We’ve been reviewing recently our most successful lead management and lead nurturing programmes, looking at what it took to make them successful and the key steps in setting them up. (For a view on the benefits these programmes have to offer, see this previous post on lead nurturing strategies/target benefits.)

Alongside a more detailed set of critical success factors, our review suggested 4 key attributes essential for creating lead management programmes (each then breaks down into several competence questions in a kick-off process):

1. Detailed knowledge of the business objectives and capabilities/needs of different teams in the business/external partners
2. Insight into target individuals, their typical needs and decision/purchase journeys
3. Expertise in the strategies, content, and hooks that drive forward the audience journeys
4. Working understanding of the technologies of lead management, nurturing and CRM (technology must not come first, but understanding the different capabilities of Eloqua vs Silverpop vs Oracle vs Marketo vs Aprimo vs Neolane vs Microsoft Dynamics vs Salesforce etc etc will ensure rapid time to value)

Only by balancing these 4 factors is it possible to take the 4 actions necessary to build the best performing programme (while these 4 are distinct and each have several sub-actions, they can’t be treated in isolation as each has an impact on the other):

1. Identify areas of potential for greatest business impact from lead management (and set the right targets/measures)
2. Correctly set the process and scoring for management/handover of different levels of opportunities and for management/improvement of ‘marketing’ data in the nurturing process
3. Design the right journeys, create enticing content (or ‘wrap’ existing content), identify appropriate triggers/personalisation opportunities
4. Select the best areas to launch the programme, implement rapidly and scale up appropriately

It would be interesting to hear if anyone has spotted any other headline factors responsible for lead management success…

Forrester’s B2B profile tool gives an interesting perspective on how different categories of buyer currently use social media (based on over 1,200 business technology decision-makers in the US and Europe; filter by organisation size or type of purchase to see how behaviour varies).

There may not be any particularly pronounced differences across categories – but the overall numbers show yet again how clearly the case for leveraging social media is growing. Consider that less than a quarter are completely inactive (i.e. not making any use of social media), and sizeable proportions are active in the various different categories (anything from just having a profile on LinkedIn or reading information on a blog through to creating their own content).

Having acknowledged that the buyers are out there, the question becomes how to engage and then nurture their interest in the way most likely to achieve your business objectives (for a starting point, see our B2B web 2.0 marketing campaign planner).

Admittedly, the last few days may well have been a bit out of the norm at the BBC, but CIO UK has a couple of interesting articles about the priorities of Tiffany Hall, BBC CIO.

The first article is a brief ‘day in the life‘ – the kind of piece that’s always worth bearing in mind in planning techniques that could realistically fit within a decision-maker’s daily routine. It’s interesting to see further proof of our own research into the challenges of persuading senior contacts to attend events. We found that senior decision-makers receive an average of one invite every day but only attend 5 in a whole year – meaning that the content, topic and invitation process has to be spot-on. Tiffany seems to be at around the average for invitations but above average for attendance!

“Evening I have been invited to more work dinners since I started this job than the entire rest of my career. I could be dining out every night of the week.”

The second, longer, article goes into more details around current BBC IT challenges and priorities. It discusses some of 2010’s headline issues of information management, standardisation and consumerisation of IT, and also references some of the ‘day to day’ projects that seem to be rising up CIO agendas this year:

“We have reached the stage in the lifecycle of our legacy business systems when we are having a good, long, hard look at that and seeing whether now is the time to divert some of our priorities back into the business systems infrastructure…This hasn’t been a great focus for my predecessors over the last few years, simply because of where the BBC’s priorities were. I am getting a very clear steer from my stakeholders out there in the BBC business that, much as they want to put the money into costume dramas and all the rest of it, we do need some better back-office functions. Traditional back-office stuff around Outlook, when are we going to Windows 7… all of that stuff is very much on the radar.”

We’re just finalising the details for the next Sales & Marketing Forum (pencil 11 May into your diaries, and see details here of the previous session), focusing on what it will take to be a successful supplier to the public sector over the next few years.

So it was interesting to hear ‘File on 4′ this evening on Radio 4 – a neat example of how political necessity may affect IT suppliers to the public sector. Listen again to the programme here – http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00r0vxg – it covers high profile issues with projects in the Rural Payments Agency, Fire Brigade and (of course) the NHS, asking whether a new government should scrap these projects and define new ones in a very different way. Whether or not all the claims are justified, it certainly highlights a feeling that exists in political debates and general public opinion.

Suppliers are up against some strong external prejudices and preconceptions (based on headlines like the average cost per year of 100 Accenture employees on one project being £200,000 each) – as well as the likelihood of new buyer priorities and strategies after May. It’s going to be very interesting to hear expert views on what this means for supplier sales & marketing strategies. I’ll update more on the Forum as soon as we have the details.

CIO UK has released an updated list of the 100 top spenders on IT in the UK – available here. The DWP, MOD, Shell, Tesco and the Department of Health top the list, while RBS has slipped out of the top 5 and Lloyds out of the top 10.

It’s hard to draw significant suprising trends from the list – public sector largely moving up the list, banks still near the top but slightly down, sectors like construction and retail taking a hit…

Where the list is particularly interesting is in the detailed profiles of each organisation’s IT strategy/performance/existing infrastructure. There are also some specific examples of popular projects for the year:

“Many were considering overhauling their communications networks to support either voice over IP or unified communications. Upgrading Microsoft Office and operating systems was also high on the list of tasks, as were improvements to e-commerce and customer management systems.”

It’s valuable information; now the question becomes how you best use this insight to support decisions/activities focused on these organisations. (You might also ask, assuming all the compeition will be targeting the top 100, how you get hold of the names of the organisations that came 100-150 on the table…)

So having made the case in the previous post for clarity in content and simplicity in presentation, it’s time to show that complex means of presentation can also be impactful and – yes – even fun…

Augmented reality (AR) is probably as complex as presentation can get – in case you haven’t come across it, AR involves laying ‘artificial’ information/graphics over images of the ‘real’ world. The first businesses using this technology to communicate a proposition are benefiting from buzz and excitement – and are finding some interesting ways to apply it.

Take GE, who are using AR to raise awareness of their Smart Grid proposition. They’ve created an application that builds a smart grid in your hands when you hold a printed symbol up to a webcam. There’s a video of someone playing with GE’s smart grid below, but their site gives the best illustration: http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/augmented_reality.

Right now, there are more examples of AR in B2C marketing – like BMW’s site for the Z4, which tied in to a recent series of TV ads and lets you drive a Z4 around your desk. But people are steadily finding business applications for the technology, as well as ways of making it work in the real world (as with the iPhone app below).

There’s nothing like keeping it simple when it comes to raising awareness at the early stages of the sales cycle. Every time we talk to buyers, we hear their need for the information that will clarify a proposition’s relevance to them (they have personal positions as experts to defend in their organisations, after all).

So there’s a real opportunity to be the supplier who clarifies things for a market and stakes a claim to be first port of call in any potential deal.

I’ve picked out a couple examples of extreme clarity to illustrate how even complex propositions can be made simple. Both examples make a virtue of simplicity – emphasising it not just in the content, but also in the presentation.

First, we have an explanation of cloud computing – a ‘hand-made’ presentation that belies the painstaking planning that must have gone into its creation:

And second, an overview of on-demand CRM – there’s something I find very compelling in this ‘no-gimmicks’ style of delivery:

Of course there’s a time and a place for complexity – talking to a well-educated buyer in the later stages of a bid, for example. But even this example isn’t black and white (the immediate audience for your proposal may be well educated, but what about the other influencers in the deal?).

Perhaps this is just making simplicity too complicated – there’s a quote from Jason Fried that our creative director is very fond of and which could probably stand instead of all the above:

“You don’t need to outdo the competition. It’s expensive and defensive. Underdo your competition. We need more simplicity and clarity.”

Forrester’s recent research (’How Managing Leads Pays Off In A Stronger, More Qualified Pipeline‘ – registration required) makes for interesting reading. Sponsored by marketing technology vendor Silverpop, the research is based on interviews with 15 senior B2B marketers in the US.

The interviewees paint a consistent and compelling picture of what lead management can deliver:

• Healthier pipelines (both better qualified and higher in volume as more leads are nurtured through to opportunities)
• More accountable marketing (consistently planned, measuring the right things and drawing out valuable intelligence)
• Greater efficiencies (more re-use of content, smarter contact strategies, less blanket comms)
• More appropriate communications (a better experience for customers and prospects)

What’s particularly refreshing (for a paper sponsored by a technology provider) is how much emphasis is given to getting the lead management and content creation process right before selecting the technology platform to use.

It’s exactly as we’ve seen across long term lead nurturing and relationship programmes – the technology is essential (whether that’s Salesforce or Siebel, Eloqua or Silverpop or even just Excel) but there are so many other factors that need to be considered first:

• Building the necessary alignment with sales
• Setting valid goals and designing the overall process
• Understanding the audience (to reach them, meet their needs, and score them)
• Creating the content that will make a difference to the audience
• Designing the campaign components to distribute the content (and mapping these into communication flows that take contacts on the right journey)
• Defining how issues like data quality and sales handover (in both directions) will be managed in the ongoing programme

After all of these (and there are several useful models to consider in the report), comes the right technology solution. There’s rarely just a single answer – far more often it comes down to the ability to integrate different platforms to make the desired process possible.

One major element that the report begins to highlight is the importance of the human factor. In our experience, there are very few processes that can be fully automated – this is where the ideal lead management process needs to account for things like efficiently handling inbound responses and making the most of opportunities for personal interaction like initial sales workshops. Above all,  it demands a new skill-set from B2B marketers to conceive, deliver and operate a lead management process.

A January article in McKinsey Quarterly raised the old question of how much emotion really comes into major purchase decisions – particularly after hearing recently from one decision-maker who said that the first projects to get budget approval are when the mandate comes straight from the Board for an urgent action or to get something new in place (JFDI was the acronym he used).

McKinsey’s article (Data to dollars: Supporting top management with next-generation executive information systems – free registration required) highlights an opportunity for CIOs to ‘make their roles more critical than ever’ by making the benefits of Business Intelligence directly visible to the Board. [Off the topic of this post, the article contains some great examples of models to visualise complex BI in action]

The article uses an example to show precisely how poor information can become a personal and emotional issue for the CIO:

“Executives intent on reviewing key performance indicators (KPIs) had to sort through a jumble of onscreen data, so the CIO needed to take several IT analysts offline every month to comb through the figures and create the desired analyses. Frustrated, the company’s board pressed the CIO to explain why group reporting costs were climbing upward and so much IT support was necessary. As the chief information officer, the CIO should play a more central role in designing next-generation executive information systems that can help a company’s top managers extract value from the data that surrounds them.”

Considering this kind of personal argument can often lead to the best response when we’re taking a proposition to senior buyers. It’s where the heart (in this example, ‘I need to be seen to do something’) can multiply the effect of the head (’there’s a better way for us to work as a company’).

Other more ‘emotional’ sales angles could include  playing on how you can make their department into a hero, or help it to prove its worth. Staying with the example of Business Intelligence, it struck me at our recent S&M Forum that the Finance decision-makers would be keen to invest in BI simply around the promise that it could help them track the performance of all the other investments they are making (ability to measure results being one of the main things they are looking to improve). This kind of thinking doesn’t normally come into a BI proposition, but it may be closest to the buyer’s heart.

This more ‘emotional’ angle  to selling can be matched by a more ‘psychological’ approach to marketing. When we look at the programmes that are delivering the best results, we can see that they are tied to some level of psychological or behavioural insight.

For example, people are more likely to respond to a lead generation activity if you make the next step ‘visible’ (giving a phone number to call if people want more information is one thing – but explaining the first stages of your sales process could actually be more powerful in helping them to see how they can take their interest forward). We also know that response or interaction can be prompted by factors like a fear of falling behind (ultimately tied to job security), a desire to be seen as posessing (and sharing) greater knowledge than peers, feeling indebted for a valuable experience…

It’s certainly too simplistic to apply B2C models of emotional buying behaviour to B2B purchases, but we do need to remember that decision-makers aren’t simply automated decision-taking machines. Our work will always be more powerful if we consider the people as well as the business that we’re marketing to.

Few people would argue about the power of ‘content marketing’ (or whatever you choose to call it): the importance of sharing the right insight, with the right people, in the right way, at the right time, for the right purpose.

A couple of recent blog posts shed some interesting light on why content marketing can be such a challenge – and, living up to the theory behind the approach, some of the conversations going on in blog comments are as interesting as the posts themselves.

Chris Koch has a great call to arms around the need for a marketing transformation – part of which is about building the ability to plan, create, disseminate and leverage truly insightful content.

Chris believes that there’s an element of fear that is preventing marketers from putting all their energy into making this the success it should be: “I think it’s fear that the hardest aspect of marketing, content development, is ascending to become marketing’s most important role, as advertising, traditional PR, and events shrink and fall away.”

I think there’s an argument that actually all successful marketing should now be thought of as ‘content marketing’. Yes, content can be some great research, or a video, or a podcast, or an interview with a customer, or a new model for understanding a complex problem… But I believe that exactly the same thinking is also at the heart of great events, for example. Like any other content, they need a story, detailed thought on what value they add to which audience, and how that audience best wants to receive that value.

When I made this point in a comment to Chris, he came back with the view that “Buyers aren’t interested in information anymore–they can get that anywhere. They are interested in insights.” I think this is the test we should be applying to all marketing activity – and whether we offer this insight at a face to face event, or online via twitter, it can all be part of a valid plan – but the core challenge of creating great content is still there. As Chris puts it, “Marketing departments are going to have to transform themselves into content development engines.”

So how do you go about building a content engine?

That’s one of the questions we wanted to answer (for the digital world, anyway) in our overview for planning great online content programmes. Paul Dunay also had some strong advice in a post I came across recently. Paul was talking about how important sharing great content is to building brands and relationships – and he raised the point that it’s essential to keep up the momentum once you start. In response to a comment asking how to create a plan for sustained content creation around a blog, he had 6 specific steps to offer:

“1) you need to start thinking like a publisher – what are you going to produce each month
2) once you have that in your mind – now make a publishing calendar out of it – so you have a plan
3) stop asking thought leaders to write stuff for you – get a writer and have the writer interview them and “suck it out of their head”
4) then send them the resulting paper for comments and approval
5) you write up the blog post and get the web page done
6) then launch blog post and send out the email to a data dip of those that have downloaded similar types of content

and bingo you have the makings of a content factory”

The point is that having big content ideas is all well and good – but these need to be supported by doing the basics well. We’ll have more on the different elements you can build into a ‘content factory’ – and how to sustain insightful conversations with customers – in some upcoming posts in the Marketing after the Watershed series…