In a recent post I wrote about some of the lessons marketing can learn from sales. Now, moving once more into the breach, the Sales Executive Council has posted a list of the seven principals to bear in mind when developing any sales tool.

Sales is often supported by tools that help them, but sometimes there are so many that these tools doesn’t always take off. Because the same practical challenges are faced in most marketing projects, maybe there’s something we can learn from these too:

1. Make sure you keep your focus on your end goal right the way through the development.
2. Prioritize and feature requests and focus on those you think will impact success most.
3. Early in the scoping, collect as much feedback as you can to base your decisions on.
4. Communicate during the build why the tool will make a difference to the user.
5. Ensure it’s easy to use. There’s nothing worse that thousands of features no-one can use.
6. Conduct pilots prior to launch so if there is any feedback to react to you can
7. Make sure everyone can get to the tool and use it when they need to.

See the link for more detail, but to say these rules are limited only to sales tools is pretty blinkered. Most of them are just common sense for just about everything we do. It never hurts to repeat good ideas, though.

We recently launched a set of four new propositions for one client, to be taken out by sales teams across EMEA. Eventually, as much effort and thought has gone into communicating how the sales teams could use the resources as in creating the resources themselves: bringing to life different sales scenarios; selling the value of the collateral; explaining how some of the newer presentation techniques can be used. And if all else fails, communicate directly with the market and create a demand for the sales team to meet…

McKinsey’s recent interview with Shell CIO Alan Matula gives some real food for thought in evaluating how you approach major enterprises (and hold on to them once you have them…)

When you consider that Matula is talking about IT transformation that has been going on for a decade (and is now looking for payback over at least 15 years from, for example, a new standardised HR system), it becomes clear why the long-term approach is the only one to take.

He talks through the different phases of the transformation, and what comes across most strongly is a ruthless focus on reaching a successful outcome. When it comes to selecting suppliers, it’s clear that only those most able to sign up to the corporate vision have been selected:

“We started with the idea that we wanted 70 percent of our spending to be external. Of that, we wanted 80 percent to be focused on the top 11 suppliers. We put those 11 into three groups: First, there are the foundation suppliers, those in which we make long-term bets—Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. Then there’s the infrastructure group, with three bundles—AT&T, HP, and T-Systems—for networks, end-user computing, and hosting of storage, respectively. And finally we have four application services suppliers—Accenture, IBM, Logica, and Wipro. What we’re doing differently is bringing all 11 of them together to work as a collective.”

It will be interesting to revisit the performance of this collaborative approach after a couple of years working. Shell is already noticing that traditional product/service divisions between suppliers are breaking down (movements like cloud computing and shifting to pay per performance models are exacerbating this at the higher level).

Matula’s closing comments illustrate 3 of his most significant priorities. Being able to measure the impact that IT has on the business. Having the skilled people available to manage relationships (internally and with key suppliers). And finally, avoiding failure at all costs – risk aversion is still top of the list.

“IT is more important and intense to the enterprise than ever before, and that essentially requires an ongoing effort to transform IT; there is always another phase. To support that mental model, the first thing is to never lose the perspective that you’re here to make the business more productive and more competitive. Our catchphrase, “business at the center,” keeps us grounded. Our position today is a reflection of the tight integration that we have with the business, combined with the efforts of key support functions like HR, finance, and procurement.

A second thing is that you’re only as good as the talent that you have. For instance, in the robust sourcing of infrastructure and applications we have put in place, the people at the interface are very important. They manage the critical supplier relationships with CEOs and top executives at these firms, and they have the technical know-how to help guide the suppliers.

Finally, if you don’t have the basics right, you won’t have any credibility. It only takes one bad “go live” on a project or a flaw in your basic delivery capabilities to set you back very quickly.”

It has been said, (if it hasn’t, then we’ll say it) that the best marketing is about taking the cream of your sales team’s capabilities in one-to-one sales and turning this into a mass-market lead generation machine. This tends to be why the best campaigns involve a close marketing-sales partnership to understand how to position offerings, view the competition, differentiate themselves and drive prospects through the sales funnel.

It’s also been oft repeated that the best marketing is about communicating the right messages at the right time.  So maybe we can bring these together into one grand unified theory of marketing-sales success? Wishful thinking maybe, but McKinsey this month published the results of their research into the buying habits of 1,200 decision makers in long- and short-sale cycles across the US and Europe. This insight into b2b sales draws a powerful conclusion: the top two turn-offs (comprising over half of those surveyed) that sales people could do were to have inadequate knowledge of their product/service and to try to communicate with them too often.

Timing + message. QED.

Fortunately, these two faux-pas are perfectly possible to remedy. But in the theme of this post, it’s not just sales that should learn this lesson but marketing too. And we bear this evidence out frequently – the most successful communications are the ones that tie a significant aspect of the product/service to a timely need of the audience. When this happens, the audience doesn’t see it as ‘marketing’ – it’s just a valuable part of their business day.

I’ll delve into another area where marketing can learn from sales in a future post, but maybe you have some experiences on this area already that you’d like to share?

Avid viewers of Coronation Street or Country House Rescue might already have seen the start of Waitrose’s new advertising campaign. Waitrose took over an entire commercial break during both programmes, showing a three and a half minute ad with Delia Smith and Heston Blumenthal that was a mini-cookery programme in itself.

Taking over an entire ad break isn’t completely new – Adidas and Xbox are among the brands to have done it before – but this is something different. It’s more like content than advertisement, more like an interaction than an interruption, and part of a carefully planned journey that the audience can be taken on. In short, everything that we’ve seen working as an approach to B2B buyers (but at a cost of c.£20m).

Whether or not it works for B2C remains to be seen, although everything seems to be geared up to meet Waitrose’s goals – the recipes are about showing that you can do your ‘everyday’ shop at Waitrose, the mix of Delia (traditional values) and Heston (21st century), the online continuation (with a prominent option to shop for the ingredients)…

If the Daily Mail’s reports are anything to go by (Achtung der Rhabarber! Waitrose forced to import German rhubarb), the tactic seems to be delivering early results: “in the first four days of the supermarket’s campaign the company sold as much of the crop [rhubarb] as it normally sells in 12 weeks – enough for 61,000 brulées”.

So what are the wider lessons?

We’ve been working with Microsoft Advertising recently on their research into what drives consumers to make premium purchases – and the answer tends to be a combination of Interest and Information. First, people need to be interested (or to be shown why they should be interested) and then they need access to information. At a high level, it really is that simple – the trick is in how you spark the interest and provide the information. It strikes me that Waitrose’s campaign is just an example of trying to meet these goals (finding an interested group – like viewers of Country House Rescue – and then explaining the value of good quality, responsibly sourced food to spark an interest that the information in the advert and online can answer.

Given that most senior decision makers will be premium consumers in their personal lives, there’s definitely a lesson to be learnt here for B2B marketers. Perhaps it’s little wonder that the most effective programmes today are the ones that have a precision focus on finding interested buyers and then take novel approaches to providing the information they need.

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’.