5 Things You Shouldn’t Expect from Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is becoming a vital tool in today’s B2B space, as more marketers need to gain a better understanding of their customers’ buying cycles and increase their ROI from every campaign.

However, many marketers become enamored with the latest technology and jump into marketing automation without considering the human investment and business processes needed to make their efforts successful. If you focus on the technology over the planning, you won’t have the backbone necessary to support your marketing automation efforts and convert more leads into sales.

Whether you’re considering marketing automation or have already begun the process, you must understand exactly what you can – and can’t – achieve with the software. Here are five things you shouldn’t expect marketing automation software to do:

1. Model how your buyers buy. A key to marketing automation is reframing your thinking to focus on your customers’ buying process rather than your selling process. Before you implement a marketing automation program, you should map how your customers move through every stage of the buying cycle and become aware of their questions and concerns throughout each stage.
2. Define buyer personas. For your marketing and sales efforts to succeed, you need to understand your buyers’ challenges. One of the best ways to get inside a buyer’s head is to develop a profile of your ideal customer that includes his/her demographic, firmographic and psychographic details. You can even give your ideal customer a name and hang a photo of him/her near your computer.

   Buyer personas enable you to create targeted marketing materials that speak to your customers’ exact needs. If your marketing automation program sends your buyers information that is off-target, they will ignore your messages.

3. Get sales and marketing to agree on what a qualified lead looks like. How often does your sales department complain about the quality of the leads you send them? Unless your marketing department has sales intuition (the ability to read your prospects’ behaviour and anticipate their next actions), defining a good lead will be difficult to do on your own. Meet with your sales team and discuss what makes a lead “qualified.”
4. Create interesting and relevant content. Many marketers fail to consider the amount of educational content necessary to address their buyers’ concerns. For example, a customer in the early stages of the buying cycle might want to read articles and white papers, while someone who is closer to making a purchasing decision is more likely to request sales literature or product demos. While a marketing automation system will deliver the content, you’ll still need to develop a content strategy and create engaging communications.
5. Engage with others through social media. Marketing automation allows you to communicate with your leads without human interaction. However, human interaction is vital to your success with social media. Although some aspects of social media can be automated (such as inserting sharable links into emails and landing pages), you still need to personally interact with your online communities. One-on-one conversations with buyers can help you discover what messages are the most relevant to them.

After you lay the initial groundwork, marketing automation software can help you eliminate repetitive marketing tasks and increase your ROI. Here are three things marketing automation can do for you:

1. Understand individual buyers. Marketing automation software collects powerful data about your buyers to help you understand their interests and needs. The software follows the footprints buyers leave on your website and shows you what content they have accessed. This means you can gain a deeper understanding of your customers and have an advantage over competitors who are not using marketing automation.
2. Deliver the right message – at the right time – to each buyer. One of the biggest benefits of marketing automation software is its ability to deliver targeted content to your leads throughout every stage of the buying cycle. For example, if a lead responds to a campaign about your XYZ solution, your program can send her a case study about a customer who achieved strong business gains after implementing your solution. Imagine how this targeted information can educate your leads and convert more of them into customers.
3. Identify the right leads for sales. Once you and your sales team identify what makes a lead “qualified,” marketing automation can help you deliver those leads to sales. Your sales team can view specific data about your prospects, including the links they clicked, the registration forms they completed and their lead scores. This detailed information makes it easier for your sales team to reach their quotas.

A successful marketing automation program involves more than just implementing the latest technology. Have you considered the sales and marketing processes you’ll need to make it work for you?

(this post originally ran as a guest post on Astadia's marketing automation blog)

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Who and What Do We Trust?

As the role of the relationship-based sales person shifts, with buyers collecting more of their information online, both prior to, and during conversations with sales people, we need to pay close attention to the most crucial aspect of a sale. Trust. It is trust that every relationship has as its foundation. However, with the changing dynamic of how the conversation happens, there is also a changing dynamic of how trust is developed.

In classic relationship-based sales, the buyer grew to trust the individual salesperson. Conversations were typically face to face, and the relationship incorporated many “social” elements such as dinner, drinks, golf outings, or sports events. Over time, this built up a level of trust between the buyer and the seller and allowed the deal to move through its challenging parts.

Now, with significantly less face-to-face time being spent, the dynamics of this trust building are changing. Trust now manifests itself in a variety of ways, which together either contribute to, or detract from, a sales opportunity. Replacing, enhancing, or complementing the trust we historically had in the direct sales rep is the trust we place in the following sources:

Peers:
The most powerful and immediate trusted source, of course, are our peers. People we know, have existing relationships with, and respect are the most powerful influencers of our decision making. Both because of shared experiences, and a perception of them being free of bias, we are far more likely to trust recommendations from our peer group.

Online Communities:
In a similar vein, we tend to trust the recommendations of online communities, where individuals may not be known to us, but we share a common thread such as the use of a particular solution, a professional discipline, or a love of travel.

Online Personas:
Within these communities, active individuals often stand out. Through creating great content, intelligent commentary, and frequent presence, they build familiarity in the same way that repeated light encounters with a neighbour or office co-worker begin to build our familiarity with them. As this familiarity builds, a sense of trust builds with it.

Personal Brands:
Taken further, many individuals have become so well known individually within a given space that their views are given significant credence. As buyers, there may be significant trust placed in the views, opinions, and perspectives of these strong individual brands within a space.

Company Online Brands:
The overall reputation and brand of a company is greatly influenced by the transparency of social media. Numerous examples exist of companies who attempted to maintain a difference between what they wanted their reputation to be, and what the reality of their product or service was. Social media has collapsed this difference, and in doing so may have an overall positive effect on buyer trust. If a company brand becomes, through community discussion and reputation, a realistic impression of what that company truly is, it becomes something that can more easily be trusted.

As trust shifts from being mainly in the purview of face to face sales reps, and towards a variety of other sources, marketing organizations need to ensure that buyers trust what is being offered. However, with trust itself being a virtually unmeasurable concept, and the source of trust being even more difficult, this provides marketers with a significant challenge.

Are you measuring how and why prospective buyers build their trust in you?

5 things to do to get ready for coming communication shift

A while ago, I wrote a piece on the next transition in communication that sparked a number of conversations. The idea explored in that article (and the explanation for the diagram on the right) was that the major search engines will next apply their computing and analysis horsepower to understanding who is talking to whom about what.

As they do that, it may become possible to have passive discovery of interesting conversations guided by the algorithms of Google and Bing and their analysis of vast amounts of social media data. Much like Amazon’s book recommendation systems which looks at “people like us” and sees what they are interested in, Google and Bing may soon be able to accurately detect and show specific conversations that are most likely to be of interest to each person.

This coming transition promises to be as disruptive as any transition in communication before it. Here are five things you can do to get ready:

1) Dive Into Social: Watch what the major search engines are doing to aggregate and understand social media activity. Where this effort lands is difficult to predict, but the more involved you are with social, the more aware you will be of the effect of these efforts on how your conversations are being discovered.

2) Understand the Influencers in your Market: Not just the major press and analyst influencers, but the bloggers and smaller influencers in the space who will most likely cause your message to be “discovered” if they join the conversation. Engage and encourage your entire team in building strong relationships with influencers.

3) Create an “Information Concierge” Role: ensure that the high quality information you have finds its way into the conversations in the first place through identifying related conversations, and presenting your information, via an information concierge, in the context of those conversations.

4) Be Findable: understand, and continually improve, how “discoverable” your content is with natural search queries. Not only will this ensure a discipline of search-friendly practices, but it will guide your company culture towards one that thrives on the continuous creation of great content.

5) Watch the Search Majors: As Google deepens its investment in display advertising, and Bing makes similar moves, their ability to target “discovered” conversations will continually increase. Being aware of, and on top of, these investments will ensure you are well positioned to take advantage of them.


Each major transition in communication is disruptive, but those who anticipate, prepare, and get in front of the transitions stand to benefit from them significantly.


(this article, in part, first appeared as a guest post on SavvyB2B - it has since been modified and split into two from the original)

Buyer Roles, Buying Stages, and Perception Challenges

We looked earlier at the evaluation of existing content assets that can be done at each stage of the buying process, and for each buyer role involved.

A similar exercise needs to be done to assess where the need for content is greatest. For each stage in the buying process, and for each role, a list of the perception challenges we face in the market can be created. From here, we will know the ideal messages for buyers to absorb.

These "messages" can be facts that are actively or passively sought by buyers. Actively sought examples are messages that are searched for, such as the specifications for integrating with a specific third party system. Messages that need to be delivered passively, however, are not actively searched for - such as corrections to misconceptions such as the idea that your solution is not appropriate for larger organizations.

Evaluating Messages

To begin, much like the evaluation of current content assets, a matrix can be created that has buyer roles along the y-axis, and buyer stages along the x-axis. In each box, the messages, information, and perceptions that need to flow out to the market can be listed, along with an assessment (red/yellow/green) of whether you are currently being successful in getting those messages out to the market. The value of this exercise is in its ability to shine a light on areas where you may have a significant messaging gap.

Successful marketers are able to inject these messages, perceptions, and criteria throughout the overall education process of a buyer, slowly altering perceptions, guiding the way in which solutions are evaluated, and ensuring that needed information is discovered.

The need to get this broad variety of messages out to buyers, now that buyers are in control of their own buying processes, is what has led to the growth in nurture marketing, as well as the business use of social media as a publishing platform. At each stage, a failure to successfully get these messages out to prospective buyers can quickly lead to buyers failing to progress in their buying process - the three types of leaks in the funnel covered in an earlier post.

Trust, Reputation, and Inside Sales

There is a significant shift underway in how we establish and build trust. Craig Newmark (of Craigslist fame) discussed this transition in quite some detail in an article on GigaOm that's worth a read.

The shifting of how trust is built has numerous profound implication for society in general, but more specifically, it is causing significant shifts in the way that people buy. While the general evolution of buyers is causing some challenges for field sales teams, the evolution of trust is opening up new opportunities for inside sales teams.

As the emphasis on face-to-face interaction as a way to build trust decreases in lieu of other ways of building trust, the need to be “in the field” also decreases. It is unlikely that field sales as a discipline will disappear any time soon, the economic bar at which a face-to-face interaction is “necessary” is in the middle of a dramatic shift.

Trust and Economics

The amount of trust we put into a vendor has a strong relationship with the size of a deal we are willing to sign. The economic value must of course be there, but without the element of trust, the deal is unlikely to close. This trust shift therefore has major implications on the size of deals that are likely to be closable through an inside (over the phone/web) sales model.

Whereas historically, inside sales teams would generally close deals with an average selling price (ASP) of below $20,000, these teams are now able to close deals at much larger ASPs. Some organizations are seeing effective use of inside sales up to $100,000 in ASP. This shift towards an inside sales model reduces both the cost and complexity of the sales process, and in doing so opens up a significant economic opportunity.

David Skok of Matrix Partners wrote an excellent piece that looked at sales cycle complexity as a driver of the economics of a business that explores this concept in great detail. His article is well worth a read, but the short story is that any reduction in sales cycle complexity (such as moving from a field sales model to an inside sales model) can remove an order of magnitude from your overall costs (and hence required price points).


Trust and Reputation

Inside sales teams are able to develop the level of effectiveness that is being seen in recent times by building trusted relationships through online interactions and presence in communities, and understanding key players in the buying committee through LinkedIn and other online tools.

These teams also relying on their company's reputation to a large amount. That company reputation, if built on a foundation of corporate openness and transparency, can contribute greatly to the amount of trust prospective buyers are willing to give to the salesperson they are dealing with.

Although face-to-face interactions remain immensely valuable in building trust, and will remain necessary for very large transactions, the efficiencies of the inside sales model give it a significant advantage in smaller transactions. This efficiency win, combined with the new ability to build trust through means other than eye contact, are moving inside sales in many organizations from small transactions to much larger transactions. This trend is likely to continue as the communication tools and trust-building approaches continue to tip the balance in favour of the inside sales model.

Behavioral Targeting and Large Populations

I'm a big proponent of marketing measurement and careful analysis, but it's worth a cautionary tale as sometimes measurements can lead one astray. The more finely tuned your messages are to the interests of the buyers, the more they can cause analysis confusion if not approached correctly.

The core of great B2B marketing communications is relevance. If your message is relevant to the audience you are communicating with, it will resonate, if not, no matter how well written it is, it will not resonate. However, the key to relevance is understanding the interests of each prospect so that a marketing message can be delivered accordingly.

Within your universe of prospects, there may be only a small percentage of them at any one time who are the precise buyer role and executive level, at the particular stage of the buying process that your marketing message ideally targets. However, many marketers fall into the temptation to broaden out their messaging to a larger universe in order to get an overall increased effect. Whereas this may seem like a good idea, as it increases the overall campaign results, it can have the unintended effect of alienating a large segment of your audience as we discussed recently in looking at the idea of neutral results in a marketing campaign.

Equally importantly, however, is the fact that a poorly targeted message can lead to highly inaccurate marketing measurements due to the overall effect of a larger population. For example, let’s look at two marketing messages, for comparison. Message one was highly relevant to VPs of Marketing at the Solution Discovery phase of their buying process (2% of your database), and achieved a stellar 30% response rate in that segment. Message two was relevant to Managers of IT at the Awareness and Education phase (10% of your database), but only achieved a 8% response rate in that segment.

For the sake of this example, let’s assume that the general population of your database, outside of the segment to which each message was relevant, responded equally poorly with a 1% response rate.

If this campaign was targeted to the entire database, you can see quickly how the results can show a counter-intuitive message. Message one, would show a 30% response rate in 2% of your database, and a 1% response rate in 98% of your database, for an overall response rate of just 1.58%.

Message two would show an 8% response rate in 10% of your database and a 1% response rate in 90% of your database for an overall response rate of 1.7%. If you look simply at the raw numbers, without diving deeper into the analysis, you can see how the final results will be misleading and will show the reverse of what is true. Clearly, it is the definition of the list, rather than the message success itself, that is causing these results to appear as they do.

Only by first looking at the targeting of your list, including both the fit of the individual, and the stage they are in their buying process, can you successfully show analytics that correctly reflect how effective each message was within that target psychographic or demographic segment. The results might be surprising.

Message Delivery vs. Message Discovery

The most obvious change in marketing that we are seeing lately comes down to how our messages reach their intended recipients. This is driven, of course, by changes in the behavior of our audience of potential buyers. The information “filters” we use are shifting from being economic filters, driven by publishers, to social filters, driven by the relevance of individuals and their messages. As this takes place, we as marketers need to shift towards thinking about how messages can be "discovered", rather than how they are delivered.

There is no more obvious place where this transition is happening than in the worlds of search and social media.

Search, either natural or paid, provides an active way to discover information. A prospective buyer actively seeks information on a given topic based on keywords. Successful marketers are able to ensure that their content is present at the top of the search results, either through an effective search engine optimization strategy, or through good search engine marketing and a healthy search marketing budget.

In the various social media channels, however, information is not pushed out directly, but rather it is published, and then discovered by an audience based on recommendations from their peers, content syndication, and chance. The more interesting and relevant your content is, the larger an audience of influencers will share it, forward it, and link to it, bringing it to the much broader audience that they influence.

Distribution via Influencers

Unlike in search marketing, however, there is no clear metaphor for applying a marketing budget in order to achieve broader distribution of your information within social media. Although a variety of paid structures are being experimented with, none have received the wide acceptance that paid search marketing has.

This means that the most reliable way to ensure that your messages are maximally discoverable within the world of social media is to build strong relationships with the key influencers in your space who are likely to share those messages and ensure that your messages are sufficiently interesting, relevant and non-salesy in order to make them shareable.

Your long term reputation with each of these key influencers is based on a history of creating high quality content, but each individual content piece stands on its own in terms of its ability to be found to be interesting and sharable. The techniques of great journalists are of use here in making each content piece most interesting and most likely to be read.

Headlines, Teasers, and Discovery

Whether it is an article title, an interesting statistic, a tweet, a news headline, or a catchy name for an eBook, the majority of your potential audience will only encounter the briefest of summaries of what your content is about. Convincing your audience to take the step from headline to content by clicking on your content is as much art as is it science.

The better the headline catches the potential reader’s attention, without being misleading, the more the content is read and the messages within it discovered.

The art of writing provocative, catchy, and intriguing summaries of information in just a few words was originally developed by newspaper editors writing headlines. Their goal was to have their publication “discovered” by those passing by a news stand. Now, in a world dominated by the need to make information discoverable, these skills are required more than ever. Each article, headline, or tweet should be thought of in the same light. The better the headline catches the potential reader’s attention, without being misleading, the more the content is read and the messages within it discovered.

Publicly Available Pricing: Theory and Practice

A lot of what I write on this blog has to do with the changes that have happened as a result of buyers’ increasing access to information. Often, these changes are looked at from a general perspective. Today, I want to look a very specific example of how this overall market transition affected us at Eloqua. It’s a very representative, specific, example of what’s going on in the market in general.

Last week we made the pricing for Eloqua’s software product packages public on our website for the first time:

The starting prices range from $1450 to $10,000 per month, depending on the level selected.

Just hearing this likely makes everyone who has ever been a field sales rep cringe. Won’t this blow up deals? What if an Enterprise buyer hears of an SMB buyer making a purchase at 1/10th the price? Won’t you be excluded from deals based on the price being seen as too high (or too low)?

Unfortunately, these arguments are based on an incorrect assumption that without talking to our sales team, buyers will not have the ability to form these perceptions of our price. That assumption, however, is false. Now, buyers are able to gather information, form opinions, and come to conclusions without ever talking to a salesperson. The sales team is competing with Google as a source for information, and that is not an easy battle to win.

So, with the market transmitting information very efficiently, the question for us was not whether the market should have access to opinions on our pricing – they already had formed opinions. The question was whether those perceptions could be better guided by contributing accurate information to the conversation.

In our case, the breadth of organizations we served had led to a perception in the SMB market that we were significantly more expensive than we actually were. So, we were better off to correct that data point in the market, rather than allow mis-perceptions to be the guiding data point, as that could easily lead to not being considered in a deal at all if the perception was significantly different than reality.

As with any change of this type, agreeing on the theory of what is happening in the market is much easier than the tactical implementation of the changes that are needed. There was much debate internally, and many points of view were raised. However, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and even in the short time it has been public a number of conversations have started with buyers who had held misperceptions of price.

Are there any changes like this that your organization is considering that are easier to agree to in theory than in practice? Will you move forward with them?

Google, Display Ads, and B2B Marketing

Google just pushed a tiny bit further into their long-stated strategy of making display advertising their next billion dollar business. Former DoubleClick exec Barry Salzman joined the team to bring this vision closer to reality, and it’s expected that we’ll see more movement from Google in this direction over the next year.

What does this strategy mean for B2B marketers? A lot.

As B2B marketers, we love search, both natural, and paid, as it gives us a highly precise way of targeting buyers based on a real-time understanding of their interests. If someone searches for “demand generation”, we can reasonably assume, that at that moment in time, they are quite interested in learning about “demand generation”. Targeting our messages against a profile that accurate makes sense in an environment where we are selling products that are often complex, expensive, and highly considered, to a very narrow audience of business people who are interested.

The Flaw With Search

The problem with this is that it relies on the prospect to "actively" seek information. They need to make the effort to perform a search for a specific piece of information, and when they do, we are able to present them with a message. This works well, but only in situations where they are actively searching for a specific type of information. Outside of that, we have no way to reach them. This means that any messages we would like them to discover more “passively” in order to start them thinking about new areas that their business could be improved, change their perceptions of a certain solution, or highlight an area to consider that they may not have considered, we are unable to get that message in front of them.

This active/passive challenge for marketers is about to move to the fore-front as Google brings its weight into the display search game. With its heavy investments in social media, with the new Buzz platform, and the full Twitter feed, as well as the algorithms to understand these in real time, Google is in an enviable position. This data allows Google to begin to understand who is interested in what at any given moment, and who the influencers are in that particular market.

Intention-Based Advertising

Far more than the loose, mainly demographic-based, targeting that is currently available to marketers in display search, Google will conceivably be able to present display ads based on actual area of interest and intent (acting more in the role of information concierge). Much as we currently target search ads based on the key phrase typed, we may soon be able to target display ads based on key phrases that are not typed – just acted on. As prospective buyers show an interest in investigating a certain area, say by clicking on a link, shared socially, that refers to an article on generating more leads for sales, Google may be able to then show them a display Ad targeted at any interest in “demand generation”.

Right now it is difficult to target prospective B2B buyers “passively”, so much of our marketing efforts are designed around making it easier for prospective buyers to find us when they are actively looking.
This may soon change.

Mapping the Buying Process - A Framework

One of the recurring themes in this discussion has been the concept of thinking in terms of a buying process not a selling process. Many times when I speak about this topic publicly, there is general agreement in the audience, but the question of how to map a buying process often comes up. In some industries, it is significantly easier than in others, but some common techniques can be used across all industries to best understand how buyers ultimately arrive at a buying decision.

Mapping this process is more art than science in most cases, but the following question framework can help analyze how your buyers buy and if there are opportunities for better facilitating their buying processes. In each main stage of the buying process, one set of questions (below) looks at understanding whether there is a problem at all in this stage of the buying process, a second set looks at understanding how current buyers make it through that stage, and a third set looks at how your overall marketing performance could be improved in that stage.


Awareness and Education

Is there a problem: Are prospective buyers generally aware of your solution category and what it can do for their business?
- Ask industry analysts their opinion on the general knowledge of the market among likely buyers
- Survey your sales team on their experiences with initial calls
- Perform some first-hand survey research with likely buyers

What currently happens: How do existing prospects become educated about your category?
- Survey existing customers and prospects on where they read about topics in the general area of business you are in
- Analyze the traffic sources to any of your educational or thought leadership content
- Become an avid reader of industry newsletters and sites to understand their content topics and whether messages about your solution area are included

What are the options: How would prospects become aware of your category if they were not already aware?
- Look at the search results that are returned for searches on some of the terms related to pains that you solve (not terms that describe your category)
- Survey your marketing team on what events, tradeshows, and publications are well attended/read by key buyers in your industry
- Discover which industry sites discuss you and/or your competitors frequently
- Analyze which sites are referring web traffic to your site



Vendor Discovery

Is there a problem: If prospective buyers are going to find vendors to look into more deeply, are you on their list?
- Review competitor wins to understand whether you had been in consideration
- Look at the percentage of search phrases driving traffic to your site that already contain your brand or product names
- Poll your sales team on the frequency with which they were added as a last minute option, based on a cold call or chance encounter
- Analyze the percentage of leads that are originally sourced by marketing or arrived as inbound leads vs being generated by a cold call

What currently happens: How have prospects typically found you?
- Analyze the non-branded search terms that drive traffic to your website
- Poll your inside sales team on how their inbound leads heard of you
- Report on the breakdown of inquiries by source to understand what is driving early-stage inquiries
- Understand the percentage of leads in your marketing database that have been nurtured prior to becoming a qualified lead

What are the options: How would prospective buyers likely build their list of potential vendors?
- Determine whether the key industry comparison charts and analysts list your company
- Search for terms related to your category to see if your content is featured in the results
- Listen to webcasts, videos, or talks from key industry influencers to see if you are mentioned
- Act as a potential buyer and do your own "research" into solutions for the problems you solve to see if you are findable


Solution Validation

Is there a problem: When a buyer evaluates your solution, do they select you?
- Look at win/loss ratios for deals over the past few months or quarters
- Compare growth rates of your business vs competitors
- Build a discipline of analyzing losses with the sales team to understand buyer reasons
- Determine if you are ranked poorly in industry comparison charts

What happens now: How are buyers currently making their selection of a vendor?
- Analyze competitors positioning of your organization and your solutions
- Conduct third party win/loss surveys to obtain deeper information on buyer decision criteria
- Scan search phrases that include your brand or product names to look for objections or decision criteria
- Look at the marketing resources (whitepapers, case studies, free trials) currently being actively used by buyers to understand their current experience

What are the options: How can buyers’ decision process and decision criteria be better influenced?
- Identify key analysts and influencers who guide the market on how to think about key decision factors
- Map buyer objections to changes in buying criteria or positioning that can be inserted into nurture marketing efforts
- Audit common objections against current marketing assets to determine if gaps exists that would be better filled with a different marketing asset such as a free trial


This is, of course, just a framework for thinking about the problem. Every organization, and every industry, deals with a slightly different set of buying challenges. However, this framework can be quite useful for identifying gaps, challenges, or opportunities in the way your audience currently buys.

No such thing as a Neutral Outcome

There is no way to determine with 100% accuracy where an individual buyer is in their buying process. This leads to a difficult marketing conundrum when looking at targeting marketing efforts based on a best possible approximation of where that buyer is likely to be in his or her buying process; in a broad enough population, there will always be some response to a marketing campaign, regardless of what buyer stage it was targeted at.

For example, if an end of quarter campaign is targeted at those almost ready to purchase in order to spur the maximum amount of business for that quarter, it will have its maximum effect in buyers that are found to be nearly ready to purchase, and are in the solution validation phase. However, determining the stage a buyer is in is both inexact, and prone to change rapidly with time. Therefore, there will still be some response in buyers found to be in the earlier vendor discovery phase, and there may even be a small response among buyers who are at the earliest phases of education and awareness.

An argument is often made that this means that the best option is to have as broad a pattern of communication as you can. Even at the top of the funnel, you will be able to drive some revenue, albeit small, but with the cost of an email campaign being almost zero, the return is still there. As long as unsubscribe rates are not high, the downside is minimal, so the campaign is worthwhile.

However, this argument assumes that anyone who does not respond to the offer is essentially a “neutral” outcome. They did not respond in a positive manner and move towards a purchase, they did not respond in a negative manner and unsubscribe, so their outcome must be neutral. This thinking is wrong, and leads to dangerous decision-making.

The outcome of the email campaign may indeed be neutral from the viewpoint of the marketer – no action was detected – but from the viewpoint of the prospect it was far from it. A non-response likely indicates that the prospect found nothing interesting about your message. This is a dangerous step towards that individual emotionally unsubscribing - reflexively ignoring your messages without looking to see if they are of interest.

Chances are, you only have a few opportunities to deliver an irrelevant message to a prospect before they begin to emotionally unsubscribe. Whereas they may not immediately, or ever, click on your unsubscribe link, you have essentially lost your ability to connect with that prospect. In today’s B2B marketing environment, no one can afford to lose the interest of their prospective buyers. The best way to maintain their interest is to ensure your communications are highly relevant to who they are, and more importantly to where they are in their own buying process.

One of the key goals of any marketing automation implementation is to do just that – to understand each individual’s behaviors and interests, and allow that person to be nurtured only with content of relevance to them. This approach tightens your segmentation focus to not just the demographics and firmographics of who the individual and their organization are, but also the psychographics of where they are in their buying process.

Only by eliminating the idea of a non-response being a “neutral” outcome can we understand the true cost of an irrelevant marketing communication.

*This post originally appeared as a guest post on Savvy B2B

The Evolution of Social Influence

Increasingly, social media sites are investing in ways to list, rank, and categorize participants. Twitter’s new list feature is the most recent incarnation of this. The challenge that is being tackled is simple; individuals do not have the same influence on their peers in all categories. This is clear just by looking at our own personal lives; a person we might turn to for advice on audio visual equipment might not be the same person we’d get local restaurant recommendations from, and we might turn to a third friend for guidance on the best travel deals.
Basic metrics like the number of “friends” or “followers” don’t allow that level of detail to be captured, as one person may be widely followed for his opinions on cars, but that should not necessarily grant him any extra credibility when he chooses to share an opinion on wines. Lists, however, begin to break down this influence by categories. If this person is listed by many of his followers in lists pertaining to cars (or related synonyms) and none related to wine, then his influence on car-related topics should be seen to be much higher than his influence on wine-related topics.

This becomes vital when we begin to use social criteria to govern search results. A link that is shared by 10 wine experts should receive a much higher social ranking than a link that is shared by many more people if those people do not have a social graph that shows that they are respected by their peers on wine-related topics.

The credibility and authority we granted to the major publishing institutions, based mainly on their overall audience size, is now being parceled out to an infinitely broader publishing audience. Whereas an advertisement in a major topical publication may have been the best way of reaching that audience historically, now that access is through social means. If the key influencers in your topic area see a piece of content or a viewpoint as being relevant and correct, it will become discoverable to those who are interested in that topic area within a much broader network.

As B2B marketers, this will have a profound effect on us in the coming years. If we want our audiences to discover us, either directly through search, or through a variety of Amazon-like recommendation means that are likely to appear in the coming few years, we need to ensure that the world sees us as credible experts in the field that we hope to influence. This effect will be relevant all the way through our buyers' entire buying process, as the information they need, and dicsover as buyers, will be presented to them based on their peers and influencers.

There is no easy way to “short-cut” this process. Instead, to be seen as an expert, and included in the various lists, groups, and categories that will be seen as defining this expertise by the search engines, we need to continue to create great content that is read, shared, and referenced. As we do that, we will begin to find ourselves listed as experts in the categories in question, and the social influence we garner will be reflected by the search results of tomorrow.

Relationship Sales and Today's New Buyer

For years, the prevailing thinking in sales has been oriented around relationship sales. The idea was that by being a friendly person, a good listener, and a decent golfer, you could gain the opportunity to build trust with potential buyers. In initial conversations, sales would ask a lot of questions, learn about the prospect’s business, delve deep into areas of pain or business challenge, and finally wrap things up with a solution that was oriented to curing these pains and solving these challenges.

However in today’s world, there is often not an opportunity to have that conversation in the first place. Unless you have information of value to offer first, the chance of a prospective buyer wanting to spend an hour with you to describe their business while you ask questions is plummeting . The access to information, which was once mainly managed by sales, is now open to all. This has forever changed the dynamics of relationship selling, as the early conversations, upon which the “trusted advisor” relationship were built, are now being diligently avoided by most prospective buyers.

Now, that trust is built by educating prospective buyers early in their buying process, providing information of value to them, and establishing the credibility of knowing enough about the space to be able to solve their problems. Rather than relying on large sales teams with good golf skills, this now relies on marketing and sales teams who are able to work together closely to understand prospective buyers and educate them on topics of interest to them so they remain engaged throughout a lengthy buying cycle.

So where does that leave the discipline of Sales?

The discipline of sales is changing fundamentally, as there is a shift away from the upfront concepts of relationship building social functions and the discovery call. Sales is shifting towards being a discipline that builds trusted relationships based on providing real business value based on prospective buyers true needs and discovery based on guiding, and observing, buyers own education processes.

For those in the Atlanta area, I’m excited to be joining Rick Page, author of Hope is Not a Strategy, and Debbie Qaqish, Principal Partner at the Pedowitz Group in a luncheon and panel discussion on these exact topics. The event is on Friday, September 25th, and more information is available here:

http://success.eloqua.com/?elqPURLPage=2557

For those unable to attend this event in Atlanta, I will definitely share the ideas, thoughts, and discussions that come out of the event with the audience here.

The Map is not the Terrain: Marketing Analysis and the Non-Linear Funnel

The conceptual model of a funnel is a great one for understanding buyer stages. At the top of the funnel is the broadest universe of suspects who may at some point have an interest in your product or services, but currently do not show significant interest. There are usually the largest number of these potential buyers, hence it being the widest part of the funnel. Further down the funnel, closer to being an actual buyer, interest levels increase while, in most cases, the number of individuals decreases.

Marketing’s overall role is to facilitate the buying process, through which people progress from mildly interested to active buyers. Lead nurturing is the process that we use, and we think in terms of how that nurturing builds awareness, interest, and then purchase consideration. As such, the funnel forms a great representation of the situation, and acts as a very good map. However, as with any map, it is only a representation of the situation, and is not exact.

The biggest difference in the B2B marketing realm is in the linearity of the buying process. The map that a funnel represents is often taken to be linear. Buyers progress through a buying process as neatly as one can draw a funnel, moving through increasing levels of interest, and then ultimately purchasing. However, this is not a reflection of reality. Realistically, most buyers move up and down the funnel in a very non-linear manner.

For many months or years, a potential buyer might move in and out of being interested, occasionally showing a brief spurt of interest, and then falling back into being inactive for long periods. At certain points, a deep amount of research and a significant amount of activity may show that a buyer has moved much further along in their buying process, but then can be followed by a quiet period as internal business changes temporarily pause the project that had led to the heightened interest. This can lead to a perception of a leaky funnel as leads that may seem almost ready for sales shift back to an earlier phase in their buying process.

Overall, the funnel model works; generally buyers progress through increasing levels of interest towards purchase. However, at an individual buyer level, the movement is much less linear. This leads to the challenges with defining a “perfect path” as talked about earlier, each individual passes through a unique path towards purchase, making it impossible to define a single path that can push a buying decision.

Similarly, this non-linearity means that the most workable way of looking at marketing analysis looks at the marketing funnel from the top down. By analyzing a funnel from a top-down perspective, you can see high level trends in terms of how healthy your marketing funnel is, and whether buyers are moving in the right direction within it, but you are not constrained by the behaviors of individual buyers, which may be much less linear.

Much like a map providing an accurate description of terrain when viewed from a high level, but missing the details at a more micro level, a funnel is a great model of the marketing analysis terrain from a high level, but is not an exact view of individual buyers’ behavior. This is a concept worth keeping in mind in designing nurturing programs - one can't assume that buyers progress linearly down a funnel, so one can't sequence marketing content in that order. Instead, buyers at each stage should be nurtured in a way that is specific to that stage, but watched for signs that they are progressing to more advanced stages.

The Buying Process; Auditing your Content Assets

Shifting your thinking from a selling process to a buying process means understanding how buyers buy and what stages each type of buyer goes through. When you have mapped out your buyer roles and the stages in their buying process, the next step is to determine what content is needed or available at each step in order to facilitate their buying process.

A very useful exercise to undertake is an audit of your existing marketing content in order to understand what content you currently have available and what new content may be required. This audit leads to a content matrix that forms a very useful basis for defining both your nurture marketing approaches and your content development strategy.

Creating the matrix is relatively straightforward. On one axis, list the key buyer roles you encounter; perhaps these are the standard technical buyers, user buyers, and economic buyers that are common definitions across many industries, or perhaps you have a more specific set of buyers you engage with.

On the second axis, list the stages of the buying process for your customers. Generally, this goes through three stages:

- Education and Awareness, where buyers learn about what is possible or required in a given industry
- Vendor Discovery, where buyers determine what vendors are available to solve a particular business pain
- Solution Validation, where buyers short list and ultimately select a particular vendor to assist them with a specific challenge

However, the phases of a buying process for your business will be quite specific.

With this matrix complete, you can now remove any cells that are not relevant, perhaps if user buyers are only brought in late in your buying process. Each cell in your content matrix now represents a combination of a buyer and the phase in the buying process that they are going through at a certain point in time. Each of your marketing assets should map to one of these cells (or perhaps a small number of cells in the case of certain broadly applicable assets).

By filling in the content matrix with your available marketing assets, and perhaps color-coding with red, yellow, and green based on quality, you get an overall view of where in the buyers’ buying process your content assets exist, and where they are strong. Some obvious gaps may become immediately apparent.

This content matrix can then be compared against the marketing challenge you face. As you plan your lead nurturing strategies, understanding where in the marketing funnel you need to focus on and where in the buying process your content exists is key.

A/B Testing; What Result are you Testing Against?

Most B2B marketers today understand the importance of testing. A quick change in a subject line, some copy, or an offer can dramatically alter the performance of a campaign. At Eloqua, our own marketing team does A/B testing on almost every piece that is sent out. However, the question we all face as marketers, is what result we should be testing against. In B2C marketing, it is often significantly easier, as campaigns are often designed to drive explicit purchase behavior, and success can be measured against revenue results.



In B2B marketing, however, the revenue result is often significantly further away. Ideally in testing a campaign, one would be able to determine which drove more actual buying behavior, but with most buying processes stretching out over months, it would be impossible to efficiently test and launch a campaign in this manner. Inversely, testing against the common results of opens, or click-throughs only tells a small fraction of the story, as there is only a very loose tie between an email open or clickthrough, and the final result of a purchase.

Luckily, our options for what results we test against, in fact, span a spectrum. A careful selection of the end result to test against guides exactly what our tests will show. Looked at along two dimensions, we have the following options to test against:



Email Opens: The easiest to test against, but the least accurate by far. This is mainly an indicator of the quality of your subject line. Whereas this can be tested very quickly, it suffers from technological differences in email platforms, as well as a very limited testing scope.


Email Click-throughs: Slightly more difficult to test against as it requires tracking of links clicked, but this is common in most email platforms today. However, this also suffers from a very limited accuracy, as it does not indicate much about the recipient’s interest in purchasing


Inquiries: Tracking of which email drove more inquiries (landing page form submissions) is a significant bump in test accuracy. This now tests whether the subject line was compelling enough to lead to the email being read, the content and offer was interesting and drove a click-through, and the landing page was optimized to maximize form submission rates. This is a very comprehensive test of your campaign, and usually sees results within one or two days of running an A/B test campaign


Qualified Inquiries: Even higher in terms of testing accuracy is testing against qualified inquiries. If, in the A/B test, email A drove 100 inquiries, and email B drove 80, but most of B’s inquiries are the right target executive, while most of A’s inquiries are students and more junior staff members, clearly email B is the best option. Note that the dimension of lead scoring we are talking about here is explicit scoring, as we are just looking to see whether the right executives are the ones inquiring.


Opportunities: We do see an increase in accuracy as we move to Opportunities as a result to test against, but this also increases our difficulty significantly. There are often many more factors involved in qualifying an opportunity as being ready for sales than just one campaign, so this leads to a significant increase in complexity of the situation to analyze.


Revenue: This is clearly the highest accuracy to test against, but the length of a sales cycle means that it is prohibitively difficult to work with, and the ideal timing to run the campaign in question may have long passed by the time that the test results are available. The way we need to think about B2B marketing analysis means that, in general, it is nearly impossible to test the effectiveness of a single campaign on revenue in a meaningful way.



Each of these options has benefits and drawbacks, so it is important to consider what you are testing against when defining your A/B test. In my experience, in a B2B marketing situation, testing to determine which option produced more qualified inquiries often provides the optimal balance between ease of testing and accuracy of results.

LA Fire Department has lessons for B2B marketers

I was in a conference session the other day and a case study on the Los Angeles Fire Department’s use of social media. I mentioned it on Twitter and was quickly thanked by the good folks behind @LAFDTalk, their Twitter handle for general community engagement.

The conversation got me thinking about the parallels with B2B marketing. I think there are many.

The first parallel is that at first glance, it’s not obvious what either should be doing in the social media realm. Although there are examples of fires being reported on Twitter, in general people still report fires using 911. Similarly in B2B marketing, when the deal is finalized, it is usually with a direct sales person in the field, not over Twitter or any form of social media.

However, when looked at more deeply, both are able to take advantage of the tools of social media extremely well. The difference is in how broadly you view your mission. I had the opportunity to ask Ron Myers at LA Fire Department his thoughts, and he expressed their mission in a very broad way:

A short answer to how broadly we view our mission lies in the LAFD Labs projects currently deployed or in beta production. With over 80 Web 2.0 projects in our sand box, we are able to assist in life saving efforts not only here at home, but, around the world. By using social media tools, we are able to provide real-time life safety information to those in harms way. Evacuations, fire information, recovery, and other real-time information saves lives.

By translating our safety messages into nine different languages, we have the awesome privilege of helping others around the globe while providing safety messages locally. LAFD Everywhere focuses on sharing our City’s experience and expertise with those who don’t have the resources to produce the information on their own.

Over the past 4 years, we have embarked on an aggressive campaign known as the “LAFD Everywhere Initiative”. Without a funding stream and with no staff, we have been able to utilize a wide variety of open source, social media tools to deliver the Department’s message and prepare for disaster management.

This is clearly far beyond fighting fires, and even beyond Los Angeles. The overall emphasis is on changing mindsets, awareness, and precautions in order to maximize the safety of the public in general. A quick glance on the LAFD blogs shows a broad array of articles talking about fire safety, traffic safety, and home safety as well as the stories of recent fire incidents. LAFD, through their social media efforts, including a great blog on all things fire and safety related in LA, has truly engaged their overall mission to educate the public on safety issues and keep us all safe.

In the same way, as marketers, if we think of our mission as purely generating leads for sales, we are focusing far too narrowly. As marketers, our goal must be to guide the market’s buying decisions to ensure they take into account the key factors that affect how purchase decisions are made. I talked with Ron about where he felt their social media efforts were most effective, and he had this to say:

This is an interesting question, one that we struggle with when deciding which projects take priority when developing new tools. Our primary focus is to protect lives. We have been able to take advantage of Twitter, Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, and other social media tools to provide real-time information for evacuations, floods, fires, and other life changing events.

We use blogs extensively to distribute preparedness message, recovery information, evacuation maps, and other messages almost daily. The old adage of an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is true. Nothing haunts Firefighters and Paramedics more than the needless loss of life. Preparedness, Prevention, Mitigation, and Recovery all play a roll in our Emergency Public Information delivery system.

Similarly, as B2B marketers, if we focus on education throughout the buying process, as early as the education and awareness phase, we can alter perceptions and behaviors that will guide buyers to consider buying factors in a new light. By challenging ourselves as to how broadly we think of our mission as marketers, we are able to think of social media in a new strategic light. We spoke earlier about the three types of challenges that B2B marketers face, and each of these challenges can be thought of as an education challenge. Through addressing those education challenges, one potential buyer at a time, we are able to leverage social media to improve our organization’s overall brand perception.


Ron Myers, Brian Humphrey and their team are working to make the Los Angeles population safer through their use of social media as an education tool. Similarly, as marketers, we can begin to guide buyer decision making through our use of social media as an education tool in a similar manner.

The Goals of Lead Nurturing

One of the most common ways to use a marketing automation system is for lead nurturing. Also called “drip marketing”, “nurture marketing” or various other names, this is the art and science of keeping prospects “warm” until such time as they are ready to buy. At that level, there seems to be general agreement that it’s a great process to put in place. Similarly, the results are clearly showing that there is tremendous value in nurturing leads. However, there is often something of a lack of consensus on what the approach should be for nurturing leads.

At a high level, I would describe the goals of lead nurturing as three things, in order:

1) Maintain permission to stay in contact with the prospect: This is by far the most important goal of lead nurturing, and one that is most often overlooked. If a prospect emotionally unsubscribes, you have lost your connection with them, and you may in fact be marked as spam.


2) Establish key ideas, thoughts, or comparison points through education: A prospect you are nurturing may not enter a buying process for many months, if not quarters. However, if you can educate prospects, and by doing so, guide their thinking slightly to incorporate key requirements and ways of analyzing the market, when they do become buyers, you will be much better positioned


3) Watch for signs of progress through the buying cycle: As you nurture prospects, you can watch their digital body language to give you an understanding of when they are moving to a new stage of their buying process

Maintaining permission to stay in contact with the prospect is, as mentioned, the most critical aspect. As we’ve seen, unsubscribe rates, as measured by explicit clicks on your unsubscribe link can be very deceptive. Many recipients will emotionally unsubscribe instead. In order to manage your lead nurturing processes successfully, you need to ensure that you pay close attention to the engagement level of your audience through watching their response activity and manage the frequency with which you communicate with them in the lead nurturing process accordingly.

The need to maintain your audience’s permission to stay in contact with them is the key driver of why high quality, valuable, non-salesy content is crucial to your nurture strategy. However, that content can also guide thought processes and decision criteria. Often, buying decisions are influenced by how buyers think about the market, what “fault lines” they see as crucial in comparing vendors, and what they believe to be possible in the market. Depending on the buying process challenge you face, you can use this content marketing opportunity to educate buyers on what is possible, or on key buying criteria they may not have considered.

If you are successful in the first two goals, you can then begin to look for progress along a buying process through watching your buyers’ digital body language. You can include “teaser” content, such as content from an RSS feed and watch that for signs of interest in a topic that indicates direct buying interest, or can establish interim actions for prospects to take, such as signing up for a webinar or trial, that would indicate a deeper buying interest.

Lead nurturing can be a very powerful way to stay engaged with future potential prospects, and in doing so, successfully establish buyer preference and understand buyer timing. However, it only allows you to accomplish this if you are careful to maintain your audience’s permission to remain in contact with them.

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.

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.