Reputation to Revenue

Marketing as service: Samsung and Best Buy put customers first

I love this new effort from Samsung to generate helpful user questions and answers on the BestBuy.com. As explained today in Clickz, the "Brand Answers" feature (based on technology from Bazaarvoice) has just finished a five-month trial and almost doubled views of Samsung products on the Best Buy site:

When visitors click a button on the brand's products details pages, a pop-up FAQ feature that's called "Mr. Samsung" appears. Then, visitors can read pages of questions and answers that were previously supplied by other viewers. They can also search the feature to find the content they need or something close to it.

Additionally, users can type in their own questions, which the feature says in a message will be answered within a 16-hour window. The most popular question during the test was, "Can I hang this TV on the wall?"

I love this for three reasons:

• It's all about helping customers make better purchase decisions
• It taps the wisdom of the crowd to generate more, faster, and often better answers than could easily (and affordably) be provided by Samsung employees
• It demonstrates the confidence that both partners share in testing new ideas and opening their doors to put customers first

It's obviously a consumer-focused initiative, but the principals hold true for B2B, don't you think? 

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

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

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.

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

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.

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. 

Cisco's big think approach to emerging markets

For years, technology companies have tried to move up the value chain by promoting big ideas that would drive sales of premium business solutions rather than commodity products and services. It certainly makes sense, and some firms do it pretty well, but it's easier said than done.

Cisco, according to BusinessWeek, is now trying to move WAY up the value chain, looking to design whole cities, among other "projects" in emerging markets such as Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and Chile.

"Cisco isn't just selling technology. [SVP Paul] Mountford's pitch is that Cisco, more than any other company, can help countries such as Saudi Arabia modernize their economies and become leaders in the Internet Age. The company argues that, by investing in the Internet infrastructure Cisco sells, these governments can better educate their citizens, improve health care, and boost national productivity. They may even be able to create their own tech sectors, giving citizens the opportunity to become  well-paid 'knowledge workers like those in Bangalore or Guangdong, China."

The effort, as tech marketing guru Geoffrey Moore explains, "is getting itself designed into the fabric of these countries' economic plans, because Cisco is helping their leaders imagine the future." 

Pretty ambitious, to say the least. And extremely challenging, as BusinessWeek also notes, given the economic slowdown, intense competition from Cisco rivals, and the tremendous internal demands it places on Cisco's own experts to actually live up to the hype and deliver the goods.

But I think the time is right. For one thing, industry leaders like Cisco need to be bold in finding new markets to maintain their momentum. For another, as I wrote recently about IBM's Smarter Planet initiative, attaching ourselves in an authentic way to causes larger than ourselves (or companies) may well be the most effective way to go to market in this time of great change.

What do you think?