Through these special blog postings, our goal is to offer advice and insights from top B2B marketers. It is my pleasure to introduce you to Malcolm Friedberg, principal at Left Brain Marketing. He has more than 20 years of marketing, sales and business development experience in a broad range of B2B industries.

Malcolm has built several national brands and staffed marketing departments from the ground up. His marketing consulting firm specializes in designing and implementing customized marketing automation solutions for B2B companies. We thank Malcolm for taking time out of his busy schedule to respond to our questions. From his responses, you'll learn what he thinks is the best strategy for connecting sales and marketing plus much more. Enjoy!

1.) Are you a left or right brainer?

We have a test on our website that allows people to get a sense of which brain hemisphere dominates. According to the test, I lean to the left, which means that I am more analytical than intuitive. This view accords with my wife's perspective that my male intuition, or lack thereof, makes me horrible at understanding what makes her happy.

And do you determine which your client is before working with them?
No, we don't have a litmus test for clients. I was a CMO before I became a consultant, and I know that most of us marketers are right-brained. Branding, events, traditional advertising tend to be more creative and right-brain focused. A big reason why I got into marketing automation is that I know most marketers need assistance in this area.

And how does it affect the way you build a campaign?
The way in which my analytical skills manifest in our client engagements is in building business processes. Marketing generally doesn't have a lot of business processes, and so the exercise of creating a well-conceived process is new. However, marketing automation requires that you map out steps to various workflows. As an example, the ability to route leads to sales and then get the untouched ones back for nurturing forces you to think through a variety of issues: what's the criteria for moving leads, how long should they sit, what triggers a transfer, which technology you use, etc. If you've never worked through these issues, creating an effective business process can be challenging.

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

There are both historical and structural reasons for the disconnect that exists between marketing and sales organizations. The historical component largely has to do with quality of leads and sales' perception that it could do as well if not better (a broad generalization, but one that I believe is accurate). The structural element is that they often exist in different business silos, independently reporting to a CEO. These are significant hurdles to overcome. One of the things I particularly like about marketing automation is that it provides a legitimate opportunity for marketing to reach out to sales and begin a dialogue about how it can better support sales. The "I'm here to help, but I need your involvement" approach seems to be the best way to make headway.

3.) What metrics have you seen work best for tracking and measuring the ROI of lead-management programs?

In my mind, this is another way of asking, "How does a CMO/VP Marketing sell his or her CEO on the investment?" The simplest way to do this is to calculate your cost per lead (e.g. acquisition through sale) and then illustrate how marketing automation can improve on that by reducing costs (e.g. less spend on traditional advertising, better conversion based on targeting, etc.). At the beginning of the process, you're going to be making assumptions, so your best bet is to grab some industry metrics. Once you're up and running you'll be able to focus more specifically on the metrics that you either have or that are most meaningful in the context of your specific business.

4.) If you were going to do only one thing, what part of a B2B lead-management program would you implement (demand generation, lead scoring, lead nurturing, ROI measurement)?

I don't think that you can focus on just one area, because you need all the parts to build a quality marketing program. It would be like fielding a baseball team with only a good pitcher, but lousy fielders. But assuming we're not all the Yankees (for you non-baseball fans, they have the biggest payroll in baseball), the biggest bang for the buck is nurturing. Chances are that you have a good number of leads coming to your site (if not, obviously demand gen would be your focus), and a few good nurturing programs will drastically help your conversion efforts.

5.) Which business practices are working best in B2B lead generation today, and which would you like to disappear?

One B2B practice that is critical to success is segmentation, because that's the foundation to relevant communication with your audience. The days of sending the same message to everyone without taking into account a buyer's product interest, role, knowledge, etc. are gone. If you're still doing that, it's time to evolve because that's the one practice that, in my humble opinion, should disappear.

6.) What's your advice to marketers working with execs who view marketing as a discretionary budget item during a recession?

Get a new job was my first thought, but that's usually not an option. The question describes a very challenging situation that is a reality for a huge number of marketers. I think that, as a whole, marketing is in transition. The need for marketing to be accountable is more real now than ever. Consequently, I think that marketers need to demonstrate their contribution to revenue (e.g. tracking the closed deals that originated with marketing). Using data to support additional investment in marketing is the way to go.

Posted by at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)