Reputation to Revenue

HP backs solutions rhetoric with org change and investments

 

Everyone talks about "solutions" these days but few seem to invest in the changes necessary to move beyond the rhetoric. For example, truly developing, marketing, and selling integrated B2B solutions typically requires both a strong focus from the top down and a new alignment from the bottom up.

Far too often, companies talk the solutions talk but fail to walk the walk. They don't invest in new mechanisms to work across business units, new ways to connect with customers, and new skills for selling higher value offerings. As a result, we see companies promoting "solutions" that are really just bundles of existing products and services, launching marketing programs that neglect real customer needs, and falling back on the old feature-function approach to sales that customers long ago rejected.

Walking the Walk

Organizational initiatives at HP over the last several years suggest that the IT giant is indeed walking the solutions walk. HP has developed and sold enterprise IT solutions for years but a renewed push in 2009 led to a much sharper focus on 10 critical areas of business customer need, such as enterprise security, converged IT infrastructure, and application transformation.

As Magdy Assem, Senior Director of Enterprise Solutions Marketing, explained:

"Not everything is a solution. You have to look outside-in to really understand the key areas to highlight. HP and other big tech companies all have tens of thousands of products and even so-called solutions. But you need to know what matters to clients. What keeps them up at night? Then you can focus new resources on these areas, not on everything, and create integrated offerings to address those needs at a higher level rather than just selling a bunch of products."

Customer focus and integrated offerings are critical steps for solutions but perhaps even more impressive are the organizational changes that HP has made to invest in success. "This is a key point for solutions," according to Assem:

"We've been working on solutions for years but you need to go beyond just aligning the organization and actually put a structure in place and hold it accountable. We've done this in sales, in field marketing, and in solutions planning and marketing. These are stand-alone teams that are not part of any product team. This was a big 'aha' for us."

New Organizational Investments

On the sales side, HP has added a new layer of Account General Managers for its top global accounts to serve as leaders in positioning and selling integrated solutions. Instead of just adding incentives for existing teams to sell higher value solutions, the new structure reflects an understanding that companies like HP need senior level sellers to be solely focused on meeting customers' most important business needs.

"To drive growth, we need to sell HP, not just one or two products," says Assem. "This means we have to elevate the discussion and have a business dialogue. You want the top people from the sales organization focusing on the highest value solutions. They can then bring in all the product specialists when they need them."

Along with the new global account leaders in sales, HP has also invested in a substantial sales education and training effort to strengthen the bias toward solutions. This has included the creation of HP Sales University, reorganizing the annual sales kickoff, rethinking training programs, and refreshing sales education curricula to include monthly activities focused on solutions.

Beyond sales, HP has also added new solutions marketing groups in the field to support the new push in the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. "You can't just align the product groups around solutions," according to Assem. "It won't work. You need dedicated people on the larger solution issues so we've added new teams headed by a VP for solutions marketing in each region."

Finally, at the corporate level, HP has added a new team for solutions marketing which Assem himself leads. The team's mandate is to define the key areas of solutions focus, develop and support key offerings, and work with marketing and sales teams across HP's business units and regions to bring solutions to market. The team includes dedicated specialists for each of the 10 major solution areas.

Overall, "this has been a huge investment to address customer needs and drive growth," says Assem. "We needed new skill sets to complement existing skills so we've done a lot of hiring and a lot of shifting within marketing and sales. Ultimately, finding people with business skills and teaching them the technology is a better route to solutions leadership than the other way around."

Return on Investment

Assem is quick to suggest that HP still has a way to go with enterprise solutions, and that the journey thus far has not been painless. "Building bridges and alignment across the organization is always a challenge," he notes. "You can't just add separate new groups or you'll risk duplicating efforts and losing support. And you really have to earn respect. It's never easy telling people a new way when they have been doing this for a living for many years."

Less than two years into the new push, however, Assem can see substantial ROI in three major areas: Average deal size has increased significantly with our global accounts and that's a key metric. We've also seen revenue growth in general with these accounts. Third, we have seen real growth in the solutions portion of the pipeline, which is another key metric for us."

Clearly not every company has HP's deep pockets. But the larger point holds for any organization looking to sell complex, high value solutions: If you really want to talk the walk, you're likely going to have to invest in new people, skills, and teams to move from rhetoric to reality. HP's investments in new groups within corporate and field marketing as well as sales help point the way forward.

What about you? How are you investing in people and organization to grow your solutions business. Please let me know in the comments.

 

Customer references and solutions marketing: Building blocks for business impact

B2B marketers focused on high value solutions know that customer evidence is like gold. Great products may sell themselves based on features or price. But when you're asking business buyers to invest serious money in a complex solution, typically involving a customized mix of products and services, they need to know you've done it before and that other customers have derived real business benefits.

Not surprisingly, sales people selling solutions say that customer references are their most valuable tool. ITSMA has found this repeatedly in sales studies. Similarly, a recent internal study by a very large technology solutions provider found that their sales people said customer references were absolutely essential for selling new strategic solutions.

The growth of formalized reference programs in recent years reflects a growing understanding that documenting and promoting customer evidence is too important to leave to ad hoc initiatives in PR or sales. The success of the Customer Reference Forum in building a broad-based community of reference managers is another sign of a maturing discipline. 

Too often, though, reference programs remain short-staffed, disconnected from other key marketing programs, and overly reliant on the kindness of individual sales people to provide access to satisfied customers. Indeed, many formal reference programs continue to vie for marketing and sales attention with the parallel existence of informal, fragmented reference initiatives across the organization.

As a result, many reference programs remain stuck in tactical, reactive mode. They crank out case studies and testimonials to support marketing launches and events but have relatively little impact in accelerating strategic sales or deepening loyalty with the most important customers.

Benchmarking the Best

Over the past six months I've had the opportunity to work with several large B2B firms to improve their customer reference programs. Along the way, I've been able to review a number other programs with companies widely acknowledged as reference management leaders while also review industry data and talking with a batch of vendors, consultants, and program managers.

Comparing the best with the rest, six programmatic building blocks are particularly important for programs that provide substantial business impact.

• Strategic Alignment: The best programs are tightly wired into the company's growth strategy and priorities to make sure they focus on developing the references and success story content that matter most to the rest of marketing and sales. Often this means having a broad-based leadership board or council to help set program direction and to make sure that the rest of marketing and sales understand the strategic value of the program. It also means having a senior-enough program director with the experience and clout to work on an equal footing with the heads of other key groups.
• Team Integration: Reference programs rely heavily on support from other groups to identify the right customers, document the right information, and make the best use of the resulting references and content. The best programs have formalized team integration with a three-tiered approach to staffing and support:
  • A central team, typically within corporate marketing, responsible for program leadership, cross-organizational collaboration, and global systems, processes, tools, and metrics
  • Field-based staff, reporting to the central team but working on a daily basis with field marketing and sales on customer reference acquisition, activities, and relationships
  • An "extended team" of designated representatives from other marketing and sales teams, not reporting to the central team but with defined responsibilities for helping coordinate reference needs and activities, reaching out to customers, documenting success information, and championing program resources and guidelines
• Comprehensive Approach: Many reference programs focus on producing a few types of success story content, such as case studies, testimonial videos, and profile slides. These certainly can be useful but they represent only a fraction of the ways that customer evidence can support solutions marketing and sales throughout the customer lifecycle. The best programs take a comprehensive approach with strong emphasis on three types of program activities:
  • Live references, including customer-to-customer discussions, event presentations, media interviews, analyst briefings, and advisory group meetings
  • Success story content, including not only case studies, videos, and profiles but, increasingly, social media content, in-depth ROI presentations, internal "how we got the win" selling stories, and integration into thought leadership publications
  • Relationship development, including focused efforts to support and provide real value to customer advocates through market visibility, executive access, peer networking, customer community, and other special programs (this is where tight integration with sales and other customer relationship programs is especially important)
• Information Management: Improving information systems is a priority for many programs and the best programs take a broad view of effective information management. Whether they build their own system or contract with an outside vendor the best programs emphasize:
  • Maintenance of an authoritative, comprehensive and regularly updated repository of reference data, content, and activity
  • Easy, self-service access and usability for other parts of marketing and sales
  • Tracking and reporting on reference activity and content usage
  • Integration with other essential marketing and sales systems, such as CRM and web content management
• Program Communication and Education: Many program teams are stretched so thin that simply keeping up with basic production leaves little or no time to help make sure the customer spokespeople or content are actually used. The best programs invest substantial time and energy communicating the value and the assets of the program as well as training other teams on how to support the program and use the system and tools. Having an extended team in place, as noted above, provides an especially helpful group for developing and implementing the necessary communication and education.
• Business Accountability: As with many marketing programs, measuring the actual business value delivered by reference programs is not easy. Indeed, many programs struggle even to measure usage of their assets, relying instead on the most basic measures of output, such as how many case studies and testimonials they have produced each year. The best programs zero in on business impact around marketing and sales priorities. Specific measure typically involve around revenue contribution in strategic growth areas, sales pipeline acceleration, and satisfaction and loyalty of participating customers.

Constructing the six building blocks is no simple matter. Talk to the heads of the best programs and you'll hear about years of work, substantial investment, and constant attention to internal as well as customer relationships. But you'll also hear about serious business benefits like direct contribution to $ millions (or hundreds of $ millions) in revenue, critical support for new solution offerings, and measurable improvements in key customer relationships. The investments, in short, are well worth it.

Active use of compelling customer evidence is far from the only determinant of solutions marketing success. But having a well developed program that provides a steady stream of customer advocates and credible content certainly makes it easier. If you're looking for ways to create a stronger foundation for customer evidence-based marketing and a more effective reference program, the six building blocks are a great place to start.

Do you agree with the list? What's working and what's most challenging for your program?

Is sales enablement dead?

Sales Enablement is a huge topic in B2B these days. You can spend all day every day and still barely scratch the surface of all the dialogue, debate, and events exploring the "real" meaning of sales enablement, who is doing it well, what tools are most useful, and how social media will revolutionize the whole process. (Forrester's upcoming forum is a great example.)

The activity makes sense. We all know the B2B sales cycle keeps getting longer, more and more people are involved in big purchase decisions, and lead nurturing is incredibly important. We know that crafting custom solutions is essential if we're going to avoid fighting over discounts with procurement folks on the other side of the table. Our sales teams need to know more, do more, and be ever more capable of having the right conversations with the right buyers and influencers at the right time.

And this isn't just talk. Sales enablement is a big area for investment. According to IDC, ITSMA, and other analysts, sales enablement is a top priority for many marketing leaders. It's one of the few areas of increased spending (along with digital marketing, of course) amid relatively flat marketing budgets. Sales enablement companies like SAVO are growing like gangbusters.

So, this is great news for marketers, right? We're drilling into what sales really needs and making a difference.

Well, I wonder. In today's world of B2B solutions, is sales enablement even possible?

The practical reality for many B2B organizations is that sellers don't really sell anymore. What they do is help people buy once those buyers have made up their minds it's time for a purchase. 

Buyers today have all the information. They have extremely smart and sophisticated teams that know far more about what they need than any sales person. They talk to peers across their industries to learn more about what's working and what's not -- and which vendors are worth considering and which are not. Along the way, in fits and starts, they decide it's time to invest in a new solution. Then, and only then, they start to talk with vendors and potential partners to see if you can deliver what they need.

OK, you know this, too. It's not news to say that buyers are in control and that they set the pace. So is it just semantics when I suggest that sales enablement is dead and the real issue is buyer enablement?

Surely we cannot just get rid of our sales forces, spread the good word about our solutions, and wait for buyers to show up. Indeed not. Especially in the world of high-end solutions, sales teams are more important then ever to helping buyers move from defined need and interest to crafting specific solutions that deliver clear value, and then closing the deal. 

As sales guru Neil Rackham noted recently at ISBM's conference on marketing and sales alignment, sales people increasingly need to move from value communication to value creation. They can't just talk about the value of your offerings, they have to work with customers to help create the solutions. 

To help this process along, sales people need a huge amount of help, i.e., enablement! As the analysts keep pointing out, too few sales people are well equipped for these kinds of consultative conversations and too few buyer executives find any value at all from our sales people. 

But language matters. It reflects our mindset. And our mindset needs to change. 

Buyers are in control; that's not going to change. Traditional selling is less and less effective, and often even counterproductive. Helping buyers craft solutions and invest in real value for their business is the way we should be thinking about our work.

For marketers, then, it's not so much about enabling sales, it's really about collaborating with sales to enable the buyers. More investment can help, and new tools can be useful, but I think the starting point is clarifying exactly what it is we're trying to do.

Do you agree? Is this a meaningful distinction or just a pointless word game? I'd love to hear how you're approaching the issue.

Photo credit: Dan Perry

Marketing to key accounts: It's all about the relationships

I was interviewing a Key Account Manager for a large tech firm the other day, and was struck by her comment that she wanted the firm's marketing people to be much closer to her customer.

This is a large global account we're talking about, with a big account team and numerous multi-million dollar deals worldwide.

Sales people tend to be extremely protective of their accounts. They "own" the relationships; the stakes are huge, and they rarely want anyone else in the neighborhood (except when it comes to delivery, of course).

But here's the thing: This key account manager understood that marketing could potentially play a huge role in sustaining and strengthening the business with her account -- and she was frustrated that it wasn't happening. 

Most important, the content and events that she saw from marketing were simply too generic. She still used some of it, but mostly she had to rely on her own team's efforts or colleagues managing other big accounts to get the specific information, contacts, and ideas that were most valuable to her account.

On the marketing side, meanwhile, I know that supporting the key account teams is at least rhetorically a priority.

As with many B2B firms, a relatively small number of key accounts generate a big percentage of revenue for this company, not to mention critical market insight, references, and the impetus for product and solution innovation. The marketing folks certainly understand this. Nevertheless, they are not able to provide the kind of focused support that that the account teams need. 

I wrote recently about four keys to success with account-based marketing. Looking back at that post, however, I realize I neglected an even more basic point: Marketing people need direct relationships with the key accounts. 

Only by having direct relationships can you get a real feel for the client's business environment, operations, needs, wants, language, and so on. It's an obvious point, but how often do we produce marketing content, organize events, and build sales tools without being grounded in those direct relationships? It's no wonder sales people ignore so much of our carefully crafted work.

So, what do we do about it?

The simple answer is go out and build those relationships.

OK, sure, but how do we do that?

Certainly you can't go around the account manager. That's a no-no. But you can put in the time with the account manager to work out a relationship-building program.

Sitting in on client review sessions is one easy step; working with the account teams to organize executive briefings is another (if your executives aren't willing to do these briefings for your most important accounts, you've got larger problems to worry about!). And, of course, organizing more substantial account-based marketing programs is an even better way to go.

It all takes time, and it all takes some serious relationship building with the account manager and team, too.

But the benefits can be enormous: Deeper insight into what your key accounts need, clearer direction for marketing programs and sales support, and tighter alignment with key account teams that are driving a great deal of the company's success.

How close is your marketing team to your key accounts? What's working in your relationships with key account managers? I'd love to hear in the comments. 

Note: Originally posted on the Solutions Insights blog.

Photo credit: Rob Young

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo credit: hapticflapjack

The four engines of B2B marketing success

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

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

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

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

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

Four Engines for B2B Marketing Success 

Content Engine:

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

Relationship Engine:

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

Lead Development Engine:

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

Solutions Development Engine:

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

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

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

Photo credit: Imnop88a

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?

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

Six steps to differentiating your solutions

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

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

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

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

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

Six Steps to Differentiating Your Solutions Offerings

We'd love to know what works for you!

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?