When we talk about objectives for marketing, it’s easy to overlook ’speed to market’. But a few times in the last couple of weeks it’s come up as a big opportunity – something that is relatively easy to improve and which can have a fundamental affect on business results. Three ways it can help you:

1. Being the first to talk to customers and prospects about a new proposition (topics like consumerisation or the cloud lose their shine slightly by the 5th time you hear about them!).
2. Generating early interest so that you have some opportunities ready and waiting when sales need them (rather than waiting for sales to ask and then having a further wait of weeks/months before a campaign delivers results).
3. Responding to something in the news or something that’s happened to a prospect within a timeframe that’s still relevant. PR is very good at this of course – but marketing often struggles. Some of our most successful campaigns have happened when we’ve got it right and responded to news or an announcement in ‘near-real-time’.

I remember a few years ago when an RBS manager defrauded the bank of £21m (it’s an interesting story – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-389418/The-bank-boss-21m-fraud.html – including the irony that he was named business manager of the year 3 times). One day after the news broke, we contacted risk/anti-fraud/anti-money laundering contacts in financial services to explain how a client’s software could have detected and prevented the fraud. One of the most successful campaigns we’ve ever run.

So if we bear these advantages in mind (more relevant to the audience, ahead of sales demand, ahead of the competition), maybe we can make a stronger case for streamlining the process when it really counts.

On the other hand, it did take me a week from having a conversation about this to writing a post on it, so maybe we’re doomed to remain behind the times…

At a strategic level, aligning sales and marketing can mean embarking on a major organisational change programme. Sometimes it only happens when there’s a change in personnel at the top. Waiting and hoping for that to happen can be very frustrating for professional marketers ‘stuck’ in a company that doesn’t give them scope to make a difference to business results.

But I think there’s a ‘ground-up’ approach that can be more effective, simpler – and certainly more fulfilling – than waiting for some seismic organisational change to happen.

Every campaign can be aligned with sales at a more practical level to create the kind of programme we can all be proud of.

You often hear marketers complaining that ‘we hand leads over to sales and nothing happens with them’. Assuming that these are good opportunities in the right organisations, the difference can come down to how well engaged sales were with the campaign. Does the number/quality of leads match up to what sales need to hit their targets? Do they know how the leads were generated and qualified? Do they know what content converted these leads? Do they have the relevant materials to help them run meetings or follow up with the leads?

It’s also important from the perspective of your prospects. Does the handover to your sales team feel like a natural continuation of the journey that your marketing campaign took them on? Does the sales meeting or call live up to the promises that your marketing made in terms of the value they would get from taking this next step?

The six steps to getting your sales team fully on board

1.     Make sure that marketing is pitching what sales are selling – and vice versa

There’s often tension between marketing’s desire to campaign around strategic business issues and big ‘solutions’ that shift the audience’s perception of a company’s offerings, and sales’ need to be out pitching things that they know people can buy, the company can deliver and they are comfortable selling. In reality, both sides can learn from each other and there is usually a happy medium where elements of the campaign can be pitching the big vision and providing sales with materials to be more comfortable in strategic conversations, while also creating ‘point’ sales opportunities around specific products/solutions. But unless you work with sales upfront to agree this ‘happy medium’, don’t expect sales to be effortlessly engaged by the ‘opportunities’ that your campaigns deliver.

It’s about mixing an ‘outside-in’ approach (aligning campaigns to audience needs) with the best elements of the traditional ‘inside-out’ approach (running campaigns around what your business is best at and where you have a track record).

2.     Use the sales team as a source of messaging and content

Marketing often turns to product teams, customers or even external analysts for input when creating content and messaging plans. But running sessions with sales can also be highly productive – both in terms of ideas for content and messages, and also in ensuring that sales feel part of the campaign from the start. Here are some good questions to ask your salespeople:

• Who is your best customer? What makes them unique?
• Can you talk through some recent deals that you’ve won? How did they come in as a prospect? Why did we win?
• And some deals that you’ve lost – why did we lose? Who/what did they go with instead?
• What alternatives do prospects have? What solutions do they typically have in place, what are the consequences of doing nothing, what’s the competitive landscape?
• Are there any specific elements of the overall solution that you use as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to open up wider deals?
• What kind of questions/issues are buyers typically struggling with in the first sales meetings?
• What do you typically talk through in your first sales meetings?
• If you were approaching someone ‘cold’ and making the case about why they should meet you, what would you say?
• Are there any resources/presentations that you think work best as leave-behinds/prompts that move people along the sales process?

3.     Properly define what makes a ‘lead’ relevant to sales and how many they need

It’s not just about handing over BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timescale) qualified leads to sales. Sales may actually want something completely different – a smaller number of earlier stage opportunities with named accounts, coupled with better market intelligence and relationships for the future.

Try to:

• Uncover potential opportunities within named accounts that sales weren’t actively working;
• Build intelligence across all named accounts and strengthen relationships with decision-makers;
• Nurture the wider addressable market with the goals of building a long-term reputation and mapping the potential for future years to support a re-alignment of the sales team.

Marketers also need to be confident setting the right targets, which involves asking some tough questions (it’s surprising how many sales teams may not readily know the answers!). What’s the business target? How many deals are needed? What’s the typical conversion rate (and what will the conversion rate be for the type of lead defined above)?

4.     Understand what resources sales are really using

We need to understand what assets and resources sales will find most useful both to generate their own meetings and use during/after the meetings that are booked.

We researched ten salespeople from one of our clients and these waere their top four requests:

• More proactive content about where the company is going in the future – a video or one sheet summary;
• Fewer, more targeted presentations with standard templates;
• Information on competitors and how they are better (supported with examples);
• More case studies and creative examples.

5.     Brief sales on the campaign plan, calls to action and content.

And keep briefing them as the rollout happens. Include links to relevant campaigns/content with leads that are handed over so they can see the materials that prospects have already received. Also, supply ideas of presentations they can use for their next steps.

On a recent European campaign we even included a tool that helped Sales search for relevant content or tools according to the kind of meeting they were going to.

6.     And, of course, your sales and account teams are also a channel to market

Leverage the social media profile of the sales team; they can pull through blogs and SlideShare presentations to their LinkedIn profiles, and you can prompt them with ideas of content/views to share on twitter or in LinkedIn groups. If sales are fully engaged with a campaign, they’ll also be taking the proposition direct to their best prospects. One of the big wins of your campaign could be how well educated sales are on the proposition and audience issues it solves.

In summary, for every external campaign there’s an equivalent internal programme to engage sales that is just as important. You can generate all the leads in the world, but if sales aren’t engaged or equipped to follow them up then it can easily come to nothing.

Plenty of suppliers are focusing on ‘consumerisation’ as a topic of major interest to their customers and prospects. (’Consumerisation’ is all about what it means to a business when employees would rather use their own personal devices for work, would rather select their own apps, and want to interact with each other in ways that have more in common with Facebook than traditional ‘big’ corporate IT.) As a major change facing businesses, it’s creating threats and opportunities for IT, comms, services and other suppliers.

It’d be an easy prediction to say that suppliers will spend more time in 2012 to get their consumerisation stories straight – although it’s certainly not simple to stand out in an increasingly crowded market.

But the thing with consumerisation is that it’s not just another trend that marketers can use to resonate with the key decision-makers that they’re targeting. For many suppliers, it’s going to fundamentally change who these decision-makers are.

It won’t happen instantly, but over time some suppliers are going to see their heartlands (e.g. doing a single major deal with procurement) replaced with the new reality that thousands of individual employees (or at the very least hundreds of department heads) are free to make their own choices. Of course, some suppliers with security/consulting/hosting propositions may see little change (or even potential growth) while others (’consumer’ brands like Google and Apple) will find new opportunities to break into corporate markets that were previously sewn up (by major procurement relationships or ‘gatekeeper’ system integrators). But between these two extremes, there’s a mass of suppliers who face some tough choices in the mid-long term.

Assuming that they have (or can find) a business model that sustains a much larger volume of smaller (or even individual) deals, these suppliers will also need new marketing approaches to influence all of the people who could be buying, trialling, evaluating or recommending their services. You might describe it as a shift from B2B to B2C2B (I’d love to lay claim to that one but Google tells me it’s been used 25,000 times before…). As I say, none of this will happen overnight – but we can expect to see more and more examples of organisations reaching out beyond traditional decision-making units, and an increasing interest from others to see how they get on.

It’ll affect the buying journey, the sales process (e.g. more trials, less face-to-face), the approach to promotion and incentives, the real potential direct ROI from social media, the challenges of data (if you struggled managing 20,000 contacts, try coping with 20,000,000!) and the need for new types of content/user interactions. But it’s also an exciting time to stake a claim in a new area (where it feels like the Salesforce.com model has only scratched the surface and Apple is seeing success mainly by default).

“Content is King” – but maybe it’s time to consider regicide?

Wading through the morass of predictions for B2B marketing in 2012 (#irony), you can’t move for hearing that “content is King”. But I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that there’s already a near-overwhelming weight of content out there competing for my attention. At some stage you have to switch off and trust a few sources and people in your network to bring you the best of the content – or that you’ll stumble across what you need while searching on a topic.

I certainly don’t disagree with the objectives behind content marketing – it’s just that I think it’s becoming too easy and too mechanical (heard a good comment recently about the limitations of a ‘white paper factory’ approach).

So we need to be looking for what’s next – finding another dimension to add to our content marketing that will keep it ahead of the pack.

I think there’s an answer that’s about creating ‘experiences’ over and above individual pieces of content. Content can be useful; an experience can be engaging. Experience is more likely to contribute to a lasting reputation for your brand in the mind of the prospect. And at the same time, hopefully an experience is more likely to prompt a prospect to take a next step with you (proposing this next step can even be part of the ‘experience’).

I’m aware that ‘experience’ might sound a bit vague, so here’s an attempt to define what I mean.

At one level, it could be simply about content that invites audience contribution or that they can interact with. Or about having what would pass as a proper ‘journalistic’ story (the opposite of the ‘white paper factory’ approach). Experience is also a useful way of thinking about the journey that prospects (and then customers) take with your business. Differentiating with this journey can be just as important as differentiating your core product or service.

But at a specific campaign level, the most successful programmes that I’ve seen in the last couple of years have been about actually ‘doing’ something rather than just talking about it. There’s a great example in what O2 Enterprise (disclosure: our client) has done to take it’s ‘Joined Up People’ (think ‘flexible working+’) proposition to market. Rather than create lots of theoretical marketing collateral about the proposition, they’re sharing the story of how O2 itself has implemented it and the benefits they’re seeing. This coverage does a great job of summarising how different the approach is.

“It’s rather refreshing to see a big tech company actually do this kind of thing rather than just talk about it. It most certainly makes the conversation with other enterprises highly authentic, given that o2′s done it all itself.”

When we look back at the end of 2012, I’m sure that the content marketing programmes that stand out will be the ones that head in this direction of being ‘experiences’.

If you’re wondering where to look for an idea of an experience to create for your market: it’s where your expertise intersects with the audience’s interest. There’s only limited point in making a noise about something that you can’t sell to – and no point at all making a noise about something the audience isn’t interested in.

For me, the big innovation of 2012 in B2B Marketing isn’t going to be about technology or channels or techniques: it’ll be about revenue.

I’m convinced that 2012 will be the last chance for many B2B marketers in large organisations to take more accountability for revenue (and so break out of being a dispensible ’support function’).

I don’t mean revenue in the sense of ‘we ran a lead gen campaign and it generated 100 qualified leads’ (or even ‘we think the CRM system shows that a couple of the leads converted’). I mean revenue in terms of driving an understanding of the marketplace, planning where opportunities will come from, owning the long-term conversation and conversion of the audience through to sales and proving in detail the outcome – ideally past revenue through to contribution. And, on the customer side, driving the plan of how new/expanded propositions will be taken to the existing customer base.

The economic uncertainty and shake-ups happening in lots of big B2B firms have created this opportunity. If we can avoid being overly distracted by the abundance of new channels and techniques available, there’s a chance that we’ll be able to stake a claim for a place at the top table. When marketers start taking this seriously, the fabled ’sales and marketing alignment’ will just happen.

When the CEO asks ‘what did marketing do for me in 2012?’, the answer could either be ‘we sourced 30% of pipeline and 25% of prospect revenue, grew customer profitabiliy by 15% and established measurable awareness for our top new propositions’ or ‘we implemented marketing automation and social media monitoring, grew our followers by 1000% and delivered 1,500 qualified sales leads (we’re just not sure what sales did with them…)’. I know which answer I’d rather give.

In April, we researched 100 UK decision makers’ social media attitudes and behaviours. The findings have made for interesting reading, confirming some suspicions but surprising us in other areas. Above all, they’re intended as prompts in terms of important considerations when planning social media engagement.

You can read the results as both supporting the importance of social media and illustrating why it can’t succeed on its own:

For: We’ve seen that half of decision makers feel that suppliers should be active within social media, and that a surprising number have met and given business to suppliers following a first interaction via social media.

Against: But the influence of social media dips at some key stages of the buying cycle, and more traditional channels are becoming seen as more valuable than ever before in the face of ‘overwhelming’ digital interactions.

To summarise our conculsions:

Social media has reached a point where it is almost universally used, but is at its most effective alongside other channels – hopefully we have reached the stage where it can be sensibly considered as an element of any wider marketing strategy rather than hyped as a standalone silo…

If you are interested in any further information from the full findings (over 20 different question areas and variations by size of organisation/age/job function), please contact peverett@themarketingpractice.com.

Have you noticed how devalued the word ‘campaign’ has become? When you hear it used in marketing now, it’s typically just another way to describe a single wave of activity. For example, ‘email campaign’ has become synonymous with sending a singe email.

The trouble with this is that it’s a route to running one-off activities that build no momentum around a specific proposition, no lasting reputation with the audience, and ultimately miss out on most of the latent opportunity in a market. The word ‘campaign’ gives too much legitimacy to these one-off actions, so it’s time to reclaim it for serious marketing!

If you look up a dictionary definition of ‘campaign’, you’ll find something like:

1. Military.
a. military operations for a specific objective.
b. Obsolete . the military operations of an army in the field for one season.
2. a systematic course of aggressive activities for some specific purpose: a sales campaign.

Personally, I like the idea of the ‘operations of an army in the field for one season’ (in our world of course this would be a Sales & Marketing ‘army’). But it’s the second definition (’systematic course…aggressive activities…specific purpose‘) that best describes what a marketing campaign should be.

• Systematic course: Do we really know the audience we are talking to? Are there a number of stages of a journey that we will take them on (through to sales handover and beyond)? Do these stages span the different channels by which we can reach the audience? Can we track the journey through the data and respond to their actions?
• Aggressive activities: Do we know what the intended action is for the audience at each stage? Are we selling the value of them taking that action? Have we done enough to merit their attention?
• Specific purpose: Have we defined the objectives of the campaign (in terms of reach, efficiency and pipeline effectiveness)? Is everyone (in both Marketing and Sales) aware of the objectives and ready to play their part?

If we integrate our plans around these real campaigning principles then we can finally eliminate the danger of siloed thinking and one-off activities. It also gives us the opportunity to look at integrating two areas where campaigns need to move with the times (again, rather than tackling these in isolation):

1. Inbound marketing. Rather than simply using outbound channels to shout about the message, campaigns today need to take into account the inbound opportunities provided by social media. But this doesn’t mean they need to be passive and wait for the audience to act first – there’s still a strong case for orchestrating messages across channels, combining outbound and inbound activities, and staging a series of waves of activity.
2. Automation. Campaigns no longer need to be time-bound (or have the specific dates of their execution dictated in advance). With marketing automation tools, you can have various campaigns ready to roll to contacts when the time is right for them (rather than just for you).

So we have three principles to judge the vision of our ‘campaigns’ and two new tools in the kit to add to them. But the battle isn’t over yet, let alone the war…

I’ll start with an example. A couple of years ago, a company approached us with a single, clear requirement – the marketing team wanted 150 BANT qualified leads within 6 months. (BANT is shorthand for a decision-maker who has a defined Budget, the right level of Authority, a clear Need for the solution, and a Timescale for the project.)

This kind of detailed qualification is often important when dealing with ‘commodity’ purchases and is increasingly used when trying to industrialise the handover between Marketing and Sales (often the case with marketing automation systems). But in this example, the BANT qualification was being applied to multi-million pound IT programmes, and it’s a great illustration of the kind of issues facing lead scoring and qualification for complex B2B sales.

Where’s the downside of handing over a lead when it gets to the ‘BANT’ stage?

Well, if you have a high-value proposition – or if you have a commodity proposition but want to shift to a value-sell – then by the time they reach this stage, the prospect will probably already have been working with one of your competitors to define their needs and a potential solution. There’s every chance you’ll be making up the numbers at RFP stage and Sales or Business Development will have an uphill battle to prove your competitive value.

If you really talk to Sales leaders in these businesses, they usually want a broader mix of opportunities for their teams. It’s good to have some highly qualified leads (less time to the potential close, less effort required, very useful to give to new people in the sales team), but it’s also important to have the earlier stage pipeline too (often these become the biggest value deals as they have the chance to work with the prospect to define the solution, and for a similar reason they can have a higher conversion rate once they become competitive).

If you’re handing leads over manually to Sales, this isn’t too complex. Have an honest conversation about what kind of organisations they’re most interested in (or analyse existing customer information if you have the opportunity to get more scientific!), what kind of people they talk to early in deals, and what the signs are that they are interesting to take further. Then talk through leads as they are handed over to refine the picture of what makes a good or bad early-stage opportunity.

There are two main challenges that we see when using automation to hand over early-stage opportunities:

1. Setting up marketing automation scoring or lead ranking with a model to flag likely prospects at an earlier stage where you’re able to shape the deal. The scoring models will probably need frequent adjustment based on feedback from Sales, but the general idea is to score based on activity (how frequently a person has responded or accessed what kinds of information in how short a timeframe) as much as specific information (e.g. job roles or budgets). Looking for related information, I found this great story on Eloqua’s blog (”But What if I Want to Follow Up on ‘D’ Leads?“) with another angle on why sales people want access to early stage leads and how difficult it is to get lead scoring right. It’s exactly these kind of human factors that muddy the waters of automation.
2. Supporting joint working between Sales and Marketing. It’s inevitable that if you are trying to uncover earlier stage opportunities, then some (however good your lead scoring) won’t be right for Sales to keep hold of. Which makes it very important that they can hand prospects back into the Marketing process (avoiding the infamous leaky funnel). It’s another argument for tighter integration of Sales and Marketing people and systems.

It’s still all about the marketing, not just about the systems…

But actually, the bigger marketing challenge is a counter-intuitive one and doesn’t relate to systems or automation at all. Earlier stage leads are often simply harder to engage with than BANT qualified ones. Once they have a budget and project timescales, people tend to be more willing to give up their time to talk to relevant suppliers and are busy searching online for information. But if you’re looking for the opportunity to raise a potential issue with a prospect before they’ve properly defined a solution, then you really need good ammunition delivered in the right way to make a successful claim on their time.

The best marketing automation system, with the most appropriate nurture tracks and lead scoring, is nothing without the content, targeting and proposed next step that can bring the next opportunity to life.

B2B Marketing has published an overview of our lead nurturing programme for Oracle’s Supply Chain Management solutions. The programme won the ‘Best Lead Nurturing Initiative’ award at last month’s B2B Marketing Awards in London.

We had a great night at the awards – The Marketing Practice was a finalist for Agency of the Year, and our own Sales & Marketing Forum (a series of events for our senior clients) was runner-up for ‘Best Live Initiative’ (beaten only by Lloyds TSB).

A brief summary of the write-up of our Oracle lead nurturing programme:

“Oracle’s campaigns for its Supply Chain Management (SCM) business aimed to generate UK sales of SCM solutions to both existing Oracle customers and net-new accounts. Webinars, live events and direct mail resulted in a ROMI of some 65:1.”

“The campaigns sought to align sales and marketing in a nurturing programme, combining the strengths of sales (deep close relationships with customers); with those of marketing, by taking a cross-account view with the ability to offer an enlarged ‘footprint’ for sales – through content, events and insight that are relevant to target business contacts, tailored based on their behaviour and past intelligence.”

There are just too many cases of companies tolerating sub-standard data because “it’s never perfect” or “no-one else does it any better” or “that’s just the way data works” or “it will take too long to fix, we’ve got more pressing priorities”.

At the risk of sounding a bit evangelical, it really doesn’t have to be this way. A high-performing data platform is just too important to give up on. Because almost all B2B organisations have very poor data and data management systems, getting it right is a great potential competitive advantage and efficiency driver.

So what do I mean by “sub-standard data”? It isn’t just a case of physical contact or company records – more often it’s a case of the process that surrounds the core data. Examples would include (this is going to be a pretty long list…):

- no tiering to differentiate the treatment of a 50-person cold prospect from a 5,000-employee hot lead

- taking 2 weeks to extract and confirm a campaignable list of prospects

- existing customer records mixed in with prospects

- errors in updating core data with changes (whether the changes come from Sales, Marketing, Account teams, data services…)

- missing key contacts/job functions (or, worse, having the contacts but not recording the job functions)

- inability to record campaign histories/contact behaviour and adjust future campaigns accordingly

- trying to use a system that has been set up for progressing sales opportunities to run activities like teleservice

- no clear process/division of ownership between Sales and Marketing (for using/updating/adding contacts)

- a history of long-drawn of CRM system selection/incomplete implementations

- no valuable reporting from the data about the effectiveness/results of different marketing activities (let alone any intelligence on the target market or what to do next)

I know that these issues range from the tediously tactical to the ‘million-dollar’ strategic, but that’s the thing about data – filling in the big picture plan is (relatively!) simple; it’s the detail that can cause any data programme to stumble.

And as I said at the top, a high-performing data platform is just too important to give up on. It’s one of the 4 foundations of an indispensible marketing department (the others are content, continuous communications strategy and opportunity management).

Of all the 4 foundations, it’s the data platform that lets the others do their magic. So if you attract people in through content, then the data platform will capture them and bring them into your future activity. And the right data platform will let you focus your communications strategy on the right people at the right time.

We’ve seen enough examples now of data working in harmony with the rest of a marketing programme to know that it is possible (and we’ll post about some examples of this in the next couple of weeks). And the right answer is always deeply tailored to the realities of the business involved (the structure and responsibilities of Sales and Marketing; the way that the target market is divided and tiered; the kinds of marketing programme being employed…).

Having said that, there are plenty of things that successful data platforms have in common. The most important of all are probably that when they started they didn’t bite off more than they could chew, and that system selection came a long way after detailed working through the practicalities of what the system needed to support. There’s an interesting set of skills/experiences needed for this work, which combines understanding the things that various data management systems can offer with seeing what it is that a business truly needs from its data platform.

If you can do that at the same time as starting small, there’s every chance that your data could soon be working for – rather than against – your marketing programmes. As I said, just in case you don’t believe me, we’ll post some positive examples over the next few weeks…