Sales Handoff and the Net Quality Score

One of the most controversial and challenging areas of any revenue engine is the hand-off process from marketing to sales. It is this transition that bears the brunt of all the inter-organizational process differences, motivation differences, and politics. This makes it a vital area to focus on in building the benchmarks and dashboards that will help optimize overall performance.

The nurturing and discovery of qualified leads, while vitally important, is of limited value unless the hand-off to sales is efficient and optimized. As this aspect of the process involves a significant behavioral element in the managing of sales team engagement with the lead flow process, it can be the source of many easily remedied revenue engine challenges.

The first aspect of understanding this element of the process is to understand the volume and quality of leads flowing to each territory. Volume is, of course, a simple metric to dashboard, and volume differences by territory can be quickly identified.

Quality, however, is often a more important indicator of eventual success. While MQLs may be defined as any lead that falls into a fit and engagement profile that defines it as an A1, A2, or B1, this does not mean that all MQLs are equal. Understanding the quality of leads passed to each territory is vital in ascertaining whether any revenue challenges being seen are a result of poor team performance or poor lead quality.

Most useful in this is a metric called the Net Quality Score that indicates the overall balance of high and low quality leads being sent to each rep or territory. To calculate the Net Quality Score, first split leads into high (eg A1s), medium (eg A2s), and low (eg B1s and B2s) categories. The Net Quality score is the number of high quality leads minus the number of low quality leads, divided by the total number of leads. Scores can range from -100% to +100%, and higher scores indicate a higher average lead quality.

This quality score can quickly pinpoint issues, for example in the following dashboard, it can be seen that while the Central region is receiving a large number of leads, they are generally of very low quality. This may result in sales team effectiveness that is much lower than expected without being the fault of the sales team in terms of performance.



What Happens After the Handoff?

With this understanding of which territories, product lines, and salespeople are provided with leads, and of what average quality, the next step is to provide insight into the outcome of those leads. Done properly, the disposition of leads by a sales team after they attempt to connect with them should not only trigger a marketing process to correctly handle the leads, but also provide clear insights into the whether any fine tuning of the qualification process may be required. If the leads were unreachable, lacked interest, were not the right role, or only had early stage interest, this insight allows marketing to see whether there are potential quality issues with their leads.

Likewise, if certain sales reps are doing a poor job in following up with the leads they are given, this will also show up in the analytics of lead disposition when a MQL to SQO conversion ratio is calculated for each sales person. In the following lead disposition chart, for example, you can see that Bob, Andy and Jane received a large number of leads, but failed to convert many of them to opportunities, instead marking them as unable to connect. Worth noting, however, is that the net number of opportunities created remains on par with the team as the poor conversion rate was masked by the high volume of leads.

This may be an indication of a performance or training challenge with these sales reps, or it could be that the volume of leads was so high that they were unable to truly dedicate sufficient effort to each lead.



Looking at a Difficult Problem

How are you analyzing and optimizing your handoff process from marketing to sales? Just delivering leads is not enough, if you're not able to ensure quantity, quality, and follow-up, you may be leaving money on the table.

Marketing Dashboard: Passive Discovery

We spoke recently about various ways of looking at marketing benchmarks and how to better dashboard and analyze the entire revenue performance management process. This thinking needs to be applied to all areas of the revenue engine, and each has its own unique challenges.

At the earliest stages of the funnel, where buyers first begin to become aware of your company and its solutions is perhaps the most challenging. One of the main ways in which people discover your message, of course, is coming across your messages "passively", through ads, content, and social media sharing.

Building an understanding of how your messages are being passively discovered is an interesting challenge. Many of the paid techniques of passive discovery, such as banner advertising, are inherently trackable. However, great content that allows an organization to earn passive discovery is often much less trackable. However, a clear understanding of this element of the revenue process is key to determining where to make important investments.

An important metric to start with is an understanding of paid vs earned awareness. This dashboard metric gives you a clear sense of whether prospective buyers in the early stages of their education process are learning about you through paid efforts, such as advertisements, or through your efforts to earn their attention, such as through content marketing. To create this view, chart the traffic to your website by its originating source. Those that arrive from content sites, or without the tracking codes that you place in your online advertisements are most likely earned discovery through your content marketing efforts. Those that arrive with the tracking codes of your online advertising efforts are paid discovery efforts bearing fruit.

In charting these two sources of awareness, all active discovery, such as referrals from search sites such as Google and Bing, and all natural traffic (visitors who just typed in your website’s address, and were not referred to it), must first be removed. Other sources of traffic, such as from a customer community, or online help portal should also be excluded, as these are individuals who are already aware of who you are and what your solutions are. With these categories of traffic removed, this leaves just the visitors who discover your content, and hence become aware of your solutions, through either paid or earned awareness efforts.

This view is instructive in two ways. First, a direct comparison of your paid and earned efforts provides insights into whether opportunities might exist that are not being maximally exploited. If you notice that prospects discovery of your solutions is mainly from paid sources, there is an opportunity to assess whether content marketing efforts may provide a more economically efficient way to drive awareness. If, however, all of your discovery traffic is coming from earned sources, there may be a chance to either re-evaluate whether your current paid awareness efforts could be better targeted, or, if there is an opportunity to increase your paid awareness efforts in order to generate awareness in areas of the market in which you are not currently driving as much awareness as you could be.

The second area of value you get from creating and maintaining this view of your revenue engine is that you can understand how your efforts are resulting in more awareness over time. This is most crucial for earned media, as this follows a “fly-wheel” dynamic for growth. Effort this is invested in creating and promoting great content results in a slow and steady growth in awareness. This dynamic is much different than the “lightning strike” dynamic of most paid media efforts where an investment results in a near real-time effect.

Calculations of the total audience to which your messages are presented in a way that allows them to be passively discovered is similarly simple for paid audiences, but challenging for earned audiences. For paid audiences, the total coverage of your advertisements (number of “eyeballs”) forms a good audience proxy. However, to calculate the total audience for earned awareness (mostly in the form of content sites that mention your company or solutions), it may be simpler to do this by assuming a known conversion rate and using that to calculate what the overall audience must be, based on traffic.

While this technique obviously prevents any insights that might have been gained by understanding and analyzing traffic conversion rates, in earned passive awareness, this is often not something that can be easily optimized as there is very limited control over how and where you are mentioned, so the best action is often simply to drive audience sizes higher through garnering more share of the conversation.

Analyzing Paid Discovery – Advertising and Audience Definitions

In building a dashboard to show the effectiveness of advertising efforts, the focus is on understanding how to target audiences that will effectively convert into interested buyers. This area of the industry is evolving rapidly, and an important development is in how audiences are defined. Historically, an audience was defined mainly by the content itself, with a thin layer of demographics on top.

For example, an industry new site focused on printing technologies in the publishing sector could be assumed to have an audience of people involved in that discipline. Within this audience, advertisers could often target by title or organization fit based on declared demographics, but not much more.

In today’s online world, this is rapidly changing. The major content networks are beginning to provide the ability to target audiences based on historical activity. For example, those who visit certain pages on your site, or meet certain qualification criteria could be defined as a specific audience, regardless of where they are on the Internet, for having specific ads presented to them.

In analyzing advertising campaigns, this analysis of audience becomes critical. While remarketing audiences are likely to have substantially smaller sizes than their mainstream counterparts, they may offer opportunities to convert prospective buyers to MQLs at a much higher rate or present more precise information that is relevant to later stage investigation and validation only.




Inbound Links – Earning the Potential to be Discovered

Traffic to your web properties is the most tangible metric to dashboard when looking at passive discovery. However, when it comes to the efforts to earn this discovery, it is a difficult metric to use in order to guide decisions as it is an aggregate measure of all the content that is linked to. Efforts to build great content and share it with influencers lead to a more measurable metric of inbound links.

An inbound link is a link from another site on the web to a page of content on your website. Creating interesting, useful, and valuable content leads to more links, and each link increases the chances that your content will be discovered by those reading about the market space. Obviously, links from higher traffic and more credible sites increase this potential more than links from less relevant sites.

To gain an understanding of the success of your content marketing strategy, and areas for improvement, a dashboard of inbound links can be very useful. For each major area of your web properties, such as your main site, blogs, and campaign-specific sites, dashboard the total number of inbound links, the average quality for each inbound link (based on the traffic and credibility of the page the link resides on), and the number of visits generated by that link in the recent time period.



This dashboard view provides insights into the successes and challenges of efforts to create exceptional content that inspires others to link to it. If top level analysis of passive discovery shows levels of performance that are less than expected, an inbound link analysis can identify where the issues might be occurring.

Social Engagement and Passive Discovery

As social networks grow in importance as a medium through which information is shared, so too do they grow in importance as a place where prospective buyers happen upon information of interest to them and in doing so begin to learn about new solutions and new approaches. Each conversation or engagement that happens in the public domain, whether a discussion on LinkedIn or an interaction on Twitter creates an opportunity for another viewer to see the discussion and engage with the content being talked about.

While measurement in this area is evolving quickly, even a simple view of which social networks are seeing a large number of links to your content being shared, the total traffic to your content that is driven by each of these networks, and whether this traffic is successfully turning into inquiries.



Thinking about Passive Discovery

Whether paid (advertising) or unpaid (content, social), this top end of the funnel is crucial for driving new business. Without great dashboards, it is hard to optimize and grow it.

How do you think about, measure, and analyze the ways by which people "come across" your content?

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.

Marketing Dashboard: Active Discovery

One of the most valuable areas to gain an understanding of is the current state of how your prospects actively discover your company and your solutions. The richness of insights that can be gained with a deep understanding of how buyers are using search is nearly without parallel. Each insight allows you to guide investments in a way that maximizes their effectiveness in driving your revenue performance.

Basics of Discovery

The first area to look at is the set of 10 or 12 “main terms” that buyers most commonly associate with your solution category or industry. These are the main search terms that would ideally lead prospective buyers to your web properties. A dashboard comparison of both the number of searches being performed on each search phrase (the search engines' webmaster tools provide this information quite readily), and the number of visitors to your content based on those main terms gives a very good understanding of if you are successfully being discovered through this avenue. A few powerful insights can be gained here that allow a reallocation of investments:

- Need More Category Awareness? The raw number of searches being performed gives a good indication of the upper limit of your success with active awareness efforts such as search engine marketing or search engine optimization. Broader awareness efforts such as analyst and public relations may be needed to increase interest in your solution category if this is the case.

- Are you Being Discovered? The number of visitors, and more importantly the percentage of visitors, who reach your site for each search term gives you a good indicator of how well your paid and organic search efforts are performing against each term. If a term is performing poorly, either an investment in search engine marketing against that term, or a focus on content around that term may improve your chances of being actively discovered by buyers seeking information on that term



Deeper Searches

As looked at earlier, however, the way in which buyers seek information is changing. With the average search phrase being more than three words in length, it is equally important to understand what is happening with the broader universe of search phrases being used by buyers. With a robust content strategy, the raw list of search phrases that are used by buyers to find you can be quite instructive in itself. However, as a high level dashboard to provide an understanding of the current state of your revenue performance, the best way to view the longer tail search phrases being used is to have it provide insight into what buyer stage your audiences can be loosely categorized into.

To understand this, divide the searches that guide visitors to your website into four main categories:

- Navigational: searches that are simply a replacement for typing in your website URL, usually just your company name

- Main Terms: searches for the main search terms you have deliberately optimized against

- Long Tail (branded): deeper searches, often with multiple words in the search phrase, or for specific content, and with your company or brand name in the search phrase

- Long Tail (unbranded): deeper searches, as above, but without your company or brand name in the search phrase

This dashboard view provides some rich insights into how well your company and solutions are being actively discovered. First, the relative amounts of visitors who discover your offerings based on long tail phrases vs main terms provides an indication of whether your content marketing strategies are working effectively. Given that the majority of searchers use lengthy search phrases, if the long tail columns are not larger than the main term and navigational columns, there is very likely an opportunity to be discovered by many buyers who are actively seeking solutions such as yours that is being missed. An increased investment in content creation may be warranted.

Second, a comparison of your relative strength between long tail search phrases with and without your brand name (ie, “Sourcefire intrusion detection products” vs. “intrusion detection system comparison”) provides an understanding of whether the buyers discovering you tend to be more at an education stage (understanding the category) or have moved more into the discovery stage and are looking to better understand your specific products.




Of course, overall trends are also very much of interest. The effectiveness of natural search or content marketing strategy grows slowly over time, and its success is best observed by following the trend in these high level numbers over time.

Paid vs. Organic Search

In order to deepen the insight gained from these views of your prospects’ active discovery of your content, it is important to understand what is driven by paid search (SEM) and what is driven by organic search (SEO) efforts in order to better coordinate efforts between them. Most B2B marketing organizations invest in paid search campaigns to drive awareness, and with most if not all of these efforts there is an ability to differentiate between traffic driven to your site via paid efforts vs. natural search efforts.

By splitting these two sources of traffic apart, and understanding the trends in each, you can better understand the performance of two very different categories of marketing investment. Paid search is predominantly a financial investment, and the results are generally directly in proportion to the monies invested (with a reasonable variation based on the skill of the search engine marketing team, of course). For this reason, you should expect the trend line of visitors from paid search to map closely to your SEM investments.

Organic search efforts, however, are very different. Effort, mostly in the form of time to create and promote great content, is invested, and slowly builds credibility with the search engines and with influencers in the industry. Consistent, meaningful investments in this avenue with therefore result in a slowly but steadily growing number of visitors driven by organic search results.

For this reason, a combination of investments can be very useful. Paid search (SEM) investments can be made in areas that are new, where results are weak, or where a short term boost is needed. Investments in content and influence to drive organic search results can be done over time in core areas of focus.

4 Quick Steps to Understand Search Discoverability

We are not all natural search experts, nor should we be. There is a lot of art and science to the field that makes it worthy of having a specialist on your marketing team focus on consistently. However, that does not mean understanding how well you are performing is outside of the reach of non-experts.

Here are 4 quick steps to understand how well you are performing. Only step 4 requires any tools or techniques that are not immediately available.

Step 1: What Will Buyers Look For?
Define a list of around 10-15 terms that, when buyers are searching for them, you would ideally be discovered. This requires putting yourself in the mindset of a buyer and avoiding any “internal speak” or terms that are not the most common terms. As an example, buyers generally search for “laptops”, even if you happen to call them “netbooks” internally.

One Step Further: To take this a step further, think about how buyers might “broaden” the term slightly and expand each of your 10 terms. For example, while “marketing automation” is a key phrase for us, buyers may be looking for a “marketing automation platform” or “marketing automation software”.


Step 2: Where Are You Ranked?
For each of the terms in your list of 10-15, do a quick search on Google and/or Bing. Find the first piece of content from your web properties, and record the rank. Search rankings change over time and by location, but this will give you a sense of whether you are discoverable.

One Step Further: While you are doing this exercise, it can be interesting to jot down the search ranks of your main competitors so you can compare your performance to theirs over time.


Step 3: Who’s Looking?
Go to Google Trends and look up each phrase in order to understand rough volumes of searches. You will likely find that buyers tend to look for some phrases more often than others. This gives you a relative volume, but will help you understand what is important.
One Step Further: Narrow your analysis by country. You may find that the phrases used differ significantly by country.

Step 4: When Are You Found?
Look at the people who land on your site from a search, and categorize them by the search phrase used. For each of your 10 main phrases, how many people are finding your content each month. At a raw traffic level alone, this can provide a lot of insight into the success of your efforts to get content ranked on the search engines.

One Step Further: Traffic is great, but understanding who these visitors are and whether they progress towards being marketing qualified leads and ultimately revenue is even more of interest. For each search term, see how many leads, opportunities, and dollars of revenue are ultimately created.


Performing well in the natural/organic search results requires a good understanding of search optimization techniques, and a robust discipline of content creation. However, understanding the basics of natural search performance is both accessible to all without any technical knowledge or tools, and important to understand in analyzing whether your buying funnel has any challenges with discoverability.

6 Ways For Marketing to Help with Social Media

I can almost hear the comments already - shouldn't Marketing be "doing" social media, not "helping" with social media?

Yes.

Sort of.

But there's more to it than that.

The problem is that in many marketing teams, there's "marketing" and then there's "social media". The "marketing" group believes strongly in social media, and agree that it's crucial, but what they "do" is run events, launch promotions, spend ad budgets, and optimize keywords. The "social media" person manages the Twitter handle, the Facebook page, and the blog.

I might be oversimplifying, but this problem is one I've seen often enough to generalize.

The reason is that most B2B marketing teams are not set up to truly invest in social media. Most are organized more around "lightning strike" rather than "flywheel" investment patterns, and often marketing teams do not contain the real subject matter experts needed as content creators for great social media efforts.

This means that the "marketing" folks generally work with two major levers:

- A Budget for campaign spend (ads, search keywords, event promotions, show attendance)
- A Marketing Database of interested or potentially interested prospects

Because they don't fit into these two major levers, the "social media" person's efforts often feel a bit disconnected from the major promotions being run.

So what can be done?

6 Ways Marketing Can Invest in Social Media

Smart marketing teams are applying these two major levers to turbocharge their social media efforts in 6 ways:

1) Content as Advertisement: Instead of spending ad budgets to promote high level branding ad spots, smart marketers are spending ad budgets to share the rich content their team is creating with a much broader audience of potential viewers.

2) Social Content as Nurturing: Rather than creating separate content for each nurture campaign or newsletter, leveraging the best content that the team has created (measured by the number of tweets, for example) gives you a sure win in terms of audience engagement, and lets your content be discoverable by the broader audience in your marketing database.

3) Hiring for Content Creators: If the subject matter experts in your organization are not creating a steady stream of rich content, hire a journalist to facilitate the process (credit for this idea goes to David Meerman Scott). A daily stream of interesting and inspiring content should be no problem for a professional.

4) Sourcing Data for Insight: If the ideas for what to write about are running dry among your content creation team, fund a survey to provide data and insights on topic areas that they suggest. Most organizations surprise themselves with how much mileage they can get out of unique and interesting survey data.

5) Fanning the Flames of Engagement: When your subject matter experts do write content, the marketing team can fan the flames of engagement. Sharing and promoting each new piece of content in the networks it's relevant to (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Delicious, etc) helps build awareness, and motivates your subject matter experts to continue creating more great content.

6) Leveraging Search to Showcase Content: Rather than use your search marketing budget to drive traffic from the same set of terms to the same set of landing pages, leverage your search budget to help each blog post, video, or eBook "get found". The content on each post is very likely long-tail or niche oriented, so the traffic volumes for each one will not be large, but the relevance will be very high.


Done well, the marketing team facilitates the growth of a healthy and vibrant community that is aware of and engaged with the rich, relevant content your subject matter experts and social media team are creating.

While the flywheel vs lightning strike dynamic is a real challenge, these investment options allow marketing teams to work in a coordinated fashion towards true social media success.

What have you done to get the "marketing" and "social media" people on your marketing team to operate in a more coordinated way?

Friends, Avatars, Countrymen, lend me your ears

David Meerman Scott had a great post the other day on “I do not friend logos”. Very well put, and I agree with him.

As you know we’ve been doing a lot of experimentation with the best way to apply social media in the B2B marketing realm, and David’s post hit on one of the biggest challenges we’re all facing – what to do about Facebook as B2B marketers. The numbers are undeniable, the active population on Facebook is huge. However, the challenge we’ve all faced, as DM Scott puts so well, is that companies are not really “friendable”.

So, how about a personality… in our next B2B marketing experiment, we’re exploring the idea of a corporate “personality” in the social space. For anyone who is part of the Eloqua community, you may already have met Drake. He now has a Facebook page, a growing bunch of friends, and a personality.

Having a personality is a good start, but how can one translate that into real market traction? For one, a personality opens up more avenues for having fun than a corporate logo does. As the first example, Drake has launched his first contest – take a photo with him, and you might win an iPad. Not something that would fly with a corporate logo.

Is this taking the idea of “personas” a bit too far? Will this crack the code on B2B marketing on Facebook? We’re not sure, but you’ll be the first to know. Well, maybe not the “first”; that honor might go to David Meerman Scott – he is, after all, friends with Drake on Facebook.

LinkedIn as Facebook for the Business World

(note, this post was cross-posted on It's All About Revenue last week)

I've long been a bit skeptical about the use of Facebook for sharing business content. It is a great medium for personal sharing, and works well when businesses hit on the rare, but brilliant creative campaigns that go viral because they are cute, funny, or whimsical. However, for content like whitepapers, it just does not work.

I'm currently running an experiment to see if B2B content is "likeable" on Facebook, and while I have not compiled the data yet, the answers are looking bleak.

However, interesting developments continue at LinkedIn, with their recent promotion of a sharing bookmarklet. The technology is really simple:

1) Drag the bookmarklet to your browser toolbar:


2) Click it to share any page you are on:

3) Your status is updated with that link:


But the implications are more interesting. By doubling their investment in the status update as a communication metaphor that Twitter and Facebook have leveraged with great success, LinkedIn seems to be attempting to become a similar communications hub for the business world.

Whether they will be successful in becoming "Facebook for the business world" is unclear, but there are a few factors in their favour, and a few against worth considering:

3 Factors working in LinkedIn's favour:
- their presence as the defacto network of business connections gets them over the hurdle of network adoption quickly

- their deeper knowledge of business profiles means that they can (theoretically) do a much better job of understanding influence networks than alternatives

- the gulf between our social selves and our business selves is probably implanted deep in the brain stem, and may be impossible for Facebook to overcome as an inherently "social" ecosystem


3 Factors working against them:
- they are late to the party when it comes to building a robust developer ecosystem to extend and innovate on the core

- their application usage scenario feels a lot more like a CRM system (looking up contact and company details) than a communication platform like Twitter or Facebook. Making this shift will be difficult

- Each network has an implied "hurdle" of becoming connected (Twitter is very low, for example). LinkedIn has historically been a relatively "high" hurdle, which doesn't lead to broad sharing of ideas through many loose connections


What's your bet? Will LinkedIn succeed with this initiative and become Facebook for the business world?

Content as Advertisement

Content has long been a key driver of success for great B2B marketers in today's world. That's nothing new, and we've talked about related topics such as the content gap and the need to get more subject matter experts involved.

However, one challenge that remains is how to draw attention to your content. Earning attention is certainly the best way, by steadily creating great content, winning over the hearts and minds of a loyal following, and having that loyal following share your message with still more audience members.

That's a great way to build an audience, but it is NOT a fast way.

The Challenge of Earned Media

In a recent post, I talked about the flywheel effect that these investments had; slowly building a following over time that built up momentum and energy, but based on the continual push of great content, rather than the blast of major marketing spend.

An interesting hybrid option has been appearing recently, here's one I saw from American Express:


And here's a similar example from Accenture:



These are ad placements - these happened to be on LinkedIn, but where is less important than what. They are regular, paid ad placements that advertise not promotions or brand-related things, but pure content.

Buying Your Way to Earned Media

This is not a shortcut of the mantra of earned media; for this strategy to work, the content has to be interesting, relevant, useful, and valuable. It is, however, a turbo-charging of it. By using advertising to broaden the discovery of the information, Accenture and American Express are just fast-tracking the process.

The content must still stand on its own merits, but for those with a reasonable advertising budget, the laborious process of building a loyal audience can be facilitated with a bit of cash.

I'm sure that this is an affront to many content marketing purists, so I welcome what I'm sure will be an interesting discussion. Have you tried using content as an advertisement in this way? Did it work?

Event Marketing and the Information Concierge Concept

I was down at IMS in Atlanta recently, spending time with a lot of very interesting and creative marketers. The interesting thing about marketing events for the marketing field is that you see many interesting new ideas experimented with.

One of the techniques that caught my eye this time came from Jamie Turner and the team at BKV Digital. Rather than share the usual “promotional” content that we all see at these events, BKV took a different approach. Similar to the Information Concierge concept we discussed a few weeks back, they dropped topic-specific mini-cards on the tables. Each mini-card was essentially the title of a catchy blog post, and guided people to a specific landing page on the BKV website.



The audience at most events are in the early stages of awareness and education. They are looking for insights, ideas, and great content. The best marketing content should find a way to be relevant to audiences at this stage of their buying process, and buy focusing on mini-cards, rather than sales pitches, BKV allowed their audience to passively discover the content that they would find interesting.

It’s a simple technique, but very much inline with how buyers buy. Worth keeping in your back-pocket as you think about how to drive engagement at events you attend.

The Next Transition in Communication

Over time, the way in which communication happens has gone through some very interesting transitions. Each of them resulted in profound changes in information flow, and with that, significant changes in the discipline of marketing. We’re about to see the evolution of a fifth form of communication, and it will have an equally interesting effect on our lives.

1. One-to-One

The oldest form of communication is the one-to-one model. Face to face interactions and conversations were the main way in which messages were communicated. While very interactive, this was not a very scalable model at all. However, because it was the only way of conveying messages, it found an audience that was not overwhelmed with communication, and was likely much more receptive to new information.

2. Broadcast

The modern marketing industry was born with the advent of mass broadcast communications. Radio, print, or television enabled messages to be mass communicated to broad audiences. This was a highly scalable, but entirely non-interactive, as it was a one-way communication and allowed no way for the listener to engage with the communicator. Also, as broadcast grew, it reduced the attention span of audiences by overwhelming them with too many communications.

3. Email

The next interesting evolution in communication was with the advent of email. I’m not talking about email marketing, however, as that is much more similar to a broadcast model. Interpersonal email, however, added a very interesting element with the “Reply All” function. Now, the audience members in a communication group could easily respond to a discussion, and do so in a way that created ad hoc, topical group discussions. However, these discussions were closed to outsiders. A person who was not in the discussion would not see the discussion happening and could not join the discussion without explicitly being included by an insider.

4. Social Media

Solving this discovery problem, of course, was social media. Now, with the discussions happening in an open format, anyone can detect, read, or join existing discussions. The speed with which these communications happen has been well documented, and discussions on a particular topic can quickly grow to involve and influence hundreds of thousands of people. However, social media creates huge volumes of communications, most of which are not of interest. Filtering through this noise is a daunting challenge, and whereas most social media can be filtered by keywords or brand names, this still tends to result in an overwhelming volume of content.

5. Conversation Discovery

So what's next? As the major search engines apply their computing and analysis horsepower to understanding who is talking to whom about what, we may be on the verge of a fifth major shift in how information is communicated. Passive conversation discovery, guided by the algorithms of Google and Bing and their analysis of vast amounts of social media data, may be the way we discover what conversations are happening that may be of interest. 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 finally allows the interactivity and openness of social media while not having the overwhelming volume of unfiltered social


Each of these evolutions in communication has changed how we interact with each other, how we learn, and how we market. This coming fifth transition promises to be as disruptive as any before it.

What are you doing to be ready?



(this article first appeared as a guest post on SavvyB2B)

Information Will Find Me

As the way that we find information becomes increasingly driven by social influence, it’s interesting to look at where this trend goes in the longer term. The logical extension of this trend is that the consumers of information – our prospective buyers – will expect that the information they should be interested in will find them, rather than them finding information. Much as in the consumer world, songs, books, and movies are recommended to us based on collaborative filtering techniques, information in the business world may soon find us.

A combination of our own unique social graph, and that social graph’s interests and reading history, may soon make the dominant trend of information discovery one of passive recommendation, rather than active discovery (such as via search). As each individual’s interest areas, business role, and social influence graph becomes more and more known by search engines and content portals, the information being presented will cater itself more deeply to what is likely to be of interest.

Analytics across extremely broad populations and vast amounts of data on what was actually clicked or viewed will allow this process to become startlingly precise and highly accurate, further increasing its effectiveness, adoption, and relevance to marketers.

The question for marketers, of course, is how to have relevant content discovered by appropriately interested buyers in this way. The two key points are relevance and interest. As marketers, we need to focus on creating interesting content that is of relevance to each type of buyer we are likely to encounter. This content, whether it is eBooks, webinars, live events, or interesting data, can then be introduced to the discussion through well targeted nurture marketing approaches.

In a world driven by passive information recommendation, there is nothing more important than having your information be found interesting by people who are "like" the people you want to target.

When your information is found, and deemed interesting by an influencer population, it will find its way to a much broader population. Vice versa, if it is not found, or not deemed interesting, it will not find its way to a broader population.

In a world driven by passive information recommendation, there is nothing more important than having your information be found interesting by people who are "like" the people you want to target. The more relevant, interesting, and targeted the content is, the more likely each potential influencer is to read, recommend, or share it, which then guides whether audiences beyond your own will have that content recommended to them based on their unique interests and social graph.

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?

Deep Searches and Content Proliferation

Sometimes, the evolution of what is available online and how buyers access it tends to form a bit of a positive feedback loop that rapidly changes behaviours, and therefore what marketers need to do.

Take, for example, search. Today’s buyers are rapidly becoming accustomed to the prevalence of valuable information online, and the increasing accuracy of search engines. In response to this, buyers are beginning to adapt how they perform searches, and are seeking ever more precise and deep information. As the effect of social influence on search results increases, this trend will only increase as deep content, of a quality determined by the social influence of specific experts in that topic area, can be even more easily discovered.

What this means is that buyers are not searching for broad topic areas as one might flip to a section of a newspaper. Instead, prospective buyers are using longer and longer terms find exactly the information they need. According to a Hitwise study on search phrases over 56% of searches involve three or more words in the search phrase, while close to 20% involve at least 5 words. This is a significant fact as it means that prospective buyers are seeking information that fits a very specific challenge they are facing or precise question that they have.

To keep on top of trends, buyers might search for how specific new capabilities are affecting their industry (“augmented reality in real estate”) or trends in businesses like theirs (“small business adoption of CRM”). As they move towards a purchase cycle, and look for particular vendors to have on their evaluation list, prospective buyers may seek particular traits (“funds making ethical investments in latin america”) or specialized capabilities (“high availability network backup solutions”). Similarly, when moving towards the final stages of validation of a purchase decision, the searches may involve specific brands or product names, along with capabilities, objections, or perspectives that the buyer is looking to learn more about (“Eloqua email deliverability specifications” or “Eloqua marketing automation in financial services”).

Over 56% of searches involve three or more words in the search phrase, while close to 20% involve at least 5 words.

The Challenge for Marketers

The resulting challenge for marketers is an interesting one. If searches are becoming more precise, this means that we must strive to both create a wealth of quality content that is interesting and relevant at all phases of the buying process. Similarly, as search results are being guided by social influence, we must strive to build influence and reputation among the appropriate audiences so that our results are found to be relevant.

As we do this, it is key to keep a close eye on both our search discoverability and the search terms that currently drive visitors to our sites. If we watch these metrics, while at the same time increasing our focus on creating deep, high-quality, subject-matter expert content, we will be found by those buyers and have a chance to influence their thinking at each stage of the buying process.

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.

Influencers, Advocates, and the Mainstream

We've all heard the hesitations on social media - "I don't use it", "my peers don't use it", "our buyers don't use it", etc. Even if these statements are taken as true, the need to engage in social media in a B2B marketing context is just as great because of the effect of influencers and advocates, and their effect on the mainstream audiences.

On this blog, much of the discussion has focused on the ability to get an idea, message, or piece of content, based on its own merits, to be discovered by an intended audience. This is indeed the main challenge of today’s marketers. However, there is often a core audience of influencers, advocates, and fans who can be of significant assistance in this effort.

With the decline of the mass publishers, and the advent of micropublishing online, whether through industry sites, social media, communities, or discussion forums, marketers are faced with a highly fragmented set of audiences to deal with. Each individual who writes has a unique set of motivations, ranging from building their own audience and reputation, to being seen as an expert in a community, or developing a business.

By carefully building relationships with this set of influencers over time, and understanding how you can help them achieve their goals, you can develop a friendly crucible for each of your messages. Each of these individuals influences an area of the market , and collectively may influence a larger area of the market than you can influence directly. Many of the key influencers in a particular market space are also watched closely be the mainstream media.

As B2B marketers, involved in social media, we are all aware of the commonly stated goal in social media to "join the conversation", "help others", and "contribute to the community". However, it can occasionally be challenging to see how these philanthropic actions tie back to the metrics that we are all measured on by the companies we work for. It is with this audience of influencers that this connection becomes clear.

The value of contributing to, helping, and engaging with this audience of influencers and advocates is in forming a friendly launch pad for any of your messages. Each story, and each message, must still stand on its own merits and be appropriately non-salesy, but an audience of advocates and fans, carefully nurtured, will give each message a more open-minded look, and may be among the first to share it with their own audience.

When explaining the value of social media to individuals who do not participate, and believe that their peers don't participate, this "indirect" model is the important one to explain. I have seen more than a few "aaaah, I get it" moments on social media, when this indirect model is explained.

The Content Gap - Lead Nurturing and Content Creation

Many articles have been written about B2B marketing’s evolution towards a model where marketers act as publishers. As buyers are in control of their own buying process, we as marketers need to facilitate them through education, nurturing, and engagement. The best, if not only, way to do this is with great content that adds value, is thought-provoking, and captures the attention of the prospective buyer based on where he or she is in her buying process.

Typically, buyers progress through stages of a buying process from Awareness, to Discovery, to Validation, and have unique content needs at each stage. Marketers who successfully cater their content to buyers at each of these stages do well in guiding and facilitating a buying process that results in revenue for their organization.

The start and end of the buying process are usually well covered by the traditional alignment of roles in an organization. Most marketers are quite experienced in creating the high level thought leadership whitepapers, educational sessions, and industry webinars that are ideal content for the Awareness stage of the funnel. Similarly, sales teams and product marketers are experienced at creating the “why buy us, why buy now” content that is appropriate for the Validation stage of the funnel, but a content gap is left in the middle of the funnel.

In the Discovery stage, prospective buyers have become aware of your solution category and the problems that you solve, and will likely have heard of your organization. Now, they are beginning to formulate their plan for solving the business pain that you solve, discovering vendors who they should investigate more deeply, and scoping the breadth and depth of the initiative in question. It is in this stage that “best practice” content is often most useful.

Depending on your industry and solution, this usually means content and writing that comes from your services team, subject matter experts, product consultants, designers, specialists, or engineers. These are the people who have the knowledge, expertise, and passion to write about what solutions like yours can accomplish, what the challenges and considerations are, and what others in the industry are doing. This is non-salesy content, but it is a level more detailed than the high level thought leadership that is appropriate at the Awareness stage.

The challenge is that these subject matter experts are not marketers, writers, or sales people. Their objectives, motivations, and compensation plans are not generally aligned with generating revenue, moving leads through a buying funnel, or creating great content that is appropriate for the middle of the funnel. Unless addressed, this can leave a critical content gap in the middle of the buying funnel, and lead to an awkward transition as buyers move from high level thought leadership content to much more tactical sales content without the educational transition of content in the Discovery stage.

Successful marketing organizations recognize this content gap, and find ways to motivate, compensate, and encourage the creation of educational, Discovery stage content by subject matter experts, but it can be a difficult process.

Has your organization identified a content gap? How have you dealt with the challenges it presented?

Publishing vs Social Media; a Difference of Filters

I’m sure we’ve all been in conversations around why social media is important to us as B2B marketers. Many of the discussions of its importance talk about joining the conversation, building a dialog, and engaging customers. I definitely agree that those are important, and that social media in general is of significant importance, but I want to frame the issue in a different light.

To understand what social media means in terms of marketing, we need to go all the way back to 1450. Johanes Guttenberg invented movable type, and with it, gave society the ability to mass produce information. With a bit of setup cost, a vast number of books could be produced, and that setup cost spread across all the books produced, making them economical enough for the average person to buy.

This, however, meant one important thing; the publisher was taking all the risk. If the books didn’t sell, he incurred all the cost, and received none of the revenue. This meant that the publisher had to pick good quality information to share – it was an “economic filter” on the quality of information. That same model transferred over to all other forms of mass media; television, music, movies, etc. The publisher of information had to bear the burden of producing information of good enough quality to generate a good sized audience, or they would not remain in business.

It was on this “economic filter” that modern marketing was built; by paying the publishers of media to allow us to “bypass” this filter, and insert our message in their publication, marketers were able to “buy” access to an audience. Whether in television, print, radio, or online media, the concept was essentially the same.

However, this has all changed with the advent of social media. The cost to publish a message and have it accessible to the entire world has fallen to zero. This means that the economic filter of quality, upon which both the entire publishing industry and the discipline of marketing has been based, is no longer a necessary construct.

What replaces it is the concept of a social filter. Information is deemed “good” if many people find it interesting. The original social search engine, of course, is Google. A link to a piece of content is essentially a social “vote” on that piece of content’s quality, and links are predominantly what Google, and all other major search engines use to rank content. As things progress, this trend will only accelerate as the search engines are leveraging the insights from social media in order to guide the ranking of content, and the social media sites themselves are using lists and groups to guide their understanding of social influence by topic area.

As access to information moves from the “economic filter” driven model of the publishing industry to the “social filter” driven model of tomorrow, we as marketers need to adapt how we communicate with buyers and how we learn who is interested. Rather than access content from specific sources on general topics, as they did in the publisher model, in a social model, audiences “discover” information based on the likes and dislikes of the peer group they respect and listen to.

As marketers, we need to ensure that great content is inserted into this conversation, and the influencers in the market spaces we are interested in are carefully nurtured and listened to. It is through them, and through the dynamics of social filters, that our messages will be discovered by the broader audience we hope to influence.

This is the fundamental reason why we need to do all those things that are talked about as the key activities in social media. Joining the conversation, building a dialog, and engaging customers, are all ways to influence the influencers in our market spaces and have our messages discovered. The investments we would have made in buying our way through the economic filters of the publishing industry we now need to make in influencing our way through the social filters of today's world. It is a different mindset, and different investments, but is as important as the advertising dollar investments we made over the last few decades.