability, we advise you to resist. Based on your ideal customer profiling (combining this with activity and BANT variables if both are possible/intuitive to include), choose the variables you believe to be most predictive of a prospect's viability and prioritize your weighting there.

What do you think?

While it is not an exact science, lead scoring is critical to successful nurturing and lead management. This requires that as marketers we get under the covers a bit and address some of these 'advanced' issues -- which is what I wanted to do here. I hope that these ideas were helpful. What thoughts/ideas would you add to this list?

Posted by Adam Needles at 6:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My posts over the last few weeks on sales/marketing (mis-) alignment have tended to focus on two areas -- 1.) addressing the seismic shifts in the operating environment facing modern B2B sales and marketing professionals and 2.) exploring ways to find mutual empathy between these two teams. And there is no question that both of these are important considerations.

Yet as I've thought more about this topic and have discussed it with some of my colleagues over the past few weeks, I've shifted some of my thinking. Much of the sales/marketing alignment conversation today seems too inwardly focused. Craig Rosenberg, a.k.a. 'The Funnelholic,' refers to it in a recent blog post as a quest for "... sales and marketing 'glasnost.'" We cite that the buying environment has changed, but we talk too much about the working relationship between sales and marketing.

Isn't the real challenge (and the opportunity) one of better aligning against the evolving needs and processes of the modern B2B buyer?

As marketing is tasked with managing an increasing amount of the dialogue with the buyer, the real issue becomes one of alignment around that dialogue. Re-conceptualizing this issue in these terms shifts one's perspective. Alignment then becomes less about organizational dynamics and more about the continuity of the dialogue with the buyer. And mis-alignment becomes most apparent when there are hiccups in the dialogue when marketing hands off a lead and sales picks it up.

So as marketers, what can we do to improve the continuity of the dialogue with the buyer in our demand generation activities?

I like to think of building continuity in two stages -- first, in initial planning, which I'll focus on in today's post, and second, in implementation and management, which I'll focus on in my next post.

Planning for Continuity of Dialogue with the Buyer

Here are thoughts on three actions we as marketers can take to improve the continuity of dialogue with the buyer ... and in doing so, improve fundamental sales/marketing alignment.

> Analyze the dialogue paths for different buyer segments and use them as the basis for building your nurturing campaigns: Marketing author Akin Arikan, whom I've cited before on this blog, writes in his book Multichannel Marketing: "In order for the [customer] experience to be consistent and relevant, it needs to be born from a dialogue with the customer rather than a monolog. ... [T]he business needs to listen to customers and study their behavior. Otherwise, how could the business come up with relevant responses or treatments and remain consistent with ... interactions?"

I like to think of this combination of listening to customers and of studying their behavior as analyzing the different 'dialogue paths' that potential buyers follow. While every buyer is different, over time there are observable common paths followed by different segments and personas. How did they find your company in the first place? What do they know about your product/service and its category? What questions do they ask? What materials do they leverage in the buying evaluation process? At what point do they transition from online content and e-mails to live dialogue? What information do they need to be armed with before they're ready to discuss a purchase? This is their dialogue path.

The implication is that if you truly understand dialogue paths, you will understand the role different communication channels, marketing assets and sales/marketing interactions play in the buying evaluation process. It will help you develop dynamic marketing automation campaigns that can anticipate and respond to the upstream dialogue, and it will inform downstream dialogue with sales. As a result, both marketing and sales will have a clear idea of the roles they should play in nurturing the buyer dialogue and will be aware of -- and able to maintain -- the continuity of the dialogue that has transpired throughout the entire process. Voila ... alignment.

I also believe that dialogue paths are the right way to think about approaching lead scoring and routing within a marketing automation framework. A lead score fundamentally represents a combination of the demographics and behaviors that qualify a lead for a sales discussion. Dialogue paths, thus, should be the starting point for mapping out the behavioral elements that constitute various levels of leads scores. And lead routing fundamentally focuses on the lead’s condition when it comes into the marketing process and the actions that need to be taken to nurture that lead, improve its score and move it to a sales opportunity. Dialogue paths, thus, help marketers understand the interactions required for nurturing different buyer segments and translate into various routing paths that should be built into a nurturing campaign.

Dialogue paths also will help marketers better assess what other elements need to be integrated into managing buyer dialogue -- such as inbound marketing interactions and requisite brand perception. And dialogue paths highlight the importance of compelling and engaging marketing content. Again, all of this maps back to continuity and -- ultimately -- to sales/marketing alignment.

> Engage sales as you are developing the messaging and voice that will underlie your marketing content: Eventually a B2B buyer winds up in an interaction with a sales team member, discussing a potential purchase. That’s the goal after all. That is why it is critical that as marketers we engage sales as we are developing our messaging and thinking through the 'voice' of our content. Ultimately the core messages and voice that will be engaged by a successful sales team member also must be supported through upstream continuity of the marketing dialogue with the buyer. I think of it as ensuring that the voice of sales is omnipresent ... even though at earlier steps in the buying dialogue that voice cannot be too heavy or intense.

Kate Headen talks about his in a great, recent post on her Savvy B2B Marketing blog:

Early on in the collateral development process, tap a member of the sales team as a reviewer. Invite them to the kick-off meeting, and give them a chance to talk about what they have seen and heard in the trenches. ... [Y]our marketing messages will be stronger and the sales team will be more likely to reach for them -- after all, they helped write them.

> Use two qualifiers for marketing content: Is it substantive, and is it responsive?: Understanding the dialogue path for a given buyer segment and having input from sales into how you will speak with leads is critical, but as marketers we are still faced with a huge task. How do you populate the vast amounts (and iterations) of dynamic and conditional content necessary to support complex, segmented and multi-path lead nurturing campaigns? Delivering marketing programs that revolve around buyer dialogue is no small task.

I think that there are two additional filters that are necessary, which should guide every piece of content developed -- asking whether content is substantive and also whether it is responsive. What does it mean to be substantive: Does the content answer a real question from the buyer? If not, it’s just mindless slogans and catch phrases that do not support the dialogue. And what does it mean to be responsive? Is the content delivered in the right place and at the right time, based on the dialogue path? If not, it will not be absorbed by the buyer.

Brian Carroll, author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale, commented on effective messaging in a Q&A with BtoB Magazine: "It's about being a resource for that prospect and offering relevant, thought-leading ideas-and not being a pest, and asking over and over, 'Are you ready to buy yet?'"

If marketing content does not support effective dialogue with the buyer, it ultimately will be felt when sales picks up the dialogue. The result will be lower-quality lead flow to sales and dramatically-lower conversion rates. And questioning whether content is substantive and responsive is just common sense -- the same common sense that drives the actions of a successful sales person in his/her dialogue with a hot prospect. So by applying this yardstick, we can further refine our overall sales/marketing alignment.

Today's post should have helped you think through planning for continuity of dialogue with the buyer. The next post will tackle implementing and managing for continuity of dialogue with the buyer. Stay tuned ...

Posted by Adam Needles at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (137)

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)

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)

With this latest blog post, I want to introduce Adam Needles, a new member to our team, who we announced in a press release today. Adam is an experienced B2B marketer who is passionate about the intersection of marketing strategy and new innovation and technology. In his new role, he will serve both as an advocate for B2B marketers and also as an evangelist for Silverpop's Engage B2B marketing automation platform. I'd like to welcome him to the team and share his first blog post with you. ~Will Schnabel

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Many of you have followed my ongoing research and writing via my Propelling Brands blog. You also know I'm passionate about my mission, both in writing that blog and also via my ongoing work in this space, to be a resource for marketers on issues of marketing strategy and also to provide marketers with insights into innovation and technology that have the potential to help them change their game.

I've had the good fortune throughout my career to connect with the best and brightest thinkers and leaders in the marketing technology space, and it has truly inspired me. In fact, I've been searching recently for a 'platform' that would enable me to better accomplish my mission, to be an advocate for marketers and to stay on top of the state of marketing innovation and technology. So I was excited by the opportunity to join Silverpop. What I've found is an organization with goals, aspirations and beliefs that align with my own. It is an online marketing solutions company with a clear vision of its goal to empower marketers through intelligent solutions and strategies that ultimately help marketers be more successful. I like that.

The company has asked me to take on a role where I will be able to work closely with front-line marketers - as a listener and as a coach - talking to marketers, relaying their insights back to the people who develop the company's B2B marketing platform and also delivering cutting-edge insights into new strategies, innovation and best practices back to the marketing community.

I'm also excited about the company's thinking around the state of marketing strategy and its concept of improving 'engagement marketing.' It's a topic I won't dig into more today, per se, but look forward to talking about over the coming weeks. But that topic does bring me to what I wanted to address today.


What does it mean to be an 'engaged' marketer?

As I've been ramping up here at Silverpop, a thought came to mind. It's certainly critical as a marketer to improve one's engagement with the customer, but what does that look like from the marketer's end? What does this look like from a strategic and operational perspective? What does it mean to be an 'engaged' ... and, ultimately, successful ... marketer? Here are a few ideas I came up with:

> Focusing on the bottom line and measuring success against this: For most B2B marketers, success is directly related to managing successful programs that develop qualified leads for the business and that support the conversion of these leads into customers. It's pretty straightforward and intimately intertwined with the sales process, but maintaining this lens as we review and prioritize opportunities and activities can definitely get muddled. It becomes particularly complicated navigating how we leverage the numerous communication channels - from traditional snail mail to e-mail to new mediums such as Twitter - that seem to be exploding around us. We might be tempted to allow our marketing measurement basis to reflect progress purely in terms of the medium; however, it is still critical to map this back to ultimate lead generation, conversion and sales success - keeping our eye on the prize.

I've recently been reading a great marketing book by Akin Arikan, titled Multichannel Marketing. In it, he makes some great points about maintaining focus and control in a multi-channel marketing environment. "[I]t is one thing to interact through multiple channels in parallel," comments Arikan. "It is quite another to fuse those activities together in an intelligent way to maximize response and conversion rates." Akin goes on to point out that today "[b]uyers are multichannel beings. Buying cycles are cross-channel." Thus, it is incumbent upon us as marketers to focus only on leveraging and measuring a channel to the extent that it has a clearly-definable role in our customer's buying process.

> Building processes and systems: Once you have a clear sense of what you're trying to accomplish, it's critical that as a marketer you put processes and systems in place to be consistent in achieving this goal. Throughout my career I've certainly been reminded that B2B marketing is a dynamic activity that requires agile techniques, including listening closely to your sales counterparts. Yet I'm also increasingly convinced that there is an operational aspect to marketing that when recognized and managed via definable processes and systems, enable marketers to get control over their environments and actually increase net agility.

Gary Katz, a thought leader in the discipline of marketing operations and founder of consulting firm Marketing Operations Partners, commented on this in a recent blog post:

Especially in complex organizations, [marketing operations] is integral to bridging strategy to execution, and aligning marketing with the C-suite and other stakeholders throughout the enterprise (such as sales, finance, IT, customer experience). Most organizations are missing the opportunity to change the 'MO' (sic) of marketing by fully embracing [marketing operations]. This is a shame because [marketing operations] done right can...impact an enterprise's business intelligence, sales enablement, pipeline velocity, scalability, brand governance, customer experience, ability to demonstrate marketing ROI, and agility to navigate the winds of change.

> Being transparent and accountable: Marketing has entered a new era. Truly. The same Internet that has brought us rapid and direct access to customers and that has sped our sales cycles has also changed the game when it comes to expectations for measurement and the ability to demonstrate the net present value (NPV) of marketing investments both to sales and to the C-suite. Couple this with an undisputable global movement toward greater corporate responsibility and accuracy in reporting, and as a marketer you've got your hands full.

Marketing ROI guru Jim Lenskold demonstrated in his firm's recent "2009 Marketing ROI and Measurements Study" that there is a very high correlation between firms he identifies as 'highly effective and efficient' and their transparency and accountability. He notes, by a factor of nearly two-to-one, that more-effective/more-efficient firms calculate and share ROI, NPV and 'other profitability metrics' for marketing investments. Clearly marketers can see a real upside from investing to achieve greater levels of transparency and accountability with sales and the C-suite. It also is increasingly not an option. In fact, today "[a]lmost two-thirds (65%) of firms report that their CEO/CFOs are making greater demands than last year to show ROI as part of securing budgetary resources for marketing efforts," according to Lenskold in this report.

Industry analyst David Raab adds to this point, in his recent book, The Marketing performance Measurement Toolkit, that marketing metrics should be aligned with business metrics via a balanced scorecard approach - ensuring marketing metrics also live in appropriate business context.

> Leveraging technology and innovation strategically and aggressively: No longer a merely tactical element, technology and innovation are, today, a critical element of success as a strategic marketer. Given a diversity of communication channels and a deluge of data, no marketer can be expected to stay on top of his/her game simply with Excel spreadsheets. Closed-loop marketing systems - including demand generation and marketing automation platforms - which enable marketers to both manage, monitor and evaluate the success of marketing investments and also tune the effectiveness of tactical programs and activities, are critical to effective management of scale marketing programs.
There is growing evidence that technology systems - now a critical element of other parts of the enterprise via, ERP and other strategic IT frameworks - are becoming an increasingly pervasive element of the role of the CMO. In fact, I tackled this topic in a past Propelling Brands blog piece that addressed "A CMO's Dual Imperatives - Driving Organizational and Technological Change."

What is challenging, though, is that the need to leverage technology and innovation is something that marketers recognize but all too often remain 'stymied' by. In my own recent research, I found 40% of marketers surveyed rated their organizations deployment of marketing technology as 'not aggressive' - the lowest level on a five-point-rating scale - and ratings rapidly declined from there. Only 7% of marketers, on the other end of the spectrum, rated their organizations as 'very aggressive.' Clearly we have a way to go as marketers, but that's why it's critical that we tackle these challenges today ... and head-on ... which brings me to my final point.

> Embracing an ethic of constant improvement: Perhaps the most telling aspect of our new era in marketing is the pace at which change is occurring. The bar is constantly being raised for marketers. It's not sufficient to merely be on top of one's game; successful marketers today must be ahead of the game. The points above are all critical factors, but they are the starting point. Once achieved, the impetus must be on improving against this baseline and on constantly tuning the marketing engine so that it is both agile enough to handle the diversity of market challenges and opportunities and also efficient enough to deliver profitability and growth.

Posted by Adam Needles at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)