Personalization and the bottom end of the scale

I'm a big fan of increasing relevance through carefully personalized content. The more that is known about an individual with whom you are going to communicate, the more you can target a message that captures their attention and pushes them forward.

This insight into the individual can be based on their digital body language, but it can also be based on their interaction with your software if you happen to be a software company. The insight provided through looking at software usage patterns can be among the most powerful, as you can build highly relevant content, based on very specific knowledge of an individual - in context of your application.

Many of today's social networking systems have leveraged this beautifully, with communications about visits, friends, comments, and activities that compel the recipient to remain engaged and deepen their usage profile.

However, in doing so, it's critical to set things up for the bottom end of usage that recognizes lack of usage as a pattern, and caters to it.

As an example of this, the screenshot is from an email of this type that I received. I don't have anything bad to say about Naymz, and many people I know use the service. I just don't happen to use it myself - I set up a profile, but never really adopted it. However, the personalization I receive is clearly targeted at amplifying my usage. If I saw 25 visits to my profile in the last week, I might be tempted to dive in a bit further, however with 0 visits, I'm pushed in the opposite direction.

In setting up the personalization systems that we all use, the temptation is there to focus on the highly engaged, and amplify their engagement. Whether it is with product trials, education, or event attendance, we're all tempted to focus on this keen minority, as they are the most fun. However, in doing so, there's a risk we might alienate those who are not yet engaged.

How do you cater your personalization to the non-engaged? What have you seen that worked well in identifying and re-engaging this end of the spectrum?

Natural Search in B2B Marketing - Analyzing Discoverability

Being discoverable by your potential buyers is critical to success in many businesses. As buyers control their buying process more and more, the need to be found when a prospective buyer is searching for a solution to a business pain is increasingly critical. One of the most obvious elements to this is natural search engine optimization. If a prospective buyer is searching for terms related to your business or the pains you solve, you want them to discover your organization.

If they are early in the buying process, you may want them to discover your thought leadership writings, and recognize you as a leader in the field. If they are at a vendor discovery phase or moving towards solution validation, you may want to have them discover writings that clarify how to think about important aspects of the buying decision.

Measuring this discoverability, however, is an interesting challenge, as there are many search phrases that might be relevant to discovering your solution. Against each of these phrases, your main web site, your social media properties, and your competitor’s web properties may be discoverable.

The first challenge is listing the search phrases that are relevant to finding your solution. For each phase of the buying funnel, you will have a different set of phrases, and this will differ based on the marketing challenge you face. If, for example, your main challenge is a Flying Car challenge, you may wish to focus mainly on the awareness stage, and think about search phrases that are related to, but not identical to, your solution. If prospective buyers are unaware that your solution category exists, they may be looking for solution categories that are peripheral to yours. You will want to be discoverable when they are looking.

At each stage of the buying funnel, list out the key phrases that buyers may be looking for. At the vendor discovery phase, the prospective buyers may be searching for more exact solution category names. At the solution validation phase, the searches may involve your product name directly, but be searching for specific capabilities or objections.

With the search phrases listed, it’s then key to understand where your main web properties, your social media properties, and your competitors rank against those key phrases. One of the simplest ways I have seen of presenting this, is a table that shows your best ranking against each phrase in the form of points on a grid.

On the left side, place your own web properties, both your main web properties, and any social media properties your team runs. For comparison, place your key competitors’ web properties on this side of the chart also. Along the top row, build columns for each of the following search ranks: First place, top 3, top 5, top 10, top 30, and top 100. Then, for each of the search phrases in your list, each property a point in the highest category it is discovered in.

For example, if “widget transportation” is a search phrase of interest, and your website appears as number 8 on the natural ranks on Google for that page, you would give yourself one point in the “top 10” category for your main website. Note, that if you use a marketing automation system or web analytics package to understand which search phrases are being used to find you, this will only show you the phrases where you are already successful. Be sure to include search phrases where you would ideally be found, but currently are not.

Complete this process for all the search phrases (around 100 phrases is often a useful number to gain a good perspective), and you will find an overall discoverability profile for you and your competitors. Note that the first page of search results is generally seen as the only page offering significant value in terms of traffic, so the results that are lower down than that can give indications of progress, but are unlikely to be driving traffic.

This view gives an easily digestible sense of your natural search engine discoverability. It should be noted, however that results will vary by search engine, geography, and over time. It is not a report that gives a definitive answer, but it is useful for providing a perspective as to where you are as a business and whether you are making progress in terms of being discoverable.

Social Media in B2B Marketing: The Importance of the Periphery

The rising interest in social media in B2B marketing leads to an interesting and challenging question; what is the role of social media in lead scoring? We’ve talked a lot about lead scoring and how to approach it successfully, but the relevance of social media should be addressed. The challenging aspect of leveraging social media in your lead scoring is that you do not control the main sites of social media, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. This makes it impossible to track the Digital Body Language of your buyers on those sites.

However, it is important not to underestimate the periphery – the point at which a person in the realm of social media enters a web property within your web presence.

This point of handoff, the referring URL, has been trackable for a long time, and can be seen in most web analysis tools. Its relevance in understanding your buyer’s digital body language though, needs to be fully understood. The referring URL shows you exactly where a person came from when they came to your site. Importantly, it includes valuable information on the context of why they ended up on your web site. There are three key aspects to look at in understanding the context of their visit:


- What site they came from
- What other information can be gleaned from the URL
- Where they landed

The first of these is the easiest. Understanding whether they came in to your site from Google, LinkedIn, a community support portal, an industry Blog, or Twitter can give you some context as to why they are on your site and what they are looking for. For example if they are visiting your site from an industry blog, the themes of that site will likely relate to the interest of the visitor. For example, blogs focusing on advances in mathematical modeling, insurance in the pharmaceutical industry, or employment opportunities in the Dallas area may all refer visitors to an insurance company’s site, but with very different contexts for their visit.

With certain sites the more relevant information is contained within other aspects of the URL. Search is the best example of this, as the exact phrase that was used is presented in the query string of the referring URL. Knowing the search query can give you very relevant and actionable insight into where in their buying process a visitor is, as we saw with Sourcefire’s use of query strings to understand buying cycle stage.

The third important piece of information to be gleaned from the periphery is the page to which the visitor was referred. If this page is not the main home page this destination URL can provide extremely valuable insights into what the context of the link was. If, for example, the visitor followed a link to your site shared on Twitter that led to a deeply technical specifications page, that is more likely to be a technical buyer who followed a link from Twitter to a case study.

Understanding what this periphery can tell us about why the visitor found something interesting in the realm of social media, and has chosen to visit our site is key in guiding our communication with them from that point forward. As we score them as a lead, or begin to nurture them over time, this insight is extremely valuable in understanding them as a buyer.

What Exactly IS Digital Body Language?

I've been using the term "Digital Body Language" on this blog quite a lot for obvious reasons. However, I have not really taken a moment to define the term, as I realized recently after a presentation on the topic. An audience member came up to me and very hesitantly asked "I think I get the overall concept, but what exactly IS digital body language." It was a very fair reminder to me to not get so caught up in a topic that the basic concepts are overlooked.

So what is it?

What we are referring to when we talk about Digital Body Language is the aggregate of all the digital activity you see from an individual. Each email that is opened or clicked, each web visit, each form, each search on Google, each referral from a social media property, and each webinar attended are part of the prospect's digital body language.

In the same way that body language, as read by a sales person managing a deal, is an amalgamation of facial expressions, body posture, eye motions, and many other small details, digital body language is the amalgamation of all digital touchpoints.

The best physical representation of digital body language that I can think of is as seen through Eloqua's Prospect Profiler tool (pictured), which shows the spikes and valleys of activity, across all digital media, from web and email to search and forms. You can see how a perspective of what is happening with that individual can be gained from seeing this amalgamated digital insight.

However, the raw information that digital body language provides is often only the foundation. Much as each facial muscle contributes to our reading of a person's body language, the raw digital information is mainly of use when looked at through the lens of lead scoring to understand whether an individual is ready for sales, or what buyer role they play in the process.

Hopefully this clarifies what Digital Body Language is. As always, I welcome your questions or comments.

Sybase: Buyer Profiling for Micro Segment

We all know that it is often best to engage with our markets by segment. However, in some industries, this can be extremely challenging as the segments can be so small that they are extremely difficult to target. Sybase faced this challenge, as one of their products was of most interest to an extremely small audience - the "data elite".

To tackle the challenge, the Sybase team catered to the data elite's natural competitiveness - Peter Kim would call it an "ego trap", but regardless of what you call it, it's great marketing.

Enjoy the case study, it's from Digital Body Language:

Sybase: Buyer Profiling for Micro Segment

For one of its key data-management products, Sybase IQ, Sybase needed to engage with a specific set of its customers: “the data elite” – people who needed fast response times in a solution to tackle extremely high volumes of data. The Sybase IQ product leveraged a new approach to data storage and querying that resulted in performance improvements of many orders of magnitude. The target buyers, however, in many cases were not aware that such a solution was possible, and may have been grudgingly purchasing ever larger hardware in order to tackle the problem.

To connect with this audience, the Sybase team leveraged the naturally competitive nature of administrators of huge volumes of data, and their desire to compare themselves against their peers. The campaign targeted a scrubbed list of existing Sybase contacts and asked them for information on the extreme challenges they were tackling - data volume, response time, or both. Based on their answers, one of three cartoon icons guided them through an information-gathering process where they were ranked as a Pro, an Expert, or Elite by comparing them to their peers.

With this basic knowledge, the campaign guided them through five stages - from collecting basic information through to fully engaged, through sharing thought leadership from industry gurus and case studies of similar professionals becoming corporate heroes through delivering massive performance increases. At each step, the content and detailed information provided was tightly matched to the individual’s biggest challenge and rank. By observing their interactions with available content, the campaign transitioned the customer from one buying stage to the next.

By cultivating that competitive spirit among database experts as to who tackles the larger data challenge, Sybase engaged with the “data elite” in ways that enabled the company to better understand who would be an ideal audience for the product. By catering to this competitive spirit, Sybase was also able to develop the opportunity to present to them possible solutions, that they had never thought possible, to a very real challenge they were having.

Analyzing B2B Marketing: Balance Sheet and Income Statement

Consistent in every discussion I have with B2B marketing execs is the topic of analysis. We're all very familiar with the tactical metrics on each marketing type; open rates and click through rates on emails, landing page conversion rates, cost per click metrics, traffic statistics, and so on. However, these metrics fall short when it comes to understanding marketing's overall contribution to the performance of the business.


Much recent writing has focused on a campaign-up view of the world, with analysis focused around an attempt to determine the return on investment for each campaign. These ROI or ROMI analysis frameworks tend to run into challenges in a B2B marketing environment as the buying cycle is often of significant length, and influenced by many touch-points.


An alternative, and much more actionable framework, is a top down view that uses a "balance sheet" and "income statement" view of the marketing world to understand marketing's overall effect on top-of-funnel activity. Within this top-down view, marketing actions and campaigns can facilitate buyers moving from one stage in their buying process to another, but the complexity of each campaign's individual influence is smoothly aggregated into an overall view that shows the current view of the top of the funnel, and the transitions that have been made over the last period of time.


The first step in looking at this view of the B2B marketing world is to map the buyers' buying process. Each step from education and awareness through to vendor discovery and validation should be understood and mapped, as these are phases that are influenced by marketing, and thus highly relevant in an overall marketing analysis picture.


In order to understand which buyers are at which phase of their buying process, the techniques of lead scoring can be used in order to map each prospective buyer to their individual stage of the buying process by looking at their digital body language.


With this in place, it is possible to build a "balance sheet" view of the B2B marketing funnel. This is a moment-in-time view of where leads are in the funnel, much as a financial balance sheet is a moment-in-time view of where dollars are in an organization at the end of a reporting period.


To have this view relevant and accurate, it is of course necessary to ensure that lead scores degrade over time. Buying interest is, in most cases, a transient phenomenon, and if a lead has not turned into a sales qualified opportunity (SQO) within a certain amount of time, it likely will not, so ensuring a time-based decrease in score is key.


With a balance sheet view in place, it is then possible to begin looking at the motion in the funnel over a period of time, such as a quarter. As buyers progress through their individual buying processes, the transitions in the funnel can be viewed and analyzed, showing where in the funnel there is growth, and where in the funnel there is shrinkage.


If a large number of leads have been passed to sales as Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and accepted as Sales Accepted Leads (SALs), this may be viewed as a very productive quarter, but if the top of the funnel has been neglected and there is a decrease in awareness and a lower number of inquires than normal, this is a warning sign for future funnel trouble.

With the funnel understood in these terms, our ability as marketers to assess the buyers toolkit becomes very valuable as we can understand what resources are contributing to transitions at each stage of the funnel. If there is a gap in funnel motion at a certain stage, and investment in the buyer's toolkit at that stage can be made.

Presenting a marketing funnel in a "balance sheet" and "income statement" view allows marketing to clearly demonstrate their relevance to the business, justify investments in top-of-funnel activities, and make meaningful contributions to revenue forecasting. Whereas approaching marketing analysis from a bottom-up ROI perspective runs into significant challenges as the complexities of the B2B buying cycle come into play, approaching it from a top-down perspective brings clarity and consistency to the task.






As marketing teams begin to present this "balance sheet" and "income statement" view of the marketing funnel, the ability for the business, and the board to objectively understand marketing's contribution increases. With that shift, the well known tenure challenges of today's CMOs and the compensation imbalances between marketing and sales may begin to slowly disappear.

Lead Scoring: Eight Critical Questions to Consider

Much of the conversation around how best to set up lead scoring tends to focus around the aspects of the buyer's digital body language that are most interesting. What whitepaper, excerpt, or download they last looked at, and what this means in terms of their propensity to purchase.

These are all great discussions to have, but there are eight critical questions that need to be contemplated and discussed in order to build a lead scoring algorithm that will truly work in a business environment:

1) What are Your Outputs?: are you using lead scoring to determine who to hand off to sales? what message to communicate to them? who to nurture further? which accounts to get deeper visibility into? all of the above? Understanding your lead scoring outputs first is key in understanding how you want to approach the scoring of leads.

2) How does Time affect your Scores?: it's necessary to think through how the relevance of your prospect actions, and hence their lead score, degrades over time. An action 6, 12, or 18 months ago will likely not have the same relevance as the same action last week. For scoring interest level, this time factor is crucial, whereas for scoring on buyer role, this may not change as rapidly over time.

3) What Dimensions are Critical?: In lead scoring, it is important to clearly define what the question is that you are asking, and to build your scoring algorithm to match that question. If multiple lead scoring dimensions are merged into one, you will likely run into a challenge. Two of the most commonly used scoring dimensions are who the prospect is (explicit data like title, industry, and revenues) and how interested the prospect is (implicit data like web interest, search, and downloads).

4) How do you Cap and Bucket Scores so they are manageable?: When building a lead scoring algorithm, there are often a few buckets of data that come into play. For example in scoring the lead explicitly (who they are), you may look at title, industry, and revenues to determine whether the individual is highly qualified. To do this, it is often best to cap the scores available for each individual bucket. For example, if you are looking at the title to find an executive responsible for content strategy, you may give 10 points for "VP", "Content", "Digital", "Media" or "Production". However, would you want to give 50 points for a "VP of Digital Content and Media Production". Likely not, so this is where caps are needed. 10 points for any of the key terms, up to a maximum of 20.

5) Are your Scores Loosely Mapped to the Ranks that Determine Follow-Up?: If you are going to teach sales to follow up with leads that are defined as "A leads", you need to build in the flexibility to slightly adjust the bar on what makes a lead an "A lead" over time, without retraining sales. The best way to do this is to have both a lead score (a number such as 0-100) and a lead rank (a letter or grade such as A, B, C). Mapping the lead score to the lead rank allows you to adjust your criteria while sales does not change their process.

6) Do you Allow Sales to Cherry-Pick More Leads?: In many environments, especially when lead scoring has been implemented and only good leads are passed to sales, the sales team will feel as though they need more leads. They will ask for the lead funnel to be opened up to them so that they can "Cherry Pick" leads that they deem to be good. Allowing sales to cherry pick has opportunities as well as significant risks, however, and should be discussed carefully upfront.

7) If Sales Does Not Act, do you Claw Back the Lead?: In an ideal world, sales follows up with all leads. However, this is not the reality that most organizations live in, so a process is needed for automatically clawing back the sales lead into marketing if it has not been followed up on in a short time period. Once the lead has been clawed back, it can be re-allocated to another sales person, re-entered into a nurture program, or passed to a partner channel.

8) Have You Provided Sales with Disposition and Nurture Options?: If leads are not being followed up on by sales, it is difficult to adjust your processes unless you know why. Providing sales with options for lead disposition, including automated nurture programs that will continue to educate the lead until it is again ready for sales, can provide both great insight into reasons for lead rejection and foundation for better nurturing of leads.


By thinking through these eight critical factors up front, your lead scoring process will avoid a number of challenges on its road to adoption and success, and will succeed in driving revenue for your organization.

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.

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.

Flyers: Renewal Marketing Leads to Deeper Interest Profiling

In the case study on the 76ers, we'd talked about using a multi-channel campaign to build upon the emotional excitement of an NBA franchise. In doing so, however, the opportunity to build a much deeper understanding of exactly what each fan is most passionate about was not overlooked. In this case study, from Digital Body Language, the Flyers leveraged the digital body language insights to better understand which player each fan was most enthusiastic about.

This insight will be leveraged to deepen the emotional tie in future marketing campaigns by focusing communications on what each individual fan is most interested in. I hope you enjoy the read:

Flyers: Renewal Marketing Leads to Deeper Interest Profiling

The Philadelphia Flyers wanted deeper relationships with fans while also driving the highest possible rates of renewal for season-ticket holders. With careful planning, they were able to achieve both of these goals at once.

The team created personal URLs (PURLs) for each season ticket holder (such as http://www.myflyerstickets.com/johnsmith) and invited each customer to his/her personal site to complete the renewal process. On the personal page, personalized content and offers enticed the ticket holder to renew. But just as importantly, the Flyers began to build the basis for a direct online relationship with each fan.

The Flyers’s site contains rich information (including video) on players, stats, schedules, and the draft, and through the direct relationship with each season ticket holder that they have now built, the Flyers better understand each fan. By observing each customer’s unique digital body language as they look at stats, read up on players, and watch highlights, the Flyers can identify things such as favorite players and whether they prefer stats or highlight reel footage.
In upcoming seasons, the Flyers plan to leverage this rich base of knowledge based on the fans’ digital body language to continually strengthen and hone the message. Personalized video and audio messages from each fan’s favorite player and RSS feeds of stats and highlights tailored will deepen the team bond.

The Flyers increased online season-ticket renewals from 1% the previous year to 18%. Renewing online also allowed real-time processing so these numbers were available immediately to senior management opposed to the time lag that occurs with processing renewals manually. Of course, the Flyers were also able to deepen their understanding of their fan base and strengthen those relationships significantly.

Synopsys: Centralized Marketing Communications

Large organizations whose marketing groups have grown organically over time can often have fairly disparate functions, content, and databases. To bring those distributed marketing efforts into a central marketing database can often be an interesting challenge. Mital Poddar at Synopsys walked me through how they had tackled that centralization effort when I chatted with her during the writing of Digital Body Language.

Using a combination of incentives, including tracking of digital body language, high quality branded templates, and management of opt-out requests, Synopsys was able to win over the distributed marketing teams and centralize over 100 independent marketing databases.

Synopsys: Centralized Marketing Communications

Synopsys is a world leader in software and IP for semiconductor design and manufacturing. As such, the sales process is very knowledge and education oriented. Sophisticated buyers and sophisticated sellers exchange lots of information throughout a lengthy process. Because of this, Synopsys discovered that each of their product marketing managers were sending micro campaigns to small lists of prospects at various stages of the education and sales process.

This had been a somewhat functional process, but did not allow Synopsys easy control of their brand and messaging and the risks of over-communicating to customers due to a lack of centralized control had become significant. It also did not allow Synopsys any insight into the digital body language of those prospects as each individual salesperson would send their small scale campaigns in their own way – often from their desktop – in a way that did not allow centralized tracking.

To operationalize these communications in a way that still allowed the knowledge-intensive sales process to progress, but gave Synopsys better control over brand and better ability to provide insights into their prospects’ digital body language, they decided to centralize the process. Each salesperson could send any communication that they desired to, to any list of their prospects, but it would be executed centrally by a marketing service bureau (of one individual). This enabled consistency in brand messaging and started the process of keeping historical campaign data in one location.

As with any organization, there were pockets of resistance to either the creative
standardization (all communications would now share a common look and feel) or to giving up control of a list of contacts. The centralization, however, offered three benefits that outweighed these hesitations. A common theme was more aesthetically pleasing than most of the individual efforts, winning over many. The reduction in effort was a second significant selling point. The ability to instantly see the results of each campaign, and the individuals who had clicked through and sought further information, was the final advantage to win over skeptics.

During two months, the transition was made to this new operational model. The field team was able to quickly craft the message and the target audience they had in mind, which was then passed to the central marketing service organization. By centralizing management of the final creative touches and the distribution of the messages, the marketing organization was able to maintain control over the branding and look & feel. The team was also able to ensure the proper tracking was in place to allow insight into the prospects’ digital body language.

Through centralizing these communications, the Synopsys team was able to gain control over their brand and the frequency with which they communicate with prospects, while at the same time building rapport with their sales organization. By adding in the ability to observe the customers’ digital body language, they also began to build a foundation for deeper insights into their audience, and for an internal culture of analytics.

5 steps to a more honest view of buyer interests

I was talking with Stefan Tornquist the other day while we got ready for a video webcast with On24 (see the webcast here). We spent some time discussing one of the results from an interesting survey that MarketingSherpa did on buyer transparency.



Sherpa had asked the question "How often do you provide accurate information during registration?" of 2,700 technology buyers, in the context of events such as webinars and virtual events. The results were very interesting.

Data such as name and email were generally provided in an accurate manner, with around 70% of respondants always providing accurate information and another 20% sometimes providing it. However, beyond that, the prospects' likelihood of submitting accurate information plummetted. For Job Title, only 53% said they always submitted it accurately, and for company size it dropped further to only 40%. Although information such as readiness to buy, or main area of interest, was not studied in this survey, most marketers would intuitively suspect that it would be significantly less accurate than even Job Title and Company Size.



This challenge underscores the importance of observing what prospective buyers do, rather than just what they say, in understanding them as a buyer.

1. Map your buyer's buying process and understand how each buyer progresses from education through to vendor discovery, validation, and purchase.
2. Understand your marketing assets, and map each of your marketing assets into the "buyer's toolkit" so you can understand where each is applicable in the buying process.
3. Define areas of your website that also map into this buyer's toolkit, allowing you to understand how web activity best maps to buying stage and area of interest.
4. Add in search activity to give you an even more refined view of buyer interest and intent. Understanding what questions each prospective buyer is asking gives you a much more accurate view of their stage in the buying process.
5. Present the information on each prospect's true area of interest, or stage in the buying process to your Sales team in the environment that they are most comfortable in - their CRM system.

There is no way to guarantee that your insights into buyers' roles, interests, and industries are accurate. However, if you look at their digital body language to see what they do, and what they show interest in, and use that information to augment what they fill out on web forms, you will have a clearer picture of their interests than through web forms alone.

Kadient: Search Rebranding Leads to Greater Insights

We all put a lot of effort into our search strategies, and spend a lot of effort carefully optimizing around key words or phrases. The reality is, however, that buyers evolve over time, and so do the terms they use to connect with you. Kadient noticed this when a rebranding of their company gave them a reason to have another look at how buyers discover them, and how they looked for solutions to problems that Kadient was able to solve.


It's a great reminder to all of us to take a fresh look at how we appear to our prospective buyers and whether that corresponds with what they are searching for in their buying processes. Here's the case study from Digital Body Language:

Kadient: Search Rebranding Leads to Greater Insights

Kadient is a leading vendor of sales-knowledge, RFP, and proposal-generation software, using a free trial strategy that enables buyers to better experience the product’s value and positively compare Kadient to other possible solutions. In order to reflect their evolution from a niche, premise-based solution to a broader software-as-a-service solution, they undertook an ambitious rebranding from its prior name – Pragmatech. In doing so, they realized that a significant effort would be needed to ensure that the search engine optimization work they had put into the Pragmatech name would carry over to the new name and new URL. They ended up, however, realizing some much deeper insights into how their buyers found them.

As they optimized their search efforts to the new name, the Kadient team made careful observations of the digital body language of the prospect who found their way to their site and also the ways in which the broader universe sought information on sales challenges. Kadient quickly realized that they had been optimizing against terms such as “sales effectiveness”, which reflected their solution, but the broader market was seeking help with “sales coaching”.

Armed with this insight, the Kadient team realized that they could tap into a new opportunity. By explaining to prospective buyers, who were searching for “sales coaching” why they should think about the more than just a glib guy in a suit giving an inspirational session, Kadient was able to engage with a much broader audience and make them aware of the Kadient solution.

By analyzing the digital body language of its prospects, Kadient quickly identified a broad new opportunity for market awareness and education, and has begun to engage with buyers who may not have even initially realized that the problem they were wrestling with could be solved by a solution such as Kadient’s.

TriNet: Sweet Music - Targeting of Purchase-Ready Buyers

I talk a lot about using lead scoring to understand what stage a prospect is in their own buying process. I also talk quite a bit about analyzing the value of inquiries vs the value of qualified leads. It was great talking with Ian Brown and team at TriNet during the writing of Digital Body Language, as they done a great job of this style of very precise targeting. By understanding first who was at which stage of the buying process, and second, what the value was of moving those specific prospects to the next step, TriNet was able to offer a significant incentive. By using that level of buy cycle segmentation, they succeeded in creating a creating a very effective campaign.

Enjoy the case study:

TriNet: Sweet Music – Targeting of Purchase Ready
Buyers

TriNet (http://www.trinet.com/), a leading provider of HR outsourcing services for small and medium-sized businesses, found that a face to face meeting with a sales consultant was a key step needed to push decision-making executives over the goal line. It built a strong base of thought leadership through several nurture campaigns, but wanted to motivate purchase-ready prospects to take the plunge.

To do this, TriNet devised a campaign with the call to action being a meeting with a TriNet salesperson - a significant commitment of time for any busy executive. The personal incentive: a free MP3 music player just before the upcoming holiday season.
This large incentive, combined with the call to action, meant that TriNet needed to ensure its targeting was accurate. Otherwise, it risked wasting money on a large number of respondents taking meetings simply for the free MP3 player. The real targets: decision makers who had previously engaged with TriNet but had NOT taken a meeting with a sales consultant.

To build that list of targets, TriNet turned to its database of prospects who had been nurtured with thought leadership campaigns. By segmenting on title, industry, and employee size, the ideal target list was constructed.

Using that list, TriNet launched a combined direct mail and e-mail campaign driving the prospects to a personalize site (www.mytrinet.com/prospectname). The mailer consisted of a small box containing MP3-player earphones to highlight the value of the offer and catch attention. Response activity from the prospects initiated a notification to the appropriate rep to begin scheduling the meeting before interest waned.

The campaign was highly successful in moving prospective buyers to the final stage of their buying process. Conversions to meetings increased by more than 20% over previous quarters and sales directly attributed to the campaign have generated more than 10 times the cost of the campaign.

Based on this success, the campaign has been repurposed as a key marketing asset in TriNet’s nurturing process. Now, each potential buyer who becomes aware of TriNet through search, advertising, webinars, or whitepapers is entered into a nurturing campaign combining email and direct mail to build the case for TriNet’s solutions. When interest (as measured by the prospect’s digital body language) is detected 3 times, the incentive-based offer to take a meeting with a sales consultant is launched.

Sybase: Process And Analysis Ecosystem

You would expect that Sybase, as a provider of some great analysis products, would have a good sense of how to analyze their marketing. They do, but under the hood, their great analytics is built upon a very well thought out approach to all aspects of the sales and marketing process. By focusing on the three main goals of sales effectiveness, campaign success, and coverage optimization, Sybase was able to optimize their overall marketing efforts, while providing rich insights into what was and was not working.

This case study is from Digital Body Language. Enjoy:

Sybase: Process And Analysis Ecosystem

As a billion-dollar enterprise software company, Sybase has a broad and complex sales and marketing ecosystem. For the Sybase marketing team, given that they a provider of some of the industry’s leading database and analytics products, and have highly analytical executives, this leads to a need to present a clear overview of what is happening within marketing to all levels of the organization.

To do this, the Sybase team focused on three key areas of analytics; sales effectiveness, campaign success, and coverage optimization. The first of these analytics efforts, sales effectiveness, became the focus of the bi-weekly pipeline review between sales and field marketing. For each region, a detailed review of marketing activity and prospect response would be performed for the key accounts in the region. Highlights of the prospects’ digital body language in accounts that had gone quiet would be used to trigger different account strategies for those accounts.

The second focus, campaign success, was a marketing-driven effort to analyze the effectiveness of campaigns against stated goals. Each campaign would be given different goals based on the call to action (ie, web seminar marketing campaigns would be analyzed on % registered whereas telemarketing campaigns would be analyzed on qualified leads captured). The campaigns were then analyzed against expected goals to understand where successes were being achieved and where ideas could be better shared. This analysis generally remained at the tactical level, as, given the length of the buying process in question, the macro analysis found marketing influence in over 90% of deals.

The third main focus, coverage optimization, was again done as a bi-weekly exercise. Top level marketing expenditure amounts were defined based on industry comparables, but within that overall framework, each expense item was coded by region and product. Comparing both marketing expenditures and prospect interest levels on a region and product grid allowed Sybase to identify areas in need of additional focus and reallocate investments quickly to the needed regions.

By leveraging its own analytics technology to better understand the digital body language of its prospects, Sybase was able to provide its sales team, its marketing team, and its executive team with a previously unavailable understanding of what was and was not working in the revenue funnel.

Scoring the Stages of a Buying Process

When we talk about lead scoring, the goal that comes to mind most often is determining which leads are ready for handoff to sales. This, however, is only part of the picture. Some of us are able to map out a full buying process that is common to many or most of our buyers. If this is possible, as it was for Terracotta, then we can use lead scoring in a different way to provide a much more meaningful way to connect with potential buyers.



If there are specific stages in the buying process to look for, then you can apply the same methodology of lead scoring to determine which phase of the buying proces each buyer is in.



Each buying process is unique, so there is no universal process that all prospective buyers go through (see the example from the Terracotta case study to the right). However, there are three general phases that are common; awareness, solution discovery, and solution validation. Within these phases, prospective buyers of your solution may go through individual steps that you can map out.



Exploring free trials, learning about increasingly detailed aspects of solution capabilities, design, or implementation, reviewing case studies, viewing help documentation, and doing topic-specific searches can all be signs that a prospective buyer is at a specific stage of the buying process



Mapping the stage of the buying process allows some unique approaches to marketing:

• Offers or communications can be targeted at specific stages of the buying process in what is essentially buying process specific psychographic segmentation
• The size and shape of the lead funnel can be understood and shared with a broader team providing insights into marketing effectiveness
• Conversion gaps in the lead funnel can be identified allowing refocusing on specific points at which buyers are not moving forward in the buying process

If your prospects' buying process is one that can be effectively understood through observation of their digital body language, and application of lead scoring techniques to the overall buying process, the benefits of doing so are tremendous.

Voxify: Rejuvenating Dead Leads through Nurturing

The merits of lead nurturing are hard to underestimate. Especially in challenging economic times, it is extremely wasteful to have a leaky funnel that you spend great effort and resources on getting potential buyers into the top of, only to have them leak out the side. More often than not, this is due to mismatches between buyer timing and the handoff to your sales team.

In writing Digital Body Language I had the pleasure of speaking with Hollis Chin and the team at Voxify who had one of the best examples I had seen of using lead nurturing to generate tremendous value from a set of leads that had been discarded as dead leads.

Enjoy the case study:

Voxify: Rejuvenating Dead Leads through Nurturing

Voxify is a provider of powerful speech applications for contact centers in retail, travel, hospitality, entertainment, financial services, and healthcare. Its complex sales cycle can often stretch 12-18 months, which makes it a challenge to align sales resources with leads. At one point, more than 3,000 leads sat idle – leads that could potentially buy Voxify’s software.

Without a structured follow-up system, Voxify was wasting opportunity. If a lead was not ready to buy at the time of initial contact, the lead was recycled; however there was not a process to ensure further communication. Given the length of the sales cycle, and the type of internal project that would drive the need for Voxify’s solutions, this meant that many valid – but early – leads were leaking out of the funnel.

The breadth of Voxify’s target markets, combined with the range of possible solutions, meant the company employed a broad matrix of messaging to ensure relevance with the prospect. A matrix of 26 separate industry and education topics was created with each topic adding value to each unique buyer type and stage in the buying process. An automated nurture campaign kept this messaging in front of the “cooler” leads to maintain their interest level and watch for signs of changes to buying behavior as the messaging evolved from “why speech applications” through to “why Voxify”.

Within six months, the so-called “cooler” leads became the largest source of conversion for new sales opportunities. The campaign created 1,500 responses and enabled more than 400 companies to re-engage with the sales force. The nurture campaign also allowed the sales team to better understand whether the prospect was more interested in a specific vertical application such as a flight check-in system, or in a horizontal application such as a generic routing agent, and cater their conversation accordingly. By keeping relevant, topical messaging in front of prospective buyers, without overtly selling, Voxify identified and acted on buying interest when it arose.

The Gambler and the Perfect Path; Retrospective Determinism in Marketing Analysis

Let’s say that your organization gets one of those “ideal” client wins – great logo, fair price, smooth sales process. If you’re like most, one of the things that you’ll probably ask is “how did we market to that organization such that the sales process went so well”. I think that’s one of the more dangerous questions that is being asked today. The reason I think it’s so dangerous is that it can lead to the slippery slope of thinking that the success can be replicated like a prescription. It can’t.

Taking a single, ideal, outcome, and then looking for a “perfect path” through a very chaotic, chance-driven process is what Nassim Taleb, in his book The Black Swan calls “retrospective determinism”. The problem with it, is that it ignores the vast number of data points from people who started the process, but did not end up as the ideal client win. Those who did not end up as an ideal client win do not make a story that is at all interesting, so their story does not get told with the same enthusiasm as the story of the ideal client win.

It’s a lot like the gambler who writes a book on his or her gambling strategy. The only gambler who would write such a book, by definition, is the gambler who was able to achieve success. Those who did not succeed at gambling are highly unlikely to become authors on the subject. The gambler will write about the successful strategy, and the proof is in the winnings. The problem is that because only a winning gambler would write the book, there is no way to tease apart the effects of strategy and blind luck.

B2B marketing is in a similar situation when looking for the “perfect path”. It is an amalgamation of 100s if not 1000s of influences that cause a client to buy a product of any reasonable size. We can analyze individual efforts in the chain, and look at certain measurable aspects to see how well they performed (on those measurements) compared to similar efforts. However, when we attempt to look for the “perfect path”, we are fooling ourselves into thinking that we have more control of a process than we really do.

In each marketing interaction that you have with a prospective buyer, many factors are well outside of your control or knowledge. What is happening in their organization, their mood, whether they are distracted by another thought at that moment. At a high level we can see one campaign performing better or worse than another in general, but predicting whether a given individual will respond to a campaign in a certain way is not possible.

So, the advice I always give to people who are looking for the “perfect path” in B2B marketing – don’t. Optimize individual tactics, look for which campaigns were the best contributors in general to results, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that there is one perfect path through your marketing messaging that is waiting to be found. The world is too random for that.

Terracotta: Lead Scoring A Buyer’s Journey in Open Source

The buyers are in control, we all realize that. But it's significantly more difficult to market when we acknowledge that it's a buying process not a selling process, as it is very difficult to know where the buyer is in their buying process at any moment in time. Without that knowledge, it's very difficult to deliver the right message to that buyer.

Jeff Hartley and the team at Terracotta faced that exact challenge, and used a very interesting approach to lead scoring in order to categorize their buyers based on where they were in their buying journey. I thoroughly enjoyed chatting with Jeff while writing Digital Body Language, and hopefully you'll enjoy this case study as much:

Terracotta: Lead Scoring A Buyer’s Journey in Open Source

As a leading open-source software company, Terracotta has a challenge that most marketers would gladly choose to manage: too many leads. However, that wealth can create problems when you only have a few direct sales professionals. Those leads were generated from interest in a very strong, full-featured, open-source
version of its software – but which were ideal prospects to target for commercial service offerings?

The Terracotta marketing team turned to lead scoring to allow them to understand the process their buyers went through in understanding and evaluating their products. First, they categorized the buyer’s journey into a path called RESITD – Recognize, Evaluate, Sample, Integrate, Test, Deploy. Lead scoring was used to categorize each buyer in this buying path. The key metrics of each phase differed, depending on the likely approach a buyer would have:

• Recognition: Awareness metrics such as the number of visits


• Evaluate: Reading of introductory documents on Terracotta benefits


• Sample: Downloading of the Terracotta open source product


• Integrate: Forum activity, application-specific integration documents, or
  downloading of pre-packaged integration modules


• Test: Reading of detailed tuning guides, sample test plans


• Deploy: Reading deployment guides, reading about enterprise subscription or deployment services, and “phone-home” capabilities in the software itself

This framework allowed Terracotta to map and guide the buyer’s journey, even in an environment where direct interaction with the end purchaser was quite rare. Sales professionals at Terracotta were provided with deep insights into the buyer stage for each of their accounts, and were sent real-time notifications as buyers progressed from one stage to another.

Over 6 iterations, the Terracotta team continually refined their algorithms for understanding their audience. Insights such as a tight focus on recency and frequency as factors in evaluating any sign of interest came from this iterative refinement process. Evidence of a need for the high scale clustering software that Terracotta provides could be deemed out of date if it was more than a few months old, due to the changing nature of buyer needs. This detailed, automatically-created map of a buyer’s journey allowed their sales team to focus on the key prospects who were ready to move forward with a purchase, and allow marketing to guide the evolution of the others.

Understanding the buying process is a critical thing to focus on in B2B marketing, and Jeff and the team at Terracotta have done a great job of mapping it out and scoring prospects to understand their stage.