Reputation to Revenue

Strengthening thought leadership marketing: Five steps to excellence

I've just had the privilege of helping judge ITSMA's Marketing Excellence Awards, and was impressed in particular with the submissions in the Thought Leadership Marketing category. 

As recently as five years ago, thought leadership marketing was mainly the province of the top consulting firms. Few other B2B firms took it seriously. Boy, has that changed! The submissions in this year's awards program reflect a substantial increase not only in spending but, more important, in the programmatic discipline that is necessary to make a serious impact with customers and market influencers.

I can't name names yet because ITSMA is still selecting finalists and then the ultimate winners. It's clear from the submissions, however, along with working with many of these companies over the years, that there are five important ways in which the best of the best stand apart from the crowd:

1. Focus and depth: Lots of companies practice "random acts of content," dashing off periodic white papers, articles, videos, blog posts, and the like with little focus or depth. But when you're dealing with high level customers facing serious business challenges), the scattershot approach provides little value. Indeed, according to a major study of business technology buyers last year by ITSMA and Pierre Audoin Consulting, only 16% of these buyers believe that their solution providers are very helpful in showing them the possibilities to solve their business challenges. If you're going to join the ranks of the "very helpful," you need to pick one or a few issues, stick with it, and go deep.
2. Do the research: A lot of so-called thought leadership is really just opinion, perhaps based on a project or two. Our customers want evidence, and evidence usually requires research. The best thought leadership programs are built around serious research, including analysis of existing literature, new customer surveys, and in-depth case studies. One of the main reasons that the industry analyst firms remain so influential with buyers is that they are constantly cranking out new research. (Yes, marketers sometimes question the quality of that research, but it is generally miles ahead of the "thought leadership" content that vendors themselves produce.) To help make "thought leadership" worthy of the term, start from the beginning and don't skimp on the research.
3. Engage and empower internally. Too often, marketers publish thought leadership content but forget to tell anyone else in the organization. At best, this can mean losing the opportunity to have more colleagues representing that good thinking in the marketplace. At worst, customers start asking your people questions on an issue about which they have no idea. Especially as you begin to integrate social media across the business, you want more people engaging directly with customers, prospects, and other stakeholders. Engaging and empowering your customer-facing employees with thought leadership gives them something valuable to talk about, and can quickly become an essential multiplier for overall program impact.
4. Leverage your best content. Market engagement today is about pervasive presence and ongoing conversation, not just traditional publishing and speaking. Customers want to chew over and debate your ideas, often without you in the [virtual] room. To help make this happen, you need to leverage your best thought leadership content by publishing compelling bits and bytes in appropriate formats across the networks and channels where your customers congregate. If you're working on a white paper, for example, you want to think: Is there a short video we can produce? Where can we blog about this? What articles can we publish? Where are there opportunities to brief our best customers on our new thinking? Is there a debate I can set up?
5. Invest in expertise. Ultimately, great thought leadership programs are built around experts -- experts in the subjects at hand, of course, but also experts in research, analysis, publication, social media, and collaboration. The most successful programs invest in their people in at least three ways: Funding full time staff positions, recruiting for necessary skills and helping existing staff develop the right skills, and investing in partnerships for complementary capabilities (including brand recognition, as with prestigious academics, universities, and/or outside media and research organizations).

Building a successful thought leadership marketing program is a long-term process. The companies that are best, such as McKinsey, Accenture, IBM, Deloitte, and others, have spent years doing the research, building market presence, and refining what works. They pick key customer issues and stick with them. They go deep. And they invest in their people and programs. 

What's missing from my list? What works best for you?

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

Two cheers for Eloqua's Content Grid

Actually, I think Eloqua's new Content Grid is fabulous: it crams a complex story and a lot of information into an easy to understand infographic on a critical topic for B2B and solutions marketing. Nice job, folks!

My small beef is with the definition of "content marketing" that underlies the grid. Don't get me wrong: I'm a huge proponent of companies and marketing organizations getting much more serious about creating and executing integrated content strategies to support marketing and sales. Indeed, I make a decent part of my living these days helping companies make this happen.

What I don't agree with, though, is the equation of content marketing with inbound marketing. Perhaps I'm nitpicking at a casual line in Eloqua's blog post introducing the Content Grid, which explains the grid as "a simple framework for content -- or 'inbound' -- marketing." But the grid itself reinforces that equation with its presentation of relevant content types. It's all the fun thought leadership and social media stuff. What's missing are the nitty gritty product and service and solution descriptions and related (horror of horrors!) "promotional" material that, at the end of the day, are still necessary to help make the sale regardless of how effective your inbound marketing is.

Yes, inbound marketing is critical, content marketing is critical, and we all need to keep shifting budgets away from the old push promotion stuff that doesn't work toward educational pull materials and conversations with which our customers and prospects might actually engage. It's just that few of us can yet do away with collateral and promotion entirely -- especially when we're selling complex B2B solutions that require extensive purchase consideration, due diligence, and committee decision making.

I'm not sure Eloqua is even arguing that we should eliminate that stuff entirely, but I think it's a mistake to leave that still-important content out of the grid and the definition. If new directors of content marketing (another trend I support enthusiastically) just manage all the inbound stuff, we're likely to fall short in revamping and refreshing the basic product promotion material that still helps to seal our deal. The last thing we want to create is a great system of thought leadership-driven inbound marketing that collapses in the final phase when prospective buyers see disconnected and inconsistent product and service material.

So, two cheers for the Content Grid and the great intent behind it. Now if we can just broaden its scope a bit more.

What do you think? Do you have a content director? If yes, what's the scope of responsibility?

Four steps to strengthening B2B customer connections

 

IBM's hot-off-the-press 2010 CEO Study confirms again what solutions marketers already know: getting closer to customers is a strategic priority. An overwhelming 88% of large enterprise CEOs told IBM that getting closer to customers is a top business strategy for the next five years, placing it at the top of the list. An even higher number of the best performing CEOs, 95%, stressed the point.  

Is this really news? Isn't this just Marketing 101?

Well, sort of. The idea is basic, but making it happen, especially in large organizations, is not so easy.

The CEO imperative makes sense. Big company CEOs are struggling mightily, as the IBM report notes, with "the complexity of operating in an increasingly volatile and uncertain world."

In this context, and especially from a B2B perspective, close customer connections are essential to:

• Gain deep insight into customer wants and needs
• Gather input and advice on potential new offerings
• Uncover new opportunities and co-create solutions
• Obtain references, testimonials, and proof of value delivered

Creating and sustaining those trusted connections is extremely difficult, though, when our customers are overwhelmed with their own professional demands and tune out most of our marketing.

Social media brings promise of new and potentially more effective ways to build and maintain vibrant customer connections, both individual and communal -- but understanding how to turn that promise into reality is far from clear.

Meanwhile, face-to-face connections remain essential for key customers, especially at the executive level where so many of us need to be working. But our sales people have less time for relationship building and often little credibility in the executive suite. Beyond sales, it is difficult to know which face-to-face programs are worth funding.

A final challenge, especially for large organizations, is simply managing, coordinating, and building synergies across the wide range of programs and activities designed to strengthen customer connections.

Knowing this is a CEO priority, however, should make it at least a bit easier for marketing leaders to push forward with efforts to do what we all know is so important.

Here are four steps to consider:

1. Do an assessment. It's hard to even keep track of all the ways we're already connecting with customers. Research, sales, services, and delivery are obvious, but we also have thought leadership programs, social media and networks, executive relationship programs, reference management, key account management, customer councils, collaborative solutions development, and probably many more. Take stock of all these initiatives. Look at funding and staffing. Review effectiveness in terms of customer insight and relationship growth. Benchmark the competition. We need a baseline to identify gaps and next steps and to help build a vision of where we need to go.
2. Put someone in charge and build a cross-organizational team. We're already doing this with social media (hopefully!), but customer connections is an even bigger deal. We need someone with the big picture in mind and organizational partners and resources available to improve coordination, integration, and information sharing. We're not building relationships for their own sake, and we're not doing it just for sales either. If no one has accountability to ensure efficiency and effectiveness across the range of relationship-oriented programs, it won't happen.
3. Build executive commitment. The CEO wants to get closer to customers but is the rest of the leadership group on board? Are they setting the right examples and the right tone for their teams? Operationalizing the commitment to customer connections requires real investment and, as important, TIME. We need to push and prod and support senior executives to make the time to work on key relationships, participate in customer councils, and send the message that these initiatives are indeed a top priority.
4. Provide incentives. Companies that take customer satisfaction seriously put serious incentives in place to support the right behavior. Improving customer satisfaction is not the same thing as strengthening customer connections and relationships, but the principle certainly applies (as it usually does with any strategic initiative). Set specific goals, measure results, and then reward the folks in marketing, sales, service, and delivery teams for hitting their relationship growth targets.

What would you add to the list? What's working for you?

Photo credit: Marc_Smith

Aligning marketing and sales...with what?

Marketing folks in B2B are obsessed with aligning marketing and sales. It's a longstanding pain point, and it always comes to the fore in a down economy. The problem, at least from my humble perspective, is that the discussion tends to rotate around the idea that marketing needs to align more fully with sales.

Four years ago, I wrote this:

The typical approach to marketing-sales alignment emphasizes getting marketing closer to sales through initiatives such as tighter alignment of marketing activities with the sales cycle, better coordination around demand generation and lead management, and allowing sales to have more input into marketing programs and materials. These types of initiatives certainly can be useful, but they risk reinforcing the standard industry view that marketing is ultimately the junior partner of sales and that the alignment problem is mainly one of marketers straying too far from the daily and quarterly demands of the sales force.

Has the discussion really changed? 

Beyond the junior partner idea, another common, unspoken assumption is that sales is just fine where it is. But we know that B2B sales is undergoing changes at least as dramatic as marketing. Globalization, transparency, ecosystem collaboration, the demand for custom solutions, and more are wreaking havoc with the traditional sales process just as they are with marketing. I didn't cover social media and communities in that 2006 article, but clearly they have an enormous impact on sales, too. Witness the seemingly endless number of "sales 2.0" conferences, consultants, and tools flying.

The real challenge is transformation, not just alignment. Of course marketing and sales need to work more closely together, but most of all they need to figure out how to collaborate in serving and attracting customers when their customers are: 

• Overwhelmed with information and choice
• Skeptical of any marketing or sales pitches
• Fully capable of researching solutions on their own
• Actively tapping social networks for insight and reviews far beyond what you can provide

I'm all for more agreement between marketing and sales on which leads matter, how to map marketing to the sales cycle, and where marketing can help most with key accounts. And I'm "traditional" enough to believe that face-to-face marketing and selling continue to be essential even as social media and online communities take center stage for both sales and marketing.

But if we don't look for a larger transformation in how both marketing and sales work -- and work together -- we run the risk of building alignment around a process that no longer fits the real world environment.  

What do you think?

Photo credit: Bill Ward's Brickpile

TL in 4D: Four dimensions for thought leadership success

B2B marketers know that thought leadership is essential, especially when selling high-value solutions. Business buyers tune out most traditional marketing, but they are always looking for new ideas. If we can produce interesting and useful content, and use social media and other platforms to spread the good word, we at least have a chance of getting into the conversations that our customers and prospects actually want to have. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, thought leadership topped the list when ITSMA recently asked marketing leaders at big tech and IT services firms which tactics will be more important in 2010. According to ITSMA, 77% of respondents cited thought leadership development as a priority, beating out references and testimonials, senior executive programs, and social media. 

For most B2B firms, however, thought leadership is getting a great deal more lip service than investment. Other than top consulting and professional service firms like McKinsey, Deloitte, and Accenture, few B2B firms have yet created a focused and well-organized thought leadership marketing program. My own recent review of 72 corporate members of the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, for example, found that only 24 of these manufacturing, industrial, and technology companies even had a link to thought leadership content on their home page.

All too often, thought leadership in B2B is thinly funded (if at all), episodic, and superficial. 

• There is no dedicated staff, no editorial calendar for content production, and a heavy reliance on subject matter experts "volunteering" their nights and weekends to bang out a few white papers, articles, and blog posts. 
• Content tends to overemphasize company promotion and underemphasize customer and market evidence. 
• Publications typically are one-off productions with little coordinated effort to leverage new thinking into multiple formats, networks, and channels.  

To make a real impact with customers and create real distinction in the market, thought leadership needs focus, depth, and continuity.

Consider, for example Accenture's years-long in-depth research on high performing companies. They focus on strategic challenges facing each industry the company serves, orient primary research and publications to different executive roles among their client base, and deliver insights across a wide range of online, face-to-face, and social media platforms.

Not every company has Accenture's deep pockets, to be sure, but the lessons are clear. And it's not just a matter of blogging more and getting more content onto Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube -- although social media clearly IS critical for thought leadership dissemination and engagement. 

At a more fundamental level, companies looking for greater impact with thought leadership need to consider four essential dimensions of program development:

1. Points of View: Effective thought leadership is rooted in compelling, differentiated, and evidence-based points of view on important business challenges -- not product features or quick opinions or the experience of a single client engagement. Companies need to invest the time, research budgets, and analytic expertise it takes to create points of view that really matter. You've got to take a stand, but in ways that are not simply provocative but rooted in primary research and real world experience. (For a guide to developing effective points of view, check out Solutions Insights' Point of View Development Template.)
2. Internal Education: Especially with the rise of social media, you're relying more and more on a great many employees to tell your story, not just a few executives or subject matter experts. Investing in internal education around your points of view is critical to equipping marketing, sales, and other customer-facing employees (which could be anyone online) to engage constructively on the issues that matter in ways that demonstrate real expertise. It's also a great way to generate more insight and tap more internal experience to feed into Point of View development.
3. Market Engagement: Publishing and disseminating content is what most people think of when they consider thought leadership marketing. But the traditional reliance on white paper publishing, conference speaking, and pushing for mainstream media coverage is far too limited in today's always-on, socially networked world. Market engagement today is about pervasive presence and ongoing conversation; publishing is just the beginning of the process. And the development of more substantial points of view makes it much easier to produce steadier streams of useful content across multiple platforms.
4. Program Operations: Making this all work requires dedicated staff, disciplined processes, and clear metrics and accountability. This doesn't have to mean huge staffs or budgets, but it does mean accepting that the "volunteer" work on nights and weekends is unlikely to have a serious impact or create distinction against competitors with a more organized and funded approach. Rather, you need to bring together people, processes and tools that can do the research and analysis, generate compelling points of view, and sustain the internal and market engagement required to reap the benefits effective thought leadership can provide.

Based on our own research and experience working with thought leadership programs across the IT and professional services sectors, Solutions Insights has developed a four stage roadmap for thought leadership program development, as you can see below. It's a simple model that necessarily abstracts a great deal of nuanced reality, but it should be useful in evaluating your own programmatic maturity and considering next steps for improvement. We'd love to know what you think of the roadmap -- and please weigh in with comments on your own approach and experience. We're still learning, too.

 
 

Words and meaning: The power of alignment

Suzanne Lowe from Expertise Marketing has a great piece in her June newsletter on the importance of developing a common lexicon for marketing and business development in professional service firms. 

Pointing to common misunderstandings between business leaders and partners, on the one hand, and marketers and business developers on the other, about such basic terms as "return on investment," Lowe suggests that PS firms would be well served by investing some time in building common understanding. 

Most important, she says, is defining marketing and business development "up" to a more expansive and strategic view: 

For example, why should the term "marketing only connote the limited activities of, let's say, "building awareness," or "sales support?" Shouldn't the term "marketing be understood to also include targeting and segmentation? Pricing? Client loyalty? In many professional firms, marketing does not mean these latter terms, only the former.

To which I can only say, Amen.

It's not just professional service firms, of course. Many of the technology firms I work with suffer from the same problems: confusion over key terms and meanings, and a general defining "down" of what marketing is all about. And now that we're all trying to sort out the tangled terms of Web 2.0/social media/social networking/social web/marketing 2.0, the language problem is only getting worse.

But all is not lost, and Lowe is right to suggest that lexiconical alignment (if there is such a phrase!) can be a powerful force. 

Just consider the confusion around the word "solutions." If marketing is often misunderstood, the "S" word is subject to near-universal confusion. For companies that have taken the time to work through a solutions lexicon and taxonomy, however, the benefits have been substantial. 

My old company ITSMA has been in the forefront of this work in the IT sector, and my colleagues and I at Solutions Insights have continued to work with clients in similar fashion. In a great many cases, progress on the real work of bringing new offerings to market, sharpening marketing messaging to emphasize strategic business problems rather than product features and functions, and reorienting sales forces to sell integrated business "solutions" could only happen after all the relevant stakeholders agreed on a common language.

As it has been with solutions, so it can be with "marketing." In Lowe's own words, "New understandings of terms will foster practitioners' ability to grow the 'right' revenues, gain meaningful market share, and optimally serve clients."

What do you think?

Photo credit: greebile

The hard questions about social media for B2B solutions providers

The skepticism about social media for B2B is pretty much gone by now. It's still pretty new for a great many companies, but the combination of legitimate success stories, overwhelming hype, and the desperate search for new ways to reach customers when the old ways work less and less has convinced all but the most recalcitrant among us that social media is at least worth a try.

But how to proceed is far from clear, especially for companies selling high-value solutions that typically require very long sales cycles with multiple influencers and decision makers in every transaction. Even for companies with a fair amount of social media experience, figuring out specifically where and how to invest in social media is a huge challenge. 

It's all well and good to dabble in blogging, Twitter, and YouTube, but creating a strategic, focused, and sustainable social media program requires answering some pretty tough questions, such as:

• Who are we really trying to reach? Do we have a clear sense of which customers, prospects, influencers, and/or other stakeholders are active in social networks, or could be -- and why it's important to reach them this way?
• How do we get their attention? Attention is the scarcest commodity, especially at the executive level where many solutions marketers are determined to engage. Do we really understand what social programs or activities or applications are most likely to succeed with the people we are trying to reach?
• Do we have the skills? Lots of people talk the social media talk, but can they really deliver? Executing with social media requires a diverse set of skills, including content development, recruitment, conversation, facilitation, analysis, and, most of all, LISTENING. Who in the organization is going to do the heavy lifting?
• How should we organize our efforts? Who should "own" social media is a big conversation topic these days, with claims coming from varying departments and types of agencies. Some suggest that the very idea of ownership goes against the democratic philosophy of social media. Do we have a solid strategy for planning, budgeting, and managing our efforts in a coordinated way? Are we confident that we're not taking too narrow or broad a view of how this might work best?
• Can we sustain the effort? Social media is generally a long term proposition; initiatives may take 6-12 months or more to gain real momentum even if they are well designed and managed. Do we have the staying power to stick with it month after month after month even if the early returns are slight?
• How do we capture real value and return on investment? How will we measure success? Do we have clearly defined and realistic objectives and metrics? How will we make sure the benefits reach across the organization?
• How can we minimize risk? Among the first question many executives ask about social media are: What if people say negative things about our company? What if one of our employees shares something proprietary or just stupid or embarrassing about our company? The reality is that social media does bring risk, but the risk is there whether we engage actively or not. How can we manage and support our activities in ways that lessen the risk and increase the reward?
• Are we culturally ready? A question that some companies don't ask is "are we really ready to open the doors and join the conversation?" The biggest challenge with social media is literally being social. It's having the mindset and the culture and the confidence to engage in open conversation, trust your colleagues and staff to do the same, accept criticism publicly, and give up the old notions of controlling the message and marketing to an audience.  

A great danger today is that, in their haste to "catch up," many companies are all of a sudden taking the social media plunge without addressing many of these essential questions. In my own recent discussions with clients and prospects, I've had a lot of questions about tools and tactics (e.g., "What should we be doing with Twitter or Facebook or online video), but less about strategy, objectives, organization, and culture.

Experimentation is fine, and even necessary given the constant innovation in social tools and channels, but taking social media requires a well-developed strategy. This seems almost too obvious to state; unfortunately, though, the hype around social media appears to have caused a lot of otherwise smart marketers to temporarily forget the basics of Marketing 101. Social media may well revolutionize the practice of marketing, but the will core objectives remain the same: serving customers, finding avenues for growth, building reputation, and supporting sales.

I'm not sure it's possible to define "best practice" for solutions marketing in such a new and fast-changing arena as social media, but answering the hard questions above will certainly go a long way toward developing a strategy with a good chance of success.

To help answer some of the hard questions, my partners and I at Solutions Insights have just published a short report, Socializing Solutions: Tapping Social Media for Solutions Success (PDF). The report includes a set of guidelines on where to focus your efforts and a basic, four-phase approach to building an integrated, sustainable program. Please check it out and pass it along. I'd love to know what you think.

Photo credit: OCLS

Put everyone in marketing? Yes, and with a social spin

Harvard management guru Rosabeth Moss Kanter last week suggested: "In a Recession, Put Everyone in Marketing." The idea, of course, is that you can't just keep cutting costs endlessly, and your employees are your most important asset. When times are tough, everyone needs to contribute to growth.

It's a perfectly fine idea, although often stated as one of those age-old cliches that you don't actually take seriously: "Sure, we're all marketers. Great. Can we get back to work now?"

In fact, the recession is the perfect time to merge the basic idea of everyone supporting marketing with the mega-trend of social media.

Kanter's five suggestions for how to put everyone in marketing are all good ones, but surprisingly pre-Web 2.0. If we give them a social spin, the possibilities become a lot more interesting.

• Increase customer contact and communication. Not only should senior executives reach out more, so should employees throughout the organization. "Perhaps a personal note or a phone call to provide news or ask questions." Isn't it time to accelerate efforts to connect with customers through social networks and communities, and tap employees around the organization who are already active to lead the charge?
• Start looking for new markets now. All employees should be looking for new uses of existing products and new areas for potential customers. "This might involve sales calls, tests of a new channel, postings on Web sites targeting new areas or industry segments, sending more people to speak at industry conferences and cultivate relationship." What about tapping the social web both internally and externally to rapidly crowdsource new market ideas and opportunities, as  companies like IBM, Dell, Cisco, and others are doing with innovation jams and webstorms?
• Invest in employee morale. When morale is down, productivity suffers. Managers should do more to show employees how much they are valued. "Small tokens of appreciation and enjoyment, such as a weekend outing with families or a food festival with employee contributions... go a long way to keep people motivated." Why not really open up the organization internally with a new transparency using honest executive blogs, wide-ranging online discussion of business challenges and opportunities, and an authentic commitment from the top to respond to employee questions and concerns? If the new external marketing is all about open conversation and community, the new internal marketing should be, too.  
• Emphasize and reward small wins. Tough times make it that much more important to get new ideas from anyone and everyone in the organization, but companies too often neglect to ask or provide incentives to help the process along. "A program that actively seeks these ideas and rewards them... can strengthen the company immediately." Why not use the crowdsourcing approach noted above for an even broader effort to generate and recognize new business improvement ideas. 
• Stick with your values. Managers are often tempted to cut ethical corners in a down economy, but desperate measures often come back to haunt the company soon thereafter -- "Reminders about company values can reinforce solidarity and increase the confidence that customers have in the company." What about using the recession as the perfect opportunity to increase public commitment to management transparency and corporate social responsibility, and create new online resources such as interactive sustainability reports to demonstrate the commitment?

Kanter is right on when she suggests that getting all employees involved in knowing and caring about customers is a key to success when times are tough. This is not exactly easy when many of those employees are understandably worried most of all about their own job security and families. Fortunately, our growing experience with new social tools and programs is making it a bit easier just when we need it most. 

What do you think?

Photo credit: aleske

Marketing, sales, and "digital body language"

Several years back, I put some energy into "solving" the age-old conflict between marketing and sales. Or, at least trying to help clients and member companies in the B2B technology world (I was at ITSMA at the time) think anew about how best to align the two functions and get them working together more effectively. 

The gist of the argument is that global competition and online transparency give buyers the ability to control the buying process far more than ever before. As such, sales is less able to go it alone, and relies more than ever on strong marketing to gain deep market and customer insight, build reputation, provide focused thought leadership content to fuel useful conversation, and build relationships of tangible value. 

We've seen some useful progress across the industry in recent years with marketing and sales playing together more nicely. Account-based marketing is one of the more promising initiatives in this regard, bringing together marketing and sales teams to create a marketing-driven approach to building business with strategic accounts.

But it may be all for naught if companies keep reacting to the current crisis the way they have reacted to downturns in the past: namely, to slash spending on marketing and put all hopes on beefing up sales. 

Marketing blogs and journals are of course filled with warnings about the folly of cutbacks and the historical successes of those companies that stayed the marketing course even amid declining sales. But the marketing cuts keep coming, and I wonder how companies expect to maintain or even increase sales while hacking away at the increasingly essential support systems that make those sales possible.

Steve Woods from Eloqua hit right on this critical point in an interview with Chris Herbert about his new book, Digital Body Language:  

If you look back prior to the information resources of the Internet, people needed to connect with a salesperson to get their information on a product or service. As the salesperson was that conduit, they had an opportunity to read that prospect's body language - crossed arms, smiles, frowns - and understand what messages resonated, and where they were in their decision-making process.

Now that prospective buyers get their information online, they no longer need the salesperson as information conduit. This means that the challenge of reading body language now is on the marketer, who must read their Digital Body Language - what messages they respond to, what information they find interesting - and use that to better guide any communications with them.

The point here is not that companies should cut sales instead of marketing. Rather, it's that they need to keep up the effort to integrate the two in a more collaborative approach that provides real value to potential customers. Now is the time to accelerate the change, not fall back into the old ways that won't work any more.