Reputation to Revenue

The continuing rise of Account-Based Marketing: Four keys to success

Over the last 10 years, more and more B2B firms have invested in account-based marketing: treating individual accounts as "markets" and devising focused campaigns just for them.

Back when my partners and I were developing some of the early methodology for account-based marketing in the early 2000s at ITSMA, it was a tough sell. We had seen strong results from ABM pioneers, such as Accenture, IBM, Xerox, and HP, but the costs of doing ABM were clearer to many marketers than the benefits. It is, after all, a pretty labor-intensive approach, and it requires a lot of negotiating with sales and account teams. Much easier to just spam the market with generic emails, webinars, brochures, and the like.

As marketers began to appreciate the value of more focused approaches, however, such as vertical industry marketing, as well as the critical importance of their top accounts, ABM began to take hold. By 2005-2007, many of the top B2B tech and IT service firms were experimenting with ABM. We were going great guns at ITSMA with research, workshops, an ABM Council, annual ABM awards, and, of course, direct consulting and training to help companies get started and succeed.

What many marketers realized was that developing highly targeted programs for individual accounts yielded a great many benefits, both externally and internally. Externally, ABM can generate substantial improvements in customer relationships, brand perception, solutions proof points, revenue, and profitability. Internally, ABM can help prove the value of marketing, improve relationships with Sales, and strengthen focus on core customer challenges and potential solutions.

New research from Alterra Group suggests that ABM has also gained traction in professional services. According to a recent survey, some 86% of consulting and other professional services firms are now using some form account-based marketing, and looking to further increase spending on ABM in the years ahead. Large majorities of survey respondents further suggest that ABM has a higher ROI than other marketing approaches, and provides significant benefits in terms of retaining clients, increasing revenue and profit, and attracting new clients.

Not surprisingly, the research also found that companies investing more in ABM and paying more attention to program metrics are achieving greater results. (One would certainly hope so!)

I know we're all focused heavily on figuring out how to "socialize" everything in marketing these days (with good reason) and, especially as the 4th quarter looms, on doing whatever we can to help close sales before the end of the year. If you've let your ABM efforts lag, however, or not yet begun to invest in the approach, the Alterra Group research should be yet another set of data points convincing you to keep ABM front and center.

From our own experience, I'd like to suggest four critical success factors that go beyond simply spending more money and measuring results:

• Deep Research: Companies starting out in ABM often skip the hard work of preparation in favor of jumping right into outbound tactics, such as special events, collateral, and briefings. The real power of ABM comes from digging deep into an individual client's business situation, strategy, options, and operating environment as a precursor to really thinking through how you can help. Don't skip this step!
• Client Collaboration: The best ABM programs are not only transparent to the client (i.e., you don't hide the fact that you're making a special effort) but developed directly with the client. Actively involving client executives in research, brainstorming, thought leadership, relationship building, and solutions development is a huge win-win. The client knows you're serious about investing real time and resources in understanding their needs and crafting customized solutions. You get the tremendous benefit of the client's insight, brainpower, and feedback to help keep you on track and develop solutions you might never have even considered.
• Sustained Focus: ABM oriented to specific bids or quarterly results may be effective, but its greater potential comes in transforming the entire relationship with the client. Accenture, one of the first ITSMA award winners for ABM, turned a lot of heads in presenting its two-year ABM plans for top clients, but had transformative results to show for it. Thinking and planning longer term enables more ambitious strategies and much more substantial results.
• Solutions Orientation: I've mentioned the "S" word a few times already. One of the big differences between ABM and traditional account planning is that the latter typically focuses on selling more of whatever is on the shelf and doing it as fast as possible. Don't get me wrong; good account planning is incredibly important. But stepping back to do the deep research, collaborate with clients, and think about a longer term transformation of the relationship literally mandates that you also step back from current inventory, put yourself in the client's situation, and think anew about what really is going to make a major difference for them.

Is ABM here to stay? Let's hope so; it's one of the most effective approaches we have in B2B marketing. Making sure we do it the right way, however, is the real test, and shortcuts are not likely to show such great results.

What do you think? Are you implementing ABM? What's working for you?

Photo credit: hapticflapjack

The four engines of B2B marketing success

A friend recently had the good fortune not only to take over marketing for a successful B2B firm, but to do so with a mandate to build a new strategy that ensures a much greater impact on the business.

He's a bit like a kid in a candy store: he's got budget to spend, executive support for a more ambitious marketing program, and a relatively clean slate upon which to draw the new strategy. 

The existing program has been pretty traditional, focusing mostly on collateral, events, advertising, and direct support for the sales team. He knows that's not enough, and is definitely interested in doing more with thought leadership and social media, but how best to reshape the overall strategy is not entirely clear.

Asked for some advice, I agreed with a stronger emphasis on thought leadership and social media (which I think are appropriate for all B2B  firms), and I questioned the value of putting so much energy into advertising and collateral. 

More generally, though, I suggested that the strategy focus on the four marketing engines that I think all B2B firms need to have running smoothly to ensure business success.

Four Engines for B2B Marketing Success 

Content Engine:

As the need for more and better content continues to grow, marketing leaders have realized that they need an integrated "content engine" that consistently produces compelling content for every stage of the buying cycle. This includes thought leadership content to help build reputation and interest, educational content to support lead generation and nurturing, solutions and customer success content to support sales conversations, and, of course, social media content to support ongoing connections with customers and others.

Relationship Engine:

B2B marketing rises and falls on the strength of the company's relationships with customers, prospects, partners, and market influencers. For many marketing organizations, though, the objective of building, strengthening, and sustaining key relationships has no clear owner or strategy. A "relationship engine" may sound awkward but the idea is to ensure a comprehensive, consistent, and focused approach to strengthening critical stakeholder connections to increase sales, loyalty, and market insight. This should work across such areas as events, customer councils, account management, references, and social media.

Lead Development Engine:

The increasingly long and convoluted purchase processes that B2B marketers face puts a premium on well organized systems for lead nurturing and management. No longer can we focus on just the early stages of generating leads and then throw them over the wall to sales. More and more, we need to stay in the game with longer term programs to develop and sustain opportunities in close coordination with sales. Content and relationship programs contribute substantially to this effort but someone also needs to own the overall system for lead development, including qualification, scoring, nurturing, and assessment.

Solutions Development Engine:

Like many B2B companies, my friend's firm has a long history of successful products, satisfied customers, and productive partners. At the same time, also like many B2B companies, his firm is feeling the heat from increasing competition, margin squeeze on products, and buying decisions moving higher up in their customers' organizations. The result is a need for higher value solutions that respond more specifically to individual customer needs. Doing this efficiently and effectively means moving past the one-off approach based solely in the field. Instead, marketing needs to guide and support the field in determining top priorities for new offer development, crafting the right value propositions, and routinizing the process with the right stage gates and metrics.

The four engines don't cover every last aspect of B2B marketing, but they come pretty close and they provide a clear framework for building a comprehensive strategy that balances short- and longer-term success. Get each of the engines humming smoothly and results are sure to follow.

What do you think? Am I missing something important? Are all of your engines in good working order?

Photo credit: Imnop88a

Six steps to differentiating your solutions

Aargh! Six weeks to launch, and so much to do. The solutions management folks have spent months putting together the new offering, and now we've got about 87 things to do to get ready on the marketing side. Press release...internal webinar for the sales team...customer presentation...special briefings for the top account leads...white paper...update the public site with descriptions...collateral for the trade show. Oh yeah, and all the social media stuff, too: some blog posts, tweet schedule, maybe a few videos. 

The real challenge, of course, is getting anyone to care. Your customers are inundated with shiny new offers every day of the week, and they pretty much tune them all out. If they're actually looking for a new solution, sure, they might want to chat or at least check out your stuff, but otherwise...forget it.

Unless, of course, you actually make the new offer relevant, compelling, and truly evocative of real value. We all say our new solutions are important and different, but the sad reality is that the vast majority are me-too offerings that fail to connect or excite.

Some of this is inevitable in a world of intense competition. But a great deal reflects that fact that we simply don't put in the time or energy to identify and communicate the true differentiators that actually matter to prospective buyers. We get so caught up in cranking out the stuff of the launch process that we fail to step back and methodically work through why our solutions are better than those of the competition, and how to connect those differentiation dots to the issues our customers care about the most.

It's not rocket science, but it does take some effort, and a formal process helps. Over at Solutions Insights, we've spent a lot of time with companies that do this the right way (as well as many that don't!). Based on that experience, we've put together a quick six-step guide for defining and demonstrating clear and relevant differentiators for solutions that can make or break the launch process. 

Six Steps to Differentiating Your Solutions Offerings

We'd love to know what works for you!

The new, new marketing: Health tech coalition may point the way

The buzz in marketing is all about social media, with Twitter as the flavor of the month and maybe even a tipping point in getting laggard companies to finally take the promise of social media seriously. 

I'm all for it, of course. Certainly the hype can get tiresome, and there are huge strategy and organizational questions that companies have to face with social media, but I think we're well past the stage of wondering whether there's real gold in those hills.

But social media was "new" in marketing five years ago. Back then, when I talked with clients about the promise of blogs and communities and the like for "serious" B2B marketing, I got a lot of blank stares and "really?" responses. Those days are long gone, even if many companies are just now dipping their toes into the water.

The new, new marketing incorporates social media values and tactics, but it's much more than that. It's mission-oriented, educational, and problem-solving, while also being conversational and transparent. 

In fact, I've been thinking about yet another acronym to capture the idea: Marketing that MATTERS. it's definitely on the long side, and maybe too cute, but I think the direction is right.

M - Mission-oriented, focused on a larger purpose than just selling stuff
A - Authentic, with personal and organizational integrity, and real people speaking like real people
T - Thought-provoking, with a serious purpose and making people think
T - Transparent (of course), opening the curtain and letting people see inside
E - Educational, helping people learn and solve problems vs. distracting or "just" entertaining them
R - Relationship-oriented, looking for long-term partnership, not just the the one-time sale
S - Story-driven, since that's what we remember and what makes it real

IBM's Smarter Planet campaign (which is becoming more a way of doing business than just a campaign) is a great example of this approach, and the kudos IBM is receiving are well-deserved.

GE's new Healthymagination is another move in the same direction, as was GE's earlier start with its Ecomagination initiative.

Yes these are self-serving marketing programs. Hey, it's capitalism and these are mega-corporations trying to make a buck. But there is a strong element of enlightened self-interest here. They're tackling real social issues; they're raising awareness; they're thought-provoking; they're providing at least some education, and so on. I'm not sure they''d get all A's on a Marketing that MATTERS report card, but I'm choosing to look on the bright side.

Meanwhile, we don't all have the deep pockets of IBM and GE, and have to think a bit smaller in scale.  

A new health tech coalition, the EHR Stimulus Tour, captured my eye in this regard. Motivated by the chance to capture government funding for helping doctors convert to electronic health records (EHR), an alliance of large and smaller tech firms, including Cisco, Dell, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft, Nuance, Allscripts, and Citrix is organizing an educational campaign for doctors on the Stimulus legislation and the opportunities and benefits of EHR.

It's not a huge effort, and probably not one that will last for years. Tactically, though, the campaign covers a lot of useful ground in a well-designed and integrated way: a focused audience, an educational approach, a combination of live road show events and a resource microsite, a presence n Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, a set of webcasts, etc. And the alliance approach itself is a nice change from the normal solo or traditional channel approach; it adds to the "we're all pitching in to solve the problem" idea.

The program and the EHR push in general are not without controversy (see, for example, here). In looking at the bright side, though, I see enormous potential for business-society win-win with this kind of marketing approach. I wouldn't give these guys all A's either, but the Mission-orientation is a good start and the campaign provides a useful model to consider.

What do you think? And what about "Marketing that MATTERS" idea? Does that make sense, or is it just another dumb acronym?

It's all about lead gen now...or is it?

 

Rich Vancil, head of IDC's CMO Advisory Service, provided a great state of the tech marketing union this week at the IDC DIrections conference in Boston. It's not great, of course, with IDC projecting 10% marketing budget cuts for 2009 -- which pretty much validates what I've been hearing anecdotally from clients and other friends across the industry.

More important, as Rich pointed out, is the reshaping of marketing budgets in response to the downturn. Cuts are not coming across the board in most companies; they're focused especially on the top of the funnel. The deepest cuts, according to IDC, are coming in branding, advertising, sponsorships, and "big tent" events (conferences and trade shows). 

The other area of real cuts (although not as deep), is what Rich called "the brains of the operation" -- marketing strategy and operations, PR and AR, marketing and customer intelligence, and product, industry, and solutions marketing.

Further down the funnel, spending is either flat or even increasing. The closer you get to sales, not surprisingly, the better the budget picture looks. IDC sees modest increases this year in lead management, sales enablement, and, of course, actual selling.

Writ large, it's a shift from marketing operations and building awareness to generating demand and directly supporting sales. In better times, Rich noted, the balance is typically 50-50; it's now skewed heavily toward generating demand and enabling sales.

Again, nothing shocking here; pretty much every marketer I talk to says it's all about lead gen right now. If you can't point to a direct, near-term impact on revenue, don't bother bringing it up.

Personally, I think a lot of marketing groups are going overboard in shifting priorities. Iunderstand the pressure to move the needle on sales. I just don't agree that cutting into the brains of the organization is the best way forward.

As such, I was heartened to hear Eric Andrews, head of worldwide demand generation for IBM, take a different tack. During a marketing executive panel the same day, Andrews stated that IBM's biggest marketing initiative right now is "driving brand and differentiation across all audiences." 

Building on its new Smarter Planet theme, IBM is investing heavily in advertising, content development, and, perhaps most important, customer conversation about the broad business issues under the Smarter Planet umbrella: energy, water, transportation, health care, and so on. 

The effort is certainly aligned with sales, and, in fact, the company is pushing additional marketing resources into the field to get closer to sales. But the important point is that IBM is leading with brainpower, with ideas, with thought leadership, and with brand. In an environment where buyers are tuning out every type of sales pitch, and looking for every reason NOT to buy, it is only by engaging them with new thinking and new ideas that you really have a chance to get into the conversation in the first place. And without that conversation, forget about the sale.

In the end, it's too easy to just say "we need more leads." Of course we all need more business. But what really matters, and what will make or break our results, is how we go about it.

What do you think?

Photo credit: dierk schaefer

Sober advice for B2B marketers, and a dilemma

If you're like me, you sign up for a bunch of webinars but rarely get around to listening in. The invitations sound good, but when the day comes around they're ultimately not worth the time. You can always do a quick scan on the slides.

I am glad I listened to last week's BtoB 2009 Outlook webinar, though. Nothing earth shattering, but some good solid and sober advice for the difficult year ahead. And a real dilemma, to boot.

"Flailure is not an option"

Most important, as Mark Gambill, CMO of tech reselling giant CDW, noted: "Flailure is not an option." That's not a typo; Gambill highlighted the tendency of companies to start flailing around in a downturn, starting and stopping marketing initiatives and wasting precious resources on marginal activities.

Instead, Gambill suggested a clear-eyed analysis of your most important customers and your most important market opportunities, and then using both a scalpel and an ax on the marketing budget to trim the fat from essential programs and hack away at the non-essential ones. In other words, focus, focus, focus.

Organizational Priorities

Taking an organizational perspective, Rich Vancil, VP of the Executive Advisory Group at IDC (which includes a CMO Advisory program), had four useful recommendations:

• Use the downturn to permanently eliminate or reshape entrenched silos of program costs (e.g., isolated events or campaigns not part of a broader, coordinated program)
• Limit staff cuts: large firms have already been cutting staff for several years, and it's far easier to decimate organizational effectiveness now than it will be to rebuild it later on. (Mark Wilson, VP of Corporate Marketing from Sybase, noted in the same session that he's investing more in in-house talent now, using the downturn to bring inside resources that he had been paying heavily for with agencies and other outsourced services).
• Initiate aggressive content audits to weed out useless and off-message materials (this one is near and dear to my own heart, given how critical great content is to all marketing programs and how much bad content continues to pervade most marketing organizations).
• Identify and create marketing shared services to eliminate duplicative costs and tools (and, I would add, to enhance cross-company integration and coordination). 

Be Provocative

 

Finally, Mark Wilson from Sybase, stressed another point always worth remembering: in difficult times, it is especially necessary that your basic messaging really take a stand. Yes, it's important to emphasize that you can help your customers save money, but first you have to stand out from the crowd. Be provocative, bring forward your legitimate internal experts, and work those core messages across the spectrum of media and social channels. 

The Dilemma

Now the dilemma: Both Vancil and Kate Maddox from BtoB magazine cited recent budget surveys to show, not surprisingly, that marketers are cutting back on awareness-oriented activities in favor of lead generation and sales support. As Vancil put it, the biggest cuts are coming in the areas furthest away from revenue generation. This would seem to make all the sense in the world, which is why so many companies are doing it. 

At the same time, dramatic changes on the buying side (i.e., former and prospective customers are mostly not buying what they used to) suggests that companies really need to rethink what they're trying to sell, what value they can provide, and how they're going to market. 

To me, this suggests the need for some greater investment at the top of the funnel, such as market research and analysis, development of new solutions, fundamental value propositions, and market segmentation. It's easy to skimp on these activities when times are tough and budgets are shrinking, but the risk is pushing harder to sell things that customers have no interest in buying. In this case, all the provocative, interactive, social, leveraged lead generation activities in the world will make little difference. 

So what's the answer? We need to focus on generating revenue now, but unless we back up the funnel and make sure we're aiming the right direction the leads we bring in won't do the trick. What do you think?

Photo credit: Renaissancechambara

Thought leadership IS business development, or at least it can be

In a down economy, investments in thought leadership -- developing and demonstrating unique insights on critical market issues -- tend to fall by the wayside. The focus on the marketing side shifts more heavily toward short-term lead generation and direct sales support. Conventional wisdom suggests that thought leadership and other reputation-building investments generate only a longer term payoff in business development.

Done right, however, thought leadership can actually be one of the most powerful business development initiatives that a B2B company has at its disposal. This is not just a plea for understanding that publishing compelling thought leadership content can inspire incoming leads from prospects that sales folks don't even have on their radar -- although that should indeed happen.

Rather, the very process of developing thought leadership can itself generate new opportunities. Here's how:

First, true thought leadership emerges only from deep collaboration with clients and prospects. Developing a unique and compelling point of view on an important market issue can only come from serious research in the marketplace, from studying and learning from clients in the field and then analyzing findings to discover new and emerging patterns that individual clients themselves often don't see.

Second, engaging your clients in a serious, non-sales discussion about trends in the market, challenges in the business, and priority initiatives to address those challenges is actually the best way to gain insight into what's working, what's not, and what's new.

Consider, then, a simple project designed to create a new point of view and new thought leadership content on, for example, strengthening customer loyalty in the management consulting industry. A typical research approach could include:

• Conducting an online survey with several hundred existing customers and prospects
• Conducting deeper telephone or face-to-face interviews with several dozen of those same customers and prospects
• Convening one or several roundtable discussions with one or more small groups of customers and prospects

Having conducted such research, you're now in good shape to begin your analysis and put together a new point of view based on real insight from the field. The normal course would then be to produce a report, issue a press release, arrange some events and speaking engagements, perhaps highlight the new ideas on your blogs, produce a few podcasts, etc.

All well and good, but now consider the business development opportunity along the way: 

• The research project provides a great, non-sales reason to talk with some of your best clients and prospects
• The conversations provide deep insight into their current thinking and priorities
• The study findings provide a perfect reason to organize a follow-on conversation to review the results

As a result, these conversations can be some of the most productive business development conversations you can have. Precisely because you are not trying to sell anything, but rather to share ideas and collaborate in defining useful new directions, you're providing real value and building trust -- which is the essential condition for any successful discussion of an actual solution you might provide. Seen in this light, thought leadership is not a precursor or alternative to business development, it is part and parcel of an integrated approach to generate high quality opportunities with some of your most important clients and prospects.

Do you agree?  

Photo credit: D'Arcy Norman

Taking the time to get it right

The need for speed in the market is little doubted. Businesses are constantly trying to accelerate the pace of innovation, bring products and services to market faster, and, of course, hasten the entire sales cycle.

As in journalism, though, getting it right is just as important as getting it first.

Jeff Kaplan posted a great story on his always interesting THINK IT Services blog yesterday about a large software company preparing a new offering in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market -- about which Jeff is one of the leading experts. 

Bringing major new offers to market is a complicated operation with lots of moving parts, and it is all too common that companies race in with significant shortcomings in one or more of the fundamentals: the customer base is poorly thought through, the value proposition is weak, the launch lacks credibility, the sales force is not ready, etc.

Jeff was rightly impressed in this case both because the company brought him in a full 9-10 months before launch to help educate the sales team, and because they were truly open with the sales folks about the realities of moving in a new direction:

"I was joined in these sessions by company executives who provided candid insights about their SaaS goals, objectives, and even uncertainties. They readily admitted that they are making a 'big bet' on SaaS and still have plenty of piece parts to put in place regarding how the new offerings will be packaged, priced, and positioned.

Their candor was refreshing and rewarded with an enthusiastic response from the sales team which recognizes that times are changing, and they have an opportunity to offer their customers new game-changing SaaS solutions and greater options to meet their corporate objectives."

Executives candid with the sales team? Sales people excited about the new approach? Company working almost a year ahead of launch to get it right? I don't know the details on this one, but I like their chances.

Photo credit: John-Morgan

Sweating the small stuff

Back when I worked at ITSMA, I was constantly amazed doing market research projects for our corporate members at the poor quality of their customer lists. I mean, these were the top tech companies in the world, and some of them were even selling CRM solutions! We'd constantly struggle to get even half-decent lists of customers to interview or survey. There were always reasons, of course, often having to do with the inevitable divide between marketing and sales. But the problem reflected a critical shortcoming in basic marketing hygiene.

I was reminded of this yesterday reading "The Contact Washing Machine" on a new blog just launched by Steven Woods, co-founder and CTO of Eloqua. Steven's point is a simple but critical one: the best thing people working on demand generation can do is set up a simple system to standardize and normalize contact data as it comes in from the multitude of "unwashed" sources we're all swimming in: email, Web forms, meetings, events, internal lists, etc. He doesn't mention the new tide of data from blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks, but they only add to the challenge.

It doesn't have to be an elaborate system, but it should focus on the major data fields we all use for lead tracking and management, such as titles, physical address, sales territory, and so on. As Steven notes, "Putting this in place, and having all incoming data flow through it, is a great way to avoid the cycle of data continually degrading over time until a major undertaking (at great cost) is done to cleanse it, whereupon it immediately begins degrading again."

It's a pain to set up and maintain, and we can always think of things we'd rather be doing, but having clean contact data is one of those basic marketing (and business) essentials that makes everything else go more smoothly. 

Marketing as service

Drew Neisser, CEO of the interactive agency Renegade, has a useful post today on "marketing as service". The basic idea, a variant on my constant focus that marketing needs to provide legitimate value to all stakeholders, is when marketing "no longer talks at you but actually does something for you, then it becomes a service." 

As an example, Drew cites Samsung placing mobile charging stations at airports to help travelers recharge on the road: "Samsung gets meaningful exposure, airports get happier travelers and consumers come to recognize Samsung as a helpful & reliable 'mobile' resource. The exchange of value is crystal clear."

He then goes on to critique a superficially similar effort from Kraft, which highlights heating up bus shelters and providing samples of Stove Top Stuffing to "warm up" cold commuters this month in Chicago. Sounds okay at first, but Drew's point is that Kraft is doing this in just 10 bus shelters in Chicago, while putting more energy into traditional bus stop shelter advertising all over that city and 49 other cities as well. 

A more substantial commitment to marketing as service, he suggests, would be scrapping the advertising and providing the actual service more extensively in cold weather cities nationwide. "Commuters would be thanking Kraft by the bus load and telling all their friends how the kind folks from Glenview warmed them up on a frigid morning. Cities would be competing to get the Kraft bus shelter program as a way of encouraging and rewarding the use of public transportation."

Marketing as service is far from an alien concept in the B2B world. Business software companies provide free demos and trial versions; many companies have user groups and customer councils; and most provide thought leadership content in an effort to help business leaders make more informed decisions. 

But how much of this activity is really just a come-on to paid versions or a thinly veiled sales pitch rather than authentic provision of value -- or, as in the Kraft example, just a token effort amid a much more extensive promotional campaign? To what extent are you really trying to serve?

(Thanks to Paul Dunay for linking Drew's post on Twitter. Follow Paul yourself for a steady stream of great links.)