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).

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…

Smurfs may be great gardeners, but would they make it in B2B marketing? With this whole ’spot the difference’ idea, they’ve clearly bought into the common marketing principle of ‘differentiate or die’. But is that just qualifying them out of potential deals?

[/end tenuous Smurf analogy/]

I’m worried that many people (me included, too often) put too much faith in the ‘differentiate or die’ message. It can lead us to try and create USPs at a point in the sales cycle when we should be concentrating on answering customer needs. Just because competitors also answer these needs, doesn’t necessarily mean we can’t talk about it too.

Take an example: let’s say there are lots of companies acknowledging a need for your kind of solution (some in the sweet spot where you really do have better features than the competition) – but there are two or three big names always getting on the shortlist for the RFP.

Now, do you really need marketing to differentiate yourself from the big three? Or is the issue actually that people see them as exactly placed to answer their needs and perceive you as too different already (or don’t see you at all)?

Perhaps there’s an argument that marketing up to the point of the RFP should be all about ‘me too’ – we have a great client list (like them), we have delivered great results (like them), we have features x,y,z (like them)…

The chances are that knowledge of what one of the big competitors can do is already helping the prospect to shape their RFP  – so the only thing you’re going to achieve with differentiation is to discount yourself from the deal. This obviously isn’t a hard and fast rule (and would I imagine vary according to market and product maturity), but should be food for thought before we jump to look for a USP to market around rather than a clear customer need.

Of course, if the competition is bigger than you, then you will need one kind of differentiation – not necessarily to do with what you say, but all to do with how/where you say it. They’ll own various saturated marketing channels (think Google AdWords, tradeshows/exhibitions, industry publications, analyst activity…) – but it’s your opportunity to get smart and targeted with your direct communications to really deliver that ‘me too’ message in a way that gets ‘me too’ onto the shortlist…

And once you’re on that shortlist and having your sales meetings – that’s the time to really stick it to the competition (and your sales team need all the support they can get to highlight the places where your product/service differentiators meet the pain points of the prospect).

But start the differentiation too soon and you’ll end up needing to create a whole new market before anyone will buy from you (which is a great challenge to have, if you’re up for the fight!).

So, anyway, have you spotted the 5 differences in the smurf picture? Go here to see if you got it right!

December saw the latest session of our Sales & Marketing Forum, inspired by what seems to have been the rallying cry of 2009: “Let’s sell to the CFO as well…”

Speakers included Mark Evans, CFO, Vodafone Group Technology, and Gareth Bailey, Head of Central Services, Logistics & IT Group, Marks & Spencer, and our guests were on good questioning form (possibly inspired by the finest mulled wine the Soho Hotel could provide…).

Our write-up of the event (available to download here) covers four main areas of discussion from the night:

• Understanding Finance’s role in the organisation/process

• What are the key factors influencing Finance decisions?

• How can we reach the Finance decision-maker?

• What content works best? What do suppliers need to prove?

Everyone has an inkling that, for all the obvious reasons, the role of the Finance decision-maker is becoming steadily more important in major enterprise deals. But before adding them as simply another role on a long list to target, we need to immerse ourselves in their world and their language. Doing this can reveal where so many people are going wrong in their attempts to reach such a complex and elusive group of people.

If you have any other questions about the speaker’s views, or if you were at the event and think I’ve missed a vitally important issue, please add your thoughts in a comment…

Are there any suppliers who don’t aspire to a ‘thought leadership’ position? It’s an admirable objective, but fails to deliver on the promise all too often. Meanwhile, a more practical approach seems to be delivering ever-stronger results…

So last week, a colleague proposed the possibility that – with every man and his dog creating a ‘thought leadership’ position – the real thought leaders might be doing just the opposite.

The impulse behind a thought leadership programme is to have something interesting to say to clients and prospects, ideally something that stands a business apart from the competition as more forward-thinking and creating new solutions to existing challenges.

Which is great as a principle, and when it works it can pay massive dividends. But too often, after this great start, people put the ’stand apart from the competition’ before the ‘interesting to clients and prospects’ – which typically means taking an ever more tangential/futuristic view on a subject. And so the thought leading position gets farther and farther away from where the majority of clients/prospects are fighting their day to day battles (and spending the majority of their budgets).

When we researched the people making buying decisions worth millions of pounds, we found that the ones taking the decisions weren’t necessarily in the c-suite, but departmental heads/programme directors – people with day jobs too big to worry about what might be possible in the future and all too concerned with what’s happening today.

There’s also a tightrope to walk between innovation and delivery – at our recent S&M Forum we heard from Finance decision-makers who explained how they prioritise budget for suppliers who can clearly show what they will deliver and how they are capable of delivering (having done the same thing 100 times before being more important than some potential but unproven competitive advantage).

This won’t be true for every proposition or every audience (some companies are less risk-averse than the norm and are typically good target early adopters for new solutions), but the current environment does seem to call for a more practical, pragmatic kind of leadership.

Maybe the really innovative thinking would be to stick to what worries today’s decision-makers – details of where your proposition fits their budgets and priorities, stories about what’s going right and wrong, implementation pot-holes, war stories…

So what would we call the opposite of thought leadership? Well, if the balance is between thinking and doing, perhaps it should be ‘deed leadership’.

In scanning the list of the Harvard Business Review’s “HBR Voices” bloggers recently, I discovered that Gary Hamel was on the list. His most recent, 25 Stretch Goals for Management is worth a read as I think it offers up an interesting model for a relationship campaign that could generate great thought leadership.

Under the banner of a “Management Innovation Lab” Hamel brought together management experts, social commentators and “progressive” CEOs with the goal of laying out the agenda for management in the 21st century. Hamel writes “What drew the participants together was a set of broadly shared beliefs about the importance of management, and a sense of urgency about reinventing management for a new age.” The output of the 2 day session, called “Moon Shots for Management” was a series of interviews and content, as well as a 25 point action plan for innovation around the future of management.

It strikes me that this approach would work well to support a relationship marketing initiative and/or thought leadership campaigns. By identifying the most progressive CIOs, CTOs, CFOs or other relevant group in your client and prospect base, and bringing them together with matching futurologists and management gurus, it would be possible to design and direct a campaign that developed a closer relationship with these people, helped them deliver strategic value within their own businesses, offered real account and market intelligence and output fantastic content with which to further engage your audience.

Whilst the content, approach and tone of any campaign would need to be focused on the market and audience, the model itself is a really interesting one – playing as it does on current appetite for community and the “age of reference“.

BtoB Magazine has named its top 25 marketers of 2009 in a supplement you can download here.

It’s fascinating to note just how many of the top 25 to have made the grade are technology brands, or brands from closely-related industries. More than half (15 of the 25) fit into this category. CMOs from Oracle, Avaya, Cisco, AMD, Siemens, SAP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, HP, Accenture, AT&T, Verizon, Motorola and Sybase are all named in the list.

I’d highly recommend downloading the supplement and looking at how these different CMOs are tackling their marketing challenges. It reveals why AMD have reduced 900 global campaigns down to 4 core ones, why FedEx chose to drop its spots at the Superbowl in the face of the economic downturn, through to how an ex-Disney marketer is using the web at HP and will soon be leading a repositioning of the brand. From IBM’s focus on smarter planet technology, the Sybase CMO’s provocation-based marketing strategy and Oracle’s organisational focus on delivering opportunities to the sales force, there’s a lot to ponder. There’s also interesting insight from companies such as UPS, General Electric and Aon for a bit of non-IT inspiration.

A couple of choice quotes from the piece:

• Judith Sim, Oracle’s CMO saying, “There is no doubt, at the end of the day, that with Oracle marketing – and this is direct from Charles Phillips – we win when the cash register rings. We know what our end goal is, and that’s to support the sales organization. It’s not as much about winning those brand awards.”
• Mich Mathews, Microsoft’s VP Central Marketing “In the case of our business campaign, it was working; but we thought it could work harder,” she said. So Mathews and her team talked to customers and got feedback from Microsoft’s global subsidiaries and, ultimately, decided to retool the campaign, which targets business and IT decision-makers. In just 21 days, the company update various campaign assets—focusing messaging on how Microsoft technology can help people run their businesses successfully, particularly in a down economy.”
• Jeff Hayzlett, CMO, Eastman Kodak “In tough times you have to focus on the value proposition. The fluff, the funny campaigns, go out the window.”
• Mark Wilson, VP Sybase “We had a very compelling value proposition around risk management and risk analytics. If you looked at capital markets at the time, they were going through huge turmoil. Instead of asking companies what keeps them up at night, we would tell them what should keep them up at night. It was a very different way of selling.”

Marketing after the watershed: part 1

The world has changed in the last two years, and the one thing everyone agrees on is that it’s not going back to how it was anytime soon. McKinsey has called it “The New Normal” – a fundamentally different business environment.

A combination of economic factors and social phenomena have collided rapidly to reshape the marketing landscape. Where strategies were previously predicated on historical norms and certainty, marketers now need to make change the constant in their planning.

 As Lowell Bryan, a Director of McKinsey has said “…the flaw is trying to think that you can predict the weather—as opposed to designing a boat that is capable of withstanding all sorts of different weather. The objective is not to control things you can’t control but to enable you to be relatively better at delivering results and performance over time, no matter what the weather is. I think that what has been the big wake-up call for people…is because they can’t see the future. And they haven’t got a business model and a strategy designed for an uncertain, unpredictable environment. They’ve got a strategy and business model for smooth sailing.”

The marketing department’s being buffeted by the weather on two fronts – zero budgeting and headcount freezes prompted by the recession are making it harder to put in place teams who can spend time designing the boat (orchestrating major new programmes internally), whilst the sea keeps on getting rougher ( the growing role of participatory media and a decline in trust of traditional media means that when those programmes are executed, they struggle to make an impact in a fast-changing environment.)

Commentators are calling it the “age of reference” as opposed to the previous era of deference. “[We] are now entering the “age of emotional proximity”, says Marketing Week, where peer recommendations surpass all other marketing.” Bell Pottinger echoes this, saying “people prefer to trust people like themselves rather than traditional authority sources.”

Add to that the fact that corporate reputations are in tatters after the events of the last few years, (according to the 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer 62 percent of respondents, across 20 countries, say that they trust corporations less now than they did a year ago) and it adds up to a maelstrom for marketers, who are struggling to respond.

And what impact has this watershed had on B2B marketing? For many, it feels like crisis point. Response rates are stagnant at best, plummeting at worst. Budgets are under threat, and the demand for measurable results is here to stay. You only have to look at marketing’s place in the corporation to see the impact all of this is having. CMOs typically last fewer than two years in their role. Senior marketers hardly ever make it to the board, much less Chief Executive and marketing departments frequently struggle to gain a good reputation for their product understanding and customer intimacy.

Calls for a newly customer-centred CMO are coming thick and fast. In a prescient McKinsey Quarterly 2007 article entitled  “The Evolving Role of the CMO” David Court argues that “Few senior-executive positions will be subject to as much change over the next few years as that of the chief marketing officer…” and suggests that the CMO must assume a larger role as the “voice of the customer” across the company as it responds to significant changes in the marketplace.” This is backed up by Forrester’s research, showing that half of business executives believe customer experience will play a very important role over the next three years. According to the same study, 73 percent of respondents cite a lack of clear experience strategy as a key challenge. In B2B organisations, where the customer relationship traditionally resides with the sales force, this challenge becomes magnified.

The watershed events of the last two years are shining a bigger and bigger spotlight. Companies learned in the last downturn that cutting marketing spend entirely leaves them uncompetitive as the upturn happens. And as boards look to their marketing teams for recessionary marketing strategies, strong leadership, innovative routes to the customer and particularly lead generation… many are left wanting.

Ultimately, in a challenging environment, the corporation focuses on shorter-term returns. Thus lead generation and nurturing requirements are boosted up the ‘ to do’ list. Lead generation programmes  are currently the top priority of 70% of B2B marketers according to recent research by AMR.

Historically, it was seen as the sole preserve of the sales team to bring in the “now” revenue – whilst marketing focused on the future through its research and brand programmes. Over time, this has lead to a belief from many sales teams that marketing are too intellectually focused, and are not interested in revenue generation, and marketers’ belief that sales are selling the wrong thing.

This legacy, however, has meant that up until extremely recently, lead generation was only seen as a tactical and ad hoc activity. As a result, demand generation often follows the cycle of feast or famine, with no continuous marketing campaign process supporting the revenue forecast. ‘Lead generation’ programs are frequently short term initiatives, driven by the need to fill quickly a dwindling sales pipeline. They often have no long-term strategy and no follow-up plan. This results in knee-jerk campaigns, which deliver an oversupply of low quality leads.

The poor quality of the intelligence provided to the sales force leads to low sales productivity and often frustration. What the sales team want and need is a steady stream of high-quality account intelligence; which enables them to focus their prospecting activity on the accounts where potential projects have been identified or they have the greatest chance of success. The delivery of high quality leads is dependent on gathering detailed and sometimes sensitive information from prospective clients (who are bombarded with requests for such information, often from competing marketing departments within the same company). It is increasingly recognised that such information can only be systematically and reliably gathered from an ongoing value exchange, via thoughtful and focused marketing communications.

So we can sum up the four main areas of B2B marketing challenge that present themselves as a result of the watershed: building and maintaining a great reputation, driving a fantastic customer experience, building solid relationships across multiple channels and generating leads that satisfy the business plan. 

Not much new in the challenges themselves then – but the way in which you tackle them has changed for good. Our strong belief is that marketers should start with the end in mind. Lead generation programmes can drive all four of these if designed and executed effectively and with a long-term commitment at heart.) Can deliver leads in the short term, but ultimately work to enhance reputation and relationship as well.

And yet, even when faced with today’s brave new world, B2B marketers seem unable to break out of the rather nostalgic view that lead generation is a “one-off” activity in response to short term need. This is why the watershed moment has been so important – from this point on, lead generation cannot be seen as an emergency programme or non-core activity any more; it’s a central plank to any B2B marketing strategy, and it’s core to the entire business development process. 

Lead generation is no longer the knee-jerk campaign that you give to a telemarketing agency – it’s the ultimate goal of everything you are doing. It’s time for marketing to realise that if you can’t plot the journey of how something contributes to sales then it isn’t worth doing. And if you do plot the journey, then everything becomes more effective.

So how to get started building post-watershed marketing programmes? Our next articles in this Watershed series will cover what’s working now and how to build a framework at the heart of your marketing department that delivers these four watershed priorities, what will work in the future and how to start looking at it now, how to develop the best relationship with sales (you’re going to need it), and how to structure your team to achieve all this.

The world has changed in the last two years, and the one thing everyone agrees on is that it’s not going back to how it was anytime soon. In a paper only just published, McKinsey has called it “The New Normal” – a fundamentally different business environment.

This watershed moment has left many B2B marketers high and dry, so we’ve decided to take an in-depth look at what has really happened, what the new world order means for marketers, and what you should be doing about it. Over the coming months, this blog will feature 5 major articles, with accompanying downloads, to help you to adapt to this brave new world:

1. What happened? What’s wrong with what we used to do? Why isn’t it working any more? There’s a growing call for a new style of marketing, and the impetus to make a change for good, but where’s this coming from?
2. What’s still working in this post-watershed marketing environment? Which marketing models and techniques are bearing fruit? From provocation propositions to adaptive campaigning models, we separate the babies from the bathwater.
3. What’s new? A look at the trends that will shape our industry over the coming year. We’ll be looking at the best B2B examples out there and taking inspiration from some unexpected places.
4. Working with sales. In the post-watershed world, a closer relationship with sales is imperative. How can you integrate with them, solve the data challenges and work out lead targets? We investigate the rise and rise of account-based marketing and bid marketing techniques.
5. Structuring to deliver it. Finally we take a look at how B2B marketing departments can gear up to deliver in a post-watershed world. What will the B2B marketing department of the future look like and what can you do now to get a head start?

Sign up now via RSS or email (top right hand side of this blog) to receive these articles as soon as they are published. If there’s anything you’d like to see covered in this Watershed Series then let me know by adding a comment underneath this post.