Sherlock Holmes' Insights on B2B Marketing Data

"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

"The dog did nothing in the night-time."

"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes makes an interesting point (in the short story "Silver Blaze") about the conspicuousness of zeros in the data. They can, as in this story, lead to interesting investigations and important conclusions.

However, in the busy world we all live in, they can often be overlooked, as they generally do not appear in most analysis, due to the fact that they are by their nature non-events.

I was reminded of this in a conversation with Mark DiMaurizio regarding visual clickthrough analysis in email. Often, in looking at tabular or chart views of email clickthrough analysis, we will only see the links that were clicked on. If zero links were recorded for a click, either due to a technical error such as a broken link, or due to that call to action not engaging the audience at all, that is very valuable information that is being missed.

A very valuable and insightful question to ask whenever looking at any marketing data is "what is NOT being shown" as the insights based on absence from the data can often be as valuable as insights that the data itself shows.

As we look more and more to analyze our efforts in social media, and the efforts and forums that are driving interest in our solutions, we need to keep asking deeper questions of our data in order to draw out the insights from it.

Lead Scoring - Providing Disposition Options

Handing scored and qualified leads to sales in order for them to follow up is an inexact science. Continual optimization of the process is necessary in order to understand what aspects of a buyer’s digital body language are key to understanding buyer’s intentions. One of the best sources of this information is the sales team themselves. However, as any marketer knows, getting information out of a sales team can be challenging. On a topic such as the quality of an individual sales lead, it may in fact seem almost impossible.

Recently, we talked about the need to implement a claw-back system for scored leads that are passed to sales and show no sales activity. This approach is useful, but is a black and white system. Either a lead is good and is worked by sales, or it is not good and is ignored and quickly clawed back. There is no opportunity for middle ground, and no opportunity for feedback from sales.

If, instead, the sales team is presented with disposition options for the lead that feed directly into appropriate lead nurture campaigns, the best of both worlds is achieved. By having an option to pass a lead back to marketing, with a specific disposition that guides what will happen next, the sales person is able to maintain ownership of the lead. However, by carefully constructing the set of disposition options, marketing can learn much more about why the leads were not accepted by sales than they ever would have by asking sales to fill out a feedback form.

For example:
- If a lead is deemed by sales to be slightly too early in their buying process, they might enter the lead into a “Late Stage Buyer Nurturing” lead nurture program that provides case studies and ROI analysis to guide a prospect towards buying

- If a lead is deemed by sales to be too junior to make a buying decision, they might enter the lead into a “Convince Your Executive Team” nurture program that provided key information to make an internal business case for your solution

- If a lead is deemed by sales to be more interested in an alternate product (Product B), they might enter the lead into a “Product B Nurturing” program

These are only a few examples, each organization will have different options. The technique of providing these “lead disposition” options to sales in order to provide sales with a “middle ground” option, while at the same time providing rich insights to your marketing team as to why a lead is being rejected is extremely valuable.

This question is one of 8 critical lead scoring questions to consider when thinking about a lead scoring system.

Unsubscribes and Content Relevance in B2B Marketing

Another great chart from MarketingSherpa shows very clearly what we as marketers have long known. Relevance is key. 58% of those who stop reading, disengage, or unsubscribe quote a lack of relevance as a key factor.

Too many people are still looking at unsubscribe rates as a relevant metric to determine whether marketing messages are connecting with an audience. The fact is that only some of your audience will unsubscribe. The rest will tune out, emotionally unsubscribe, or even report your message as spam if it loses relevance.

So what is relevance and what can we do as marketers to better align our communications with what is relevant to the audience. There are four main areas we need to focus on in order to connect with our buying audience:

Relevance to their Business: This is one of the more often focused on aspects of relevance, and in many discussions around segmentation, this is all that is considered. Industry information can tell us whether they are likely to be experiencing pains we can solve, company size will give an indication of the resources they may have to tackle that pain and the size of a challenge it might be for them. Geography can give us an indication of whether the cultural or regulatory environment makes the business pain more (or less) acute. To do this, we first need to get our marketing data cleansed continually so that we can easily define our target segments based on industry or geography.

Relevance to their Role: Now it gets interesting. Knowing what role a buyer plays in the buying process allows you to target your message much more accurately. Are they a technical evaluator? If so, product details, devoid of marketing speak may be best. Are they an economic buyer? Perhaps ROI oriented case studies might be best.

Relevance to their Stage in their Buying Process: We’ve all received marketing communications that were driving towards a deal when we were just educating ourselves on the industry, and vice versa, we’ve received introductory, high level content when we were almost finished a detailed evaluation. The mis-match is painful as the content is not relevant even though we do have a certain amount of interest. Matching stage in a buyer’s buying process is crucial to relevance, and to do this, we need to map the buying process and what aspects of Digital Body Language indicate a buyer is at each stage.

Relevance of Style: Each audience responds to different styles and content. Where should the call to action be? What copy or subject line works best? There is no better answer to this than actual prospect response, and the use of A/B testing is your best option to understand which style is most relevant and effective with your audience.

Keeping unsubscribe rates low is great, but keeping audience engagement high, and emotional unsubscribes low is even better. The only way to accomplish this is through a relentless focus on making your message relevant to your audience across each of the key dimensions.

Lead Scoring - the Importance of Clawbacks

Much of the discussion around lead scoring is focused on the passing of the lead in one direction; from marketing to sales. However, equally important when scoring leads is to consider what happens when a lead is passed to sales and there is no appropriate follow-up from sales. Assuming that a good job has been done on understanding the buyer and his or her buying process, the lead that was passed to sales can be assumed to be a good lead.

If sales does not follow up with the lead in an appropriate amount of time, there is a good chance that your opportunity for connecting with that lead will disappear or diminish. When this happens, you want to ensure that the lead does not slip through the cracks to become a dead lead. Significant investment has been made in getting the lead to that point, and losing that investment through inattention is an undesirable outcome.
One of the best options is to implement a “clawback” system with sales whereby a lead is clawed back from them if they do not act on the lead within a defined amount of time. Defining this “service level agreement” with sales is a topic for another day, but a key tenet of it is the idea that if sales does not begin to work with a lead within a certain amount of time (2 or 3 days is ideal), marketing will pull the lead back from them.

Activity can be defined in a number of ways. You will want to automate this process, and your leads will likely be in your CRM system by this point, so the two most accessible options for defining activity are:

a) Sales activity logged against the lead record in the CRM system
b) A change in the status of the lead or opportunity

If activity is not seen in the predefined amount of time, the lead should be clawed back. When it is clawed back, one of three things can happen to the lead:

1) The lead can be passed to another sales rep in the field
2) The lead can be added to a lead pool with a “first-come-first-served” system of allocation whereby the sales team can compete for it
3) The lead can be passed to a partner channel
4) The lead can be re-added to a nurture program until indications of buying interest resurface at a later date

The addition of a claw-back process after you have scored and handed off your leads to sales provides an encouragement to sales to work the leads quickly. However, this overall process relies on the leads being well scored and ready to purchase in order for the sales team to remain motivated to follow up. Furthermore, it relies on there being an agreement between sales and marketing as to what a qualified lead should look like, what lead score defines a lead as being sales-ready, and what timeframe sales has for follow-up.

With those criteria in place, the hand-off between marketing and sales becomes significantly more efficient due to the competitive dynamics of the overall system.

This question is one of 8 critical lead scoring questions to consider when thinking about a lead scoring system.

The Medium is the Message: B2B Marketing, Social Media, and Conversation Context

Ever since Marshall McLuhan published his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, we have been familiar with the phrase "The medium is the message". The medium in which a message is delivered has as much of an effect as the content delivered in that medium.

Today's world of social media needs to be viewed in a similar light. The medium in which a message is delivered is as important to consider as the content of the message itself. As today's marketing organizations consider how to engage in social media forums, not considering the context of the medium being used can lead to a significant change in the overall effect on the message being received.

Social media sites are best compared to social functions in order to understand this effect of context. Like social functions, each social media context has a certain "vibe", which guides the conversation that is accepted.

If you think of this in light of social functions, it becomes clear that certain conversations are appropriate in certain social contexts, and not others. Business meetings are intended to be direct, on topic, and have an agenda-driven vibe. On the other end of the spectrum, parties have a social vibe and only social conversations are generally seen as accepted.

The use of social media for business shares a similar dynamic. The context guides the vibe, which guides the conversations that are accepted. Content of conversations cannot be understood separate from the context of the medium in which they are held.

I wrote recently about our Facebook B2B marketing strategy, which leveraged the context of the Facebook medium to guide the message being delivered. Facebook carries a very social vibe, and our goal with our Facebook strategy is to keep our conversations relevant to that context.

In the context of LinkedIn discussions as a medium, however, "talking shop" is much more expected and anticipated, so the messaging in that medium can be much more business oriented.

If a person at a party brings up a business conversation, or a person in a business meeting tells a party story, the audience is as much influenced by the out-of-context feeling, based on the medium, as they are by the content itself. It is the same in social media. A whitepaper on best practices may contain excellent content, but it is the context of the medium as much as the content itself that influences the audience.

When exploring B2B marketing in social media, understanding this context is critical to understanding how your message is received. McLuhan's prescient observation that the medium is the message is as accurate today as it was years ago.

Cherry Picking of Leads: B2B Marketing to Sales Handoff

Should we allow sales to cherry pick leads that, based on lead scoring, we have deemed not to be ready for sales?

Steve Kellogg at Astadia raised the question very aptly in his Endless Lead Loop post, and it's a question we all face as we wrestle with the business process of lead scoring and handing leads from marketing to sales. Let me start by saying that there is no right answer here, and businesses that have consciously decided to allow cherry picking are not necessarily doing anything wrong.

However, I would make a strong argument for "No."

The better we get at lead scoring, the more factors we are able to consider. We look at multiple dimensions of lead scoring to split the "who" from the "how interested", we look at multiple components of a score and allow each component to only contribute a maximum amount, and we take time into account by degrading lead scores over time. Over time, as we work with sales, we are able to build a fairly accurate picture of what matters to them in a lead.

However, there will always come a time when sales is not getting, in their view, enough volume of leads, and they will ask to open up the funnel so they can "cherry pick" the leads that they deem good. Sounds harmless, as some might turn into opportunities, and those that don't can continue to be nurtured.

It is, unfortunately, not a harmless activity. If we are connecting sales with buyers who are too early in their buying process to be ready to talk to sales, we run a very real risk of alienating those buyers and pushing them away. Despite our good intentions, this cherry picking activity can have significant negative consequences, as prospective buyers who might be good opportunities later can disconnect from an otherwise promising education process early in their buying cycle.

Better than allowing cherry picking, is to keep with the same scoring methodology, but open the funnel slightly. If an A-Lead is passed to sales, and 80-100 points is deemed to be an A-Lead, then keep the same process in place, but open the funnel up so that a A-Lead is now from 60-100 points. By doing this, we prevent sales from negatively impacting early-stage prospective buyers, but still allow them more leads in the funnel.

This question is one of 8 critical lead scoring questions to consider when thinking about a lead scoring system.

Detecting Buyer Roles in B2B Marketing

Understanding what role a buyer plays in the buying group is critical in effective B2B marketing. With a good understanding of what role each person plays, we are better able to cater our messaging, and our nurture marketing.

Each buying process is unique, and much as we can map the stages of the buying process for our products or services, we can also map the key roles in the buying process. These roles are likely to be very similar to the roles that your sales team has mapped out, just that they may be earlier in their investigation than when sales typically engages.

For each potential role in the buying group, we can define what the typical digital body language of a person in that role might look like. The specifics of this will of course depend on your buyers and what you have available on your web properties.

A generic set of buying roles might look like:

Economic Buyer/Decision Maker: This person is the gatekeeper to the budget and evaluates projects from an ROI perspective. Look at digital body language for viewing or searching for ROI focused case studies and calculators, vendor viability information such as investors or management team, and risk mitigation factors such as warranties.

Technical Evaluator: This buyer brings specific technical expertise to the buying situation, and evaluates projects on their technical merits and viability. Look for digital body language that indicates deeply technical investigation; product specifications, precise searches for highly technical information on your solutions, and activity on technical discussions and blogs.

User Buyer: The user buyer represents the users of your product or service. They are looking to understand its effect on their day to day lives, and as such may be seen looking at trials, demos, user documentation, or support sites in order to understand how they will operationally use the products.

Influencer/Coach: As a participant who is somwhat involved in the buying process, and/or highly supportive of your efforts, look for activities that suggest internal promotion of your ideas, such as frequent forwarding of content internally, referring of key internal stakeholders to your material, and searching for material that would bolster internal support for your offering.

Much as we looked a mapping web assets to stages of the buying process, we can look at mapping assets to roles in the buying process, and by doing so, gain a better understanding of what role each buyer plays in the buying process. With this, we can make our marketing efforts much more precisely targeted and effective.

D&B: Digital Body Language Throughout Customer Lifecycle

A lot of our conversation focuses on new customer marketing, but for many or even most businesses, the successful retention of their existing customers is equally critical. I had a good conversation with Jeff Yee at D&B Canada while writing Digital Body Language, and this was his core focus. By leveraging insights into interest levels, usage profiles, and adoption, he was able to optimize their subscription renewal efforts. Enjoy the case study:

D&B: Digital Body Language Throughout Customer Lifecycle

D&B (Dun & Bradstreet) Canada, given their leadership position in business and credit information, wanted to focus on the end of year renewals for their customer base. With significant existing market share renewal and retention was just as important to them as new customer acquisition.

The initial project they undertook to achieve this goal was focused directly on the
renewal period. A progression of emails, triggered by an upcoming renewal date, was sent to the customer at 90, 60, and 30 days prior to renewal. Over the progression of communications, the tone would become increasingly clear in order to encourage the renewal process.

Watching the results, the D&B team noticed two trends. The first was that the customer response to the emails increased as the renewal date approached. Early communications had open rates of 33%, but as the renewal date approached, these rates would jump to 40% showing a significant uptick in interest.

The second trend noticed was a correlation between the renewal interest and direct usage of the D&B service. Adoption was a critical driver of renewal regardless of product line or industry. To continue to grow their adoption rates, D&B then turned to understanding the digital body language of their customers as expressed in their usage of the service. The service was well instrumented, and provided excellent marketing insight into overall usage and feature specific usage patterns for each user.

Conceptually, the team split the customer’s first 12 months of their lifecycle into 3 phases, adoption, usage, and renewal. With the renewal phase now fully automated, the marketing team is now focused on the other two phases. Leveraging their understanding of the prospect’s actual system usage, combined with their insight into the relationship between usage and renewal, a series of onboarding communications will ensure every new customer is quickly and seamlessly able to derive value from the service, while a series of tips and tricks emails will then work from an understanding of what features are and are not being used to suggest areas in which a customer can see even more value from the service.

By taking their understanding of digital body language beyond marketing and into the customer lifecycle, D&B is focused on ensuring that their customers’ renewal decision is based on a year of maximum success with their service.