Reputation to Revenue

Aren't we past random acts of "selling"?

 

Sigh -- another random call this morning from a telemarketer on behalf of a large tech company: 

Caller: "Hi, this is [name] from [company name] on behalf of [tech company]. I noticed you downloaded some research. Did you find everything you need?

Me: To be honest, I don't remember.

Caller: Well, it would have been in the last 30 days, or maybe the last two months. Do you have any plans to purchase software in the next 18-24 months?

30 or 60 days ago? I can't remember last week. Do $1 apps for my iPhone count? Given the high-priced enterprise applications this company sells, I'm guessing not!

Me: I'm with a small consulting company. I don't think I fit your audience.

Caller: Well the [tech company's] new division specializes in companies from 5-500 employees. Do you have any plans to purchase...

You get the drift. How is this random calling to "qualify" a "lead" based on white paper download a month or two earlier worth anything?

White papers have their place (heck, I write some of them for clients myself!), and telemarketing, properly applied, can certainly have value. But it's hard for me to imagine that this archaic spray and pray approach to marketing and sales does the slightest good for your reputation, your pipeline, or your bottom line.

Aren't we past these random acts of selling? 

Photo credit: vlima.com

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?

New research and paper on "Four Steps to Solutions Growth"

I'm pleased to announce the launch of a new Point of View series with my partners at Solutions Insights.

Over the next several months, we'll release a series of short, research-based perspectives on how companies can improve performance in their solutions businesses.

Our first Point of View, Adjusting to the New Reality: Four Steps to Solutions Growth, is available now. It outlines four initiatives companies can take to accelerate solutions growth through the rest of 2009 while also repositioning their organizations for longer-term success.

Based on new research with our partner ITSMA, the Point of View highlights findings from a survey with more than 30 B2B solutions providers on four critical initiatives:

• Improving the solutions development process
• Reorienting value propositions and messaging
• Enhancing customer connections
• Better equipping the sales force to sell solutions

For example, we see that companies are looking mostly to develop more packaged and "mass-customized" solutions rather than relying mainly on fully customized, one-off solutions. Only 16% of the companies surveyed are looking to increase the number of highly customized solutions.

You can download the Point of View pdf here. I'd love to know what you think.

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

Stress test for thought leadership: Are you ready?

Consider the following scenario: After a few weeks of back and forth with a prominent business journal, your PR person gets the go-ahead to submit a 400 word contribution to an ongoing forum on a critical issue for the senior executives in your target market. 

For example, Sloan Management Review is currently running an Executive Roundtable on "Capturing the Green Advantage," with short pieces by top executives from Interface, Boston Consulting Group, Intel, EMC, and others.

You think sustainability is a big opportunity, and you'd love the chance to show off your vision and work in this area to such a great audience. Sloan Management Review is going to reach a lot more C-level executives than your own publications ever could.

Are you ready? Would you know what to say?

No doubt you can dash off something interesting in 400 words. But would it reflect your firm's point of view? Would it stand out as interesting, different, engaging, credible? Would it advance your firm's reputation and suggest that you really do have the expertise to help clients address the issue at hand?

Lots of firms are trying to present themselves as thought leaders in their markets. Too often, however, they produce a disconnected set of white papers, articles, presentations, and perhaps blogs, podcasts, and videos that are, to be blunt, neither very thoughtful nor really leading anything. Faced with an opportunity like the one above, they have to scramble to figure out what angle to take, and it won't necessarily line up with most of the other materials sitting on their site.

On the other hand, firms with a well developed point of view on strategic issues like sustainability (or whatever your customers' priorities may be) would have little trouble with the opportunity above -- they have a solid foundation upon which to build. It probably took them longer to build that foundation than it took others to just crank out a set of disconnected white papers, but the hardest work is up front. Once the point of view is in place, it's much easier to produce a steady stream of articles, reports, blog posts, videos, presentations, briefings, and external commentaries that reflect and reinforce that core perspective. 

Developing a strong and differentiated point of view on core issues for your clients is hard work, and easy to forgo, especially in today's economy when short term lead and revenue generation dominate all marketing conversation. For high value services and solutions, though, it's awfully hard to generate leads and revenue without standing out from the crowd.

What do you think? 

Photo credit: House of Sims

Wal-Mart seizes the moment with e-health care solution...and lessons are many

Love 'em, or hate 'em, Wal-Mart is clearly among the most innovative and successful companies on the planet over the last half-century. Critics typically point to the company's sheer size and relentless cost cutting as the pillars of Wal-Mart's success, but constant innovation in business model, use of technology, are supply chain management are at least as important. The company also has a finely-tuned understanding of its markets and a willingness to make intelligent bets on the future (witness the current substantial push toward sustainability).

Today's New York Times article on Wal-Mart's new initiative to sell a digital medical records solution to small doctor's office is a perfect example -- and one with any number of lessons to other companies trying to sell high-value packaged solutions.

The initiative is interesting enough: Wal-Mart is partnering with Dell and a small software company, eClinicalWorks, to offer an integrated package to small medical practices at a much lower cost than competitive offers. It's a big opportunity. Few small medical offices today have computerized records, according to The Times, but more than three-quarters of all U.S. physicians work in offices of ten doctors or fewer. Wal-Mart's offering will come through its Sam's Club division, which already counts some 200,000 doctors within its membership.

From a marketing and solutions perspective, though, the initiative suggests a number of lessons that are more widely applicable:

• Think Different. Wal-Mart is clearly not a technology or medical solutions provider, but if the opportunity is big enough and the company has the potential to respond in an innovative way, why not take a look? As Marcus Osborne, senior director for health care business development at Wal-Mart, told The Times, "We're a high-volume, low-cost company. And I would argue that mentality is sorely lacking in the health care industry."
• Think Solutions. Lots of company offer products and services to support digital health records, but, especially for small doctor's offices, the convenience of a packaged solution that includes equipment, software, installation, and ongoing support can be a much more attractive offer. Importantly, in this case, eClinicalWorks provides its software as a service (SaaS), making ongoing support easier and less costly than with traditional installed systems.  
• Think Partners. The new offer is potentially a big win-win-win for all three partners. Wal-Mart gets the expertise and credibility of working with leaders in a market in which it has little experience; Dell and eClinicalWorks get the enormous visibility and channel power of Wal-Mart. None of them could go it alone with anywhere near the impact.
• Think Timing. The new initiative is perfectly timed. Not only is digital health care prominent on the political agenda in Washington, but Obama's stimulus package includes substantial financial incentives for physician's offices to go digital.
• Think Mission. Along with great timing, the initiative has the benefit of serving a larger social mission, improving health care for all. As citizens increasingly look to corporate America to help solve problems and not just make money, tying to a larger mission can only help.
• Think Proof. The initiative has credibility not only because Dell is a leader in small office computers and eClinicalWorks is already providing its service to some 25,000 physicians. As important, Wal-Mart itself has tested and used the system in its own, in-store health clinics over the last two and a half years.

"If Wal-Mart is successful, this could be a game-changer," Dr. David J. Brailer, former national coordinator for health information technology in the Bush administration told The Times. 

For me, it's also a wonderful lesson in solutions marketing. Do you agree?

*For an interview about the initiative with Girish Kuman, CEO of eClinicalWorks, click here. 

Photo credit: D'Arcy Norman

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

Social media reality check: Predictions for 2009

Amid the inevitable and generally useless flood of predictions for 2009, Peter Kim published a useful e-book today on Social Media Predictions 2009 (pdf). Based on the contributions of 14 other experts, the document covers a wide range of issues, from metrics and mobile to budget and B2B.

What I found most interesting, however, was the relatively sober tone of many of the contributors after the last several years of incredible social media hype. 

Partly this is just economic reality. Even as the advocates expect a greater push toward social media as potentially cheaper than other marketing programs, several also expect a shakeout of Web 2.0 firms as the reality of questionable (or no) business models finally catches up to them. As Chris Brogan noted, "Doors are going to close all over the social web. Why? Because the money didn't come the way people thought it would." 

And from the marketing side, as Jeremiah Owyang states,"The recession will force revenue results out of social technologies--marketing must prove its worth to actually changing the bottom line."

More important, from the large company perspective, is the growing recognition that social media is hard! The contributors themselves are all social media stars, of course, (and mostly consultants ready and able to help), but their success doesn't translate so easily at the enterprise level.

As David Armano explains:

In 2008 we saw many organizations taking Web 2.0 very seriously moving from 'why' to 'how' they should implement these new strategies and tactics. In 2009, reality will set in--big time...

Organizations will come to terms with the reality that although it is now 'cheaper' to launch an initiative leveraging Web 2.0 technology--it requires qualified and passionate people to make them successful. This will not be easy for many businesses/brands as it brings up a host of issues ranging from empowering employees & agencies to have direct contact with customers, to staffing up projects differently.

Meanwhile, as both Pete Blackshaw and Charlene Li argue, the rush to quantity (more, more, more connections on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) may shift the other way. For Blackshaw:

Many of us are going to wake up in 2009 wondering 'what did we eat?' -- everything from hastily assembled friends list to Twitter followers to groups, apps, and widgets that we 'impulse adopted' (usually while shadowing others) yet rarely revisited. Some of us will join the Social Media equivalent of Weight Watchers, eager to trim the excess and rediscover a modicum of 'don't follow everything' discipline.

More people backing away from "following everything" means we marketers will have to work that much harder to get them to follow us.

Todd Defren thinks that many more B2B companies will join the party in 2009. I certainly hope so, but if they do, they'll probably need to follow two other trends:

• Companies Increasingly Crafting Content. For Ann Handley, the important news is that "organizations are increasingly focusing on producing kick-ass content to attract and retain customers, rather than randomly grabbing folks off the street." Moreover, Handley notes, the sad news of a new wave of unemployed journalists and editors might have a silver lining if companies look in their direction for help in creating more compelling content.  
• Velvet Rope Social Networks. For Chris Brogan, "the real interest will be in making targeted networks that aren't 'come one, come all.' Companies instead will focus on narrower networks for specific industry verticals and interest groups. 

All in all, I remain bullish on social media marketing for B2B next year, but it's certainly helpful to have a more realistic attitude about the challenges of doing it well. Huge kudos to Peter Kim for pulling together such a useful guide.