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…

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.

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).

He joined a panel of enthusiastic and experienced copywriters from around the UK to give their advice and opinion on questions put to them from budding copywriters looking to break into the industry.

Questions poised included: ‘What other worlds are copywriters used in other than marketing?’, ‘What should my portfolio comprise?’, ‘Is there any specific training or qualifications I should get?’ and ‘How do I go about getting work as a freelancer?’

The full discussion can be followed here – http://careers.guardian.co.uk/copywriting-careers – but Tom is always on hand to chat with anybody looking for an insight into life as a copywriter. Just email Tupfold@themarketingpractice.com.

If a prospect is to respond, they need to be clear on two things: what it is we want them to do next and why it is valuable to them. It’s a simple principle, but if we apply it with an understanding of the market and the buying process, it can dramatically improve results.

Here are three key steps to creating calls-to-action that actually work.

1. Consider the buying cycle

There are probably as many versions of the buying cycle as there are books on sales and marketing. But when it comes to developing the right call-to-action, they are useful tools since they help us understand that when we ask the reader to do something, it has to be appropriate to their current situation.

A typical buying funnel contains four stages: recognising the problem; working out what caused the problem and how big it is; evaluating possible solutions; and deciding on the best course of action.

Somebody who has only just recognised they have a problem is unlikely to pick up the phone and jump straight in to a sales meeting. At this stage, what will be most valuable to them is help in understanding the nature of their challenge. For these prospects, we might consider a link to download a whitepaper, or even inviting them to a workshop that helps them think through the cause and scope of their challenge.

Even at the later stages of the buying cycle, our time-poor prospects will be wary of picking up the phone unless they can see the value they will get in return for their time. Instead of ‘arrange a meeting with one of our experts’, then, how about a ‘case study road-show’ that shows how others have dealt with similar challenges?

2. Plan a series of CTAs

So, we understand the importance of a call-to-action that is relevant to the prospect’s current situation. And we can also assume that, in any given market, organisations will each be at a different stage in the buying cycle.

What we can do now is plan campaigns that have a series of calls-to-action, each one helping to ‘nudge’ the prospect along the buying cycle. Ask yourself, at every ‘touch point’, what is the right action to motivate people along the buying cycle?

Think about the ideal next step for your prospect, based on where they are in the buying process and taking into account any other considerations relevant to the market you are in. Also, plan out the subsequent touch points you will need to maintain customers’ forward momentum. Success comes when all of these touch points tie together seamlessly.

So, our appetite-whetting email might link to a website. The website persuades our prospect of the value of attending an event. The event finishes with an offer of a one-to-one workshop that helps the prospect understand their challenge and gives them materials to promote their case internally. And then, when they’ve had that crucial meeting with finance, we get in touch and book a sales meeting to discuss the next steps.

3. Put CTAs at the forefront

OK, we are now ready to create our content. All we need to do is remember the golden rule: we are selling the next step just as much as the solution.

So often, we devote 90 per cent of the content to the end product or solution and leave ourselves just a tenth to get across the bit that really matters: what we want them to do.

But now we have planned our ‘next steps’ to work together, our content can reflect that. We can devote more space to explaining the value of taking each step, giving us a much better chance of getting a response.

Consider it as your chance to make a pitch to the reader as to why they should act. Think about the level of investment you are asking them to make. The bigger the investment we ask, the stronger the case needs to be. If we ask them to take half a day out to attend an event, the value of that half-day will have to compare favourably – not only to other events but also any way they might usefully spend their time. With an audience that is frequently very time poor, ‘do nothing’ can be the strongest competition we face.

So, rather than making your call-to-action an afterthought, it should be at the forefront of your communication. If planned in the right way, it completely changes the structure and emphasis of your content. Let’s put calls-to-action at the heart of our creative.

Retail: Pessimistic for 2012
This article in The Telegraph also highlights expected woes for the retail industry, particularly for electrical goods, furniture and fashion chains http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/8961976/Retail-predictions-for-2012.html

Manufacturing: Automotive set to shine if the Eurozone holds out
Global car manufacturers have committed to significant UK activity in 2012 and the recent defence cuts could be transformed by a potential deal for BAE to build a new fighter jet for India. This article summarises what else we could be seeing on the UK production lines in 2012: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/8969193/Manufacturing-predictions-for-2012.html

Technology/IT: It’s all about BYO in 2012
This extensive report by Gartner tells you everything you need to know about where the IT sector is headed in 2012: http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/predicts/

Construction: Stuck in the mud until 2014
The private sector needs to improve before the construction industry can follow in its footsteps according to many of the UK associations. This review gives an overview of the expected changes this year and a breakdown of which sectors will see the biggest impact: http://www.theconstructionindex.co.uk/news/construction-news/5-fall-predicted-for-construction-output-this-year

As for the financial and public sector, we are sure our speakers at the The Marketing Practice S&M Forum (John Crane, acting CIO, Nationwide and John Suffolk, former CIO, UK government) will be filling us in with all of the insider tips so we’ll be back after the 24th to enlighten you all then.

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.

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.

But let’s assume that the proposition is a sound one, and that any right-thinking buyer would bite your arm off to sign on the dotted line – if only you could spend an hour with them to explain it (followed by 6-12 months going through the sales process…).

All you need is to sell them on the idea of spending an hour with you. Easy if you’re Megan Fox. Less so if you’re a ‘leading supplier of business services’.

Let’s also assume (it’s a dream scenario) that your data is entirely accurate and you have a contact strategy which is a thing of beauty (say, an integrated campaign plan with multiple touch-points over several months).

So you push ‘go’ on your lead generation campaign, but you only get a trickle of opportunities back. Why? 9 times out of 10, it’ll be because the strong proposition wasn’t converted into a strong set of campaign messaging.

What’s the difference between proposition and message?

The short answer: it’s the difference between a campaign that sounds good to an internal audience (strong proposition) and one that actually works when it reaches customers and prospects (strong message).

The longer answer:

The proposition is the articulation of the superior value (compared with the competition) that you can bring to bear on solving an issue that a prospect faces.

The campaign messaging is what happens when you take the proposition and think about what the audience needs to know there and then, what/who they are most likely to listen to, what will capture their imagination, and what will convince them to take the next step with you.

Let’s take the 4 elements of successful messaging in turn

1. What the audience needs to know – depending on what stage the market is at for your proposition and what stage of the buying cycle your ideal prospect is at, they will respond to very different messages. The simple example would be to compare a prospect who doesn’t even know they have an issue with one who is already evaluating different solutions. Clearly you need to share very different information with people in these two scenarios – the same applies to the difference between a proposition that is brand new to the market with one in a category that’s well established.
2. What/who they are most likely to listen to – really an extension from the previous point, the idea here is to think about the kind of information people will respond to and what sources will hold most authority (analysts, existing customers, their peers, your delivery experts….).
3. What will capture their imagination – this is an invitation to get more ‘creative’ than any standard value proposition would allow. That could mean ‘creative’ in the design/copy sense – for example, we took a client proposition about joining up strategy with execution and turned it into a campaign about great weddings (complete with pieces of wedding cake sent to their key customers). Or it could mean ‘creative’ in a more business sense – for example identifying that building a ‘maturity model’ around your proposition will help you to open doors and sell more consultatively.
4. Convincing them to take the next step with you – the best campaign messaging is entirely context-aware, and is rooted in the knowledge that buyers will be going through several stages and can be speeded up by focusing on selling the value of taking the next step (e.g. an hour’s meeting) rather than always focusing on the end solution. What’s the value of the hour’s meeting? What will they get that they couldn’t get from someone else? How will it help them to do their job? (In a way, this part of the campaign message is like building a little proposition all of its own for the next step in the sales process)

Get all of these 4 elements right, and prospects should be beating a path to your door – and having spent so much time on crafting vaue propositions it would be a shame for some of the mega deals to get away for lack of campaign messages.