6 things the iPad means for B2B Marketers

Yesterday, Steve Jobs announced Apple's latest device, the iPad. A 10 inch, touch-screen tablet with Wi-Fi access, and an extension of the iPhone/iPod platform for both application development and media purchase. It's a beautiful device, as is expected from Apple, and will surely see plenty of uptake over the coming year.

The transition that this causes in the consumer market, and to book sellers, has already been much discussed. As a marketer focused on selling to businesses, however, there remains the question of what effect this will have.

Here are six important changes that we will likely see, as B2B marketers, as the iPad and its peers become more commonplace:

1) Returning relevance of print media: the iPad is designed to shake up the print landscape, for newspapers, magazines, and periodicals. If it succeeds in this, we will see the transition of that subscriber base from off-line to digital. This means that print advertising, long too untargeted to be a mainstay of B2B marketing, may make its return. With pay-for-performance price models and highly precise targeting, the advertising opportunities may be as interesting to B2B marketers as search engines were 5 years ago.

2) Integration of offline and online experiences: the form factor of a tablet makes it extremely easy to have with you at all points in the day. For B2B marketers at offline events such as seminars and tradeshows, this means that the online and offline experiences can be melded seamlessly. A salesperson carrying an iPad can easily segue into a live demonstration if the conversation goes that way, and a prospect carrying an iPad can be guided to online resources during the booth conversation if it makes sense to. The integrated experience can be much greater than either alone.

3) Books and whitepapers become interactive: as books and whitepapers are more and more read on devices like an iPad, rich interactive aspects become increasingly possible. Embedded videos within a book, links for more detailed exploration of topics, and interactive experiences to highlight a point all become possible, allowing us to rethink the book and whitepaper formats entirely.

4) Location awareness in everything: Although only the 3G model of the iPad appears to have GPS, the Wi-Fi will enable location detection, and it is not a great leap to assume that GPS will be commonplace in future models. As more devices become location aware, more applications will be re-factored to take advantage of that location knowledge. New applications like foursquare, or older applications like LinkedIn will build deep location knowledge of people in your network, allowing new forms of social networking to increasingly bridge the physical divide. Similarly, this will allow much more accurate location-based message targeting and may revive the local breakfast or lunch event as it becomes easier to connect with only local executives.

5) Application explosion: The prevalence of iPad devices, if successful, in the executive audiences who make most B2B purchase decisions could mean a great opportunity for freemium iPad applications that would help those executives in one aspect of their daily lives, while building the case for your full solution.

6) Sales enablement enrichment: A field sales person is another likely candidate for iPad adoption, and their ability to remain mobile while working with a full-size form factor device means that their need for insights and data on leads will greatly increase. Rather than just wanting the name and phone number of a lead sent to their Blackberry, they will insist on rich activity data and deeper insights being available on their iPad.

If the iPad is successful, it will certainly affect all aspects of society, much as the iPhone has done. As B2B marketers, we will benefit from watching these trends as they unfold and hopefully being ahead of them.

What are your thoughts on these trends? Any I have missed?

Interview with David Meerman Scott

I had a chance to chat with David Meerman Scott recently on a wide variety of topics. As one of the leading thinkers on social media in a business environment, his ideas, examples, and perspectives are fantastic to hear.

In this interview, we talked about why B2B marketers are so hesitant to embrace “fun” as an element of their marketing, and why we need to think about selling to people, not amorphous businesses. As part of that transition, we need to focus on creating a steady flow of rich, interesting, shareable content. Once we do that, we will find our messages shared freely among thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of potential buyers.


See below for our conversation (if this does not load, please click here to see the full conversation with David Meerman Scott):


Interview with David Meerman Scott


Towards the end of the conversation, DM Scott also spoke about how to balance freely shared content with the need for a flow of qualified leads for our sales teams. When it’s okay to ask for information, and when it is less likely to work. I hope you enjoyed watching the conversation and got as much out of it as I did.


For more insights from David Meerman Scott, see his blog at http://www.webinknow.com/ or follow him on Twitter (@dmscott).

The Longevity of Fun in B2B Social Media

If there’s one thing that B2B marketers seem to be hesitant about it’s having fun in their marketing efforts. For some reason, even though we know that nobody enjoys reading boring and dry marketing collateral, and absolutely no one will share it with their friends, we still resort back to creating that style of content.

We would all agree that fun content is more shareable, and infinitely more likely to go viral. However, the one factor of fun content that is often overlooked is its longevity. Fun content has a habit of being discovered, and rediscovered many times, and each time can lead to another Tweet, another Facebook post, or another share, continuing the cycle.

As evidence, I want to share data from one of our not-so-recent campaigns, called The Conversation. It’s a fun, interactive exploration of marketing, the challenges we all face, and the odd things we all do to engage our prospects and measure our results. The great thing is how little it was promoted compared to the results we saw.

The campaign was launched over a year ago, and you can see a spike in leads driven by a promotion of it that we did in January. However, the campaign continues from there, generating a steady flow of leads every day since then. The campaign has been picked up numerous times including a recent Forrester Groundswell award, and you can see from the chart that it shows little sign of stopping.

To be clear, the fun and the humour in this campaign is tied directly to the solution it is here to promote, but in an entertaining and non-salesy way. At the end of the campaign, a marketer can choose to connect with us or not, there is no requirement to fill in the form. (this chart measures the actual leads created as someone interacts with the campaign, and at the end decides to connect with our sales team for further discussions)

However, in taking a message from product and solution, to fun and entertainment, an interesting transition happens. Being fun and entertaining forces us as marketers to connect with the actual people and personalities who might buy our products. This is not the idea of taking a “feature” and spinning it into a “benefit”, it’s much deeper than that. It’s about understanding what motivates, frustrates, entertains, inspires, and irks the people we are hoping to engage with. To do that, we end up creating a message that has a longer shelf life than the latest release, or an interesting capability.

Humor and entertainment lasts longer than features and benefits because it is about people, not about products, and people don’t change as quickly.

What makes a person smile, laugh, or think today will likely make them smile, laugh, or think a year from now. Connecting with buyers on a personal level makes your message not just more shareable, but also more long lasting. After seeing David Meerman Scott speak at Eloqua Experience this year about the concept of a World Wide Rave, and seeing this data from an actual campaign, I’ve become more convinced that we as marketers need to revisit how to add humor and entertainment into our B2B marketing campaigns.

Oh, and make sure you watch The Conversation - it's a lot of fun.

Sales/Marketing Integration - The Technology Stack

Integration between Marketing Automation systems and CRM systems allows a very powerful and valuable flow of data, and business alignment, between marketing and sales. It forms the technology and data basis for a new relationship between your marketing team and your sales team. This is a very powerful concept, and worth digging into in some depth as there are a lot of questions worth asking as you evaluate potential solutions.

First, and most critical, is a look at what actually needs to be integrated between marketing and sales.

I think of it as a three-layer system, in order to keep things simple. This is obviously a somewhat simplified view, but it allows some clarity into the discussion of the integration.

Data:
The first layer is the data. Your marketing team and your sales team are communicating with the same audience in many cases. The data should be synchronized between sales and marketing in order to ensure that when a field is updated, both systems know about it. You will want to make sure that you can synchronize all key data; contacts, accounts, purchase history, etc. Any data that is meaningful for segmentation whether it is directly accessed (like contact data) or relational data (like purchase history).

Unless you have a very simple structure, you will want to allow flexibility in both what data passes between marketing and sales, and what data is tracked on each individual. The data model will share many common elements (name, address, title, etc), but most marketing and sales organizations begin to quickly evolve their data model with elements that are unique to their business. Marketing may store information on prospects’ campaign history, event attendance, meal selection, and communication preferences, while sales may store information on whether certain contract, budget, and commitment milestones had been met. Requiring both marketing and sales to use the same data model is a recipe for significant frustration.

You will also want good control on which data is moved to sales. Generally marketing deals with a broader universe of suspects than you want to pass to sales. If your CRM system becomes filled with this lower quality data, your sales team will become frustrated with invalid and poorly qualified entries. It’s worth keeping a “wheat and chaff” model whereby only the good quality data is passed to sales and the lower quality data is kept, and cleansed, in the marketing database.

In order to do this, and in order to manage a marketing database that sees data from many sources, it is also necessary to have good control over the priority of data that is flowing into your marketing database. If, for example, you have the same contact in multiple data systems, all of which are synchronized with your marketing database, you need to be able to select which of those sources will be treated as a priority in updating your data.

Activity:
The second layer of an integration between marketing automation and CRM is the marketing activity and the prospect’s response. This is critical to an understanding of the individual’s digital body language, and is key to allowing your sales team to understand the individual, the company, and their overall territory.

It’s key in integrating activity to have a very flexible model for configuring what shows up where. The main goal of providing the activity information is to provide for sales enablement, which involves ensuring successful sales adoption. Being able to show prospect activity in a rich, interactive, visual manner is as critical for sales rep adoption as the data itself is.

Similarly, being able to configure what data is presented, and how it shows up is key for sales adoption. In some environments, prospect activity can be presented in an activity history record within the CRM system, whereas in other environments it may be more successful to send real-time email notifications, and in other environments, a weekly report is found to be more effective. The key to this level of the stack is configurability in order to maximize sales adoption.

Process:
The third, and final layer of the integration stack is the process layer. This layer is where the lifecycle of a lead is defined. When a lead is qualified, how is it presented to sales? Is it presented through a task, through a lead record, or through a more customized way? Similarly, if a lead is not followed up on, or is not turned into a live opportunity, what happens next? Is a lead that is not followed up on clawed back and re-distributed? If a follow-up attempt only resulted in a voicemail being left, is the lead automatically nurtured for a period of time before prompting sales with another follow-up attempt?

This process layer is where there is a great opportunity to differentiate your business. By optimizing how leads are passed to sales, in a way that makes sense for your business, you can drive noticeable improvements in your revenue. However, to do this, it’s crucial to be able to have your technology match your exact business process. If it makes sense to create structured follow-up tasks for sales so you can manage and monitor follow-up times, you will need to be able to automatically create and allocate tasks. If you need to focus on clawing back leads after they go quiet in order to plug leaks in your revenue funnel, you’ll need to be able to pull in opportunity history data in order to ensure that your marketing is aware of the sales process stage that individual lead is in.


Sales Alignment and the Technology Stack

Aligning sales and marketing in a new relationship is a challenging task that relies on many changes in people’s daily lives, and your overall business processes. In order to be successful with this new form of alignment, you will need your marketing automation system and your CRM system carefully aligned. This relies on alignment and flexibility at all levels, from data, to activity, to process. If you build your sales and marketing processes on a technology and data foundation with sufficient ability to map to your business processes, it will allow you to learn and grow over time and continually enhance the alignment between your sales and marketing teams.