Tech Marketers Here Is A Quick Tip: Create Content For The Final Decision

January 28, 2010

There are a lot of great thoughts and opinions on how to use content to further a potential technology buyer down the sales pipeline. Tech marketers have done a great job of developing content that is relevant for the various buying stages and it looks like the tech buyers appreciate the information.  In the early phase of their buying stages these tech buyers are consuming content at an accelerated pace. This is good news.

But what about the later stages of the buying process. Many technology marketers struggle with how content can address the buyer’s issues when they are in the final decision-making process. More often than not, there seems to be a hand off to sales at this point with marketing stepping back a bit and allowing the sales person to “close the deal.”  However, tech buyers want more detailed information at this stage and may not feel comfortable bringing in the sales person during the end stage of their decision-making process.

So tech marketers, if you want to influence this end stage buyer, you should have some content built around relevant details for the buyer to contemplate. Take a risk….try providing a vendor comparison document.

Many of you in the tech marketing field are not comfortable comparing your solutions to your competitors due to the perceived risks involved, but buyers have expressed the desire for this information (as noted by many tech buyer reports). Let’s face it, these tech buyers are going to compare your solution anyways, so why not make sure that they have the right detail and benefits to compare with. By offering up this content, you can hep the buyers out so they are not searching for the information themselves, and perhaps your company will be seen as a more trusted and transparent partner.

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Posted by Tom Jacobs

Tech Marketers: Quick Reminder Strategy Comes First

January 26, 2010

CMO’s at tech companies need to ensure their team is focused on strategy first. I have had recent discussions with many marketing departments at technology companies that cause me a bit of concern. Often, the conversations among these marketers tend t0 focus on what marketing vehicles should be used. I can’t count how many times I heard ‘let’s do a direct mail’ or ‘we should look into social media,’ without a mention of the objective, audience, or – for that matter – the desired result.  This concerns me greatly as I believe these marketers have the talent and the know how, but seem to be so focused on the tactical efforts due to heavy influence of a sales team or perhaps their senior management to get something out there.

A common trap inside these corporate marketing departments assumes that when you talk about marketing, you’re automatically talking about tactical marketing – placing ads, generating leads, sending out mailers, attending tradeshows, creating brochures, implementing a follow-up system, and so forth.

There is a failure to realize that the strategic side  – what you say, how you say it, and who you say it to – is always more important than the marketing medium of how you deliver it.

The distinction between the two is critical and these marketing folks need to stay focused on their strategies without undue influence from other departments. Now, I am not suggesting that the sales team input is not important. I do believe in alignment, but the conversations seem to shift to marketing tactic versus the bigger objectives. Tactical marketing is the execution of your marketing plan, such as generating leads, placing media, creating marketing tools, and implementing a follow-up system. In other words, it’s the medium in which your message is delivered.

Strategic marketing has to do with the content of your marketing message and starts with understanding your customers and the issues that are important to them, understanding why they buy or make a decision.

Just putting a marketing message in an appropriate medium for your target audience to hear or read is not good enough. The strategy must derive from an understanding of what’s important to to the target audience. Otherwise, this tactical part of the marketing process will be much less effective, resulting in ads that under-perform.

Many companies simply try to craft their sales pitch more before they find out how to provide a solution to their consumers’ needs.

Sorry if this sounds like a rant, the true intent is to remind all of your busy tech marketers to stay focused.

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Posted by Tom Jacobs

Tech Marketers: Too Much Proof = Bad Content

January 21, 2010

When developing your content to build credibility for your tech solution it makes common sense to include data to back up your claims.  Let’s face it, we are taught throughout our educational years to demonstrate and prove our intended results with documented evidence. There are so many technology solutions competing for share of voice, that incorporating proof data to build credibility in your marketing message should be automatic. Without the backing of data to support your claims, you leave your prospect simply wondering if they should take a chance on your solution.

But how much data? With technology solutions, I have reviewed many “pitches” that incorporate pages and pages of data to prove out their thinking. Marketing teams at technology companies that have adopted the content approach are gathering and analyzing data toward developing their proof points. Certainly they are demonstrating their commitment to content development which is quite necessary for their marketing initiatives. But I am often surprised by the results of this activity. Most often this content is delivered through heavy white papers and elongated sales brochures, powerpoints that can go one for days, all filled with mounds of data and proof points to back their claims.

I am not a tech buyer, but I read a lot of this content and am amazed at the quantity of data and the quality. There are some messages that have an overwhelming amount of data to support their claims, and causes me to become suspicious of their claims. It is almost too good to be true.

We can only comprehend so much. Our minds have limits in our ability to digest information and too much knowledge can undermine the intended message, greatly diminishing the intended credibility.

Developing content should be a critical component to your external marketing initiatives, but balancing the amount of benefits and proof points included within your messaging should consider the audiences ability to comprehend and digest your message. If you are truly attempting to build credibility for your tech solution, limit your messaging to four or five data points that can prove out your claims.

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Posted by Tom Jacobs

Tech Marketers: One Leadership Goal Drives Successful Sales Enablement

January 13, 2010
There’s a fundamental shift happening in technology marketing around the globe today, as the formerly adversarial relationship between sales and marketing is being replaced by a new level of collaboration driven by the need to achieve shared goals. Marketers face increasing pressure to provide sales with content that meets a specific need at a specific point in the sales cycle and at the same time marketing departments are challenged to reduce  customer acquisition costs. This means that marketers need to shift from supporting, to enabling the sales team.
CMO’s at many technology companies are implementing more refined sales enablement programs to better the alignment of these two departments. But here is the bottom line, these sales enablement programs, no matter the intention of both sales and marketing are only going to be successful with the appropriate leadership in place. Too often, marketing and sales attempt to align with each department head calling the shots and driving the strategy with their department needs in mind. This tends to cause confusion and hampers the process.
ITSMA’s most recent study Sales Enablement Practices and Trends: Increasing Marketing’s Impact suggests sales enablement needs to fall under a unified leadership in order to be the most effective. It helps assure that the burden to improve performance will be shared fairly between marketing and sales. It also creates a single point of authority and accountability for improving the processes that marketing and sales share. Julie Schwartz, from ITSMA details six reasons as to why sales and marketing need to share the accountability and leadership for effective sales enablement efforts:
  1. Integrate a split buying process. Many companies still treat the buying process as having two separate and distinct pieces, with marketing generating leads and then handing leads off to sales. But marketing and sales should collaborate to move the customer/prospect through the entire customer buying process, not just hand off leads.
  2. Create a single system for tracking leads. One of the best ways to encourage collaboration between marketing and sales is to integrate a marketing automation system with sales’ CRM system to track lead generation and nurturing. But that kind of integration requires leadership.
  3. Reduce indirect selling activities. Shared leadership would also help eliminate the inefficiency that’s occurring right now in the sales process. Salespeople spend 23% of their time on indirect selling activities (lead generation and tracking, planning, account management, creating presentations, customer research, after-sales service, etc.). This is time that could be better spent in front of customers.
  4. Make marketing accountable for that reduction. If sales enablement is all about reducing the cost and effort to move a prospect through the buying process, marketers need to be taking steps to reduce the time that salespeople spend on activities that marketers could be doing more efficiently. But until more marketing organizations become accountable for reducing the time sales spends in indirect selling activities, improvements are less likely. We found that just 11% of marketing organizations are held accountable for doing this now, whereas 37% are in the planning stages. A strong, shared marketing and sales leader could convince the other 51% to get started soon.
  5. Help marketing improve its most effective programs. In our survey, marketers told us that the three most effective sales enablement activities are reference programs, ROI/price justification tools, and client briefing centers. To be effective, all these programs require close collaboration between sales and marketing.
  6. Know what the other hand is doing. We found that companies that are succeeding at sales enablement use quantitative metrics to gauge the impact of sales enablement activities, such as:
    • Number of closed deals influenced by marketing
    • Number of opportunities in the pipeline
    • Number of sales-ready leads generated

If we are going to close the gap between marketing and sales and truly reduce the cost and effort to move a prospect through the buying process, it’s time for marketing and sales to get together.

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Posted by Tom Jacobs

Is Facebook Really a B2B marketing tool?

January 11, 2010

I have a constant internal debate over the use of Facebook as a B2B marketing tool. I truly believe in social media as a B2B marketing channel. LinkedIn, Twitter and other popular sites relevant to technology have proven to be quite effective as listening devices, and communication channels. But when it comes to Facebook, I have some comfort issues as I perceive Facebook as a more personal oriented forum. This may be due to the fact that my family uses Facebook to communicate with their friends and other family members. Most of the activity is very much oriented towards their organization and coordination of personal activities.

So when I step back and think about Facebook as a B2B marketing vehicles, I start to question how B2B content is going to be relevant in this type of environment. Perhaps if you are a smaller business, this may be a valuable social media choice, but when you think about enterprise based technology, even though your tech buyers and clients are probably on Facebook, are they there for personal reasons? Do they want to participate in business banter or is Facebook more of a respite from their busy work day?

But here’s my observation– most of the really good examples out there are of B2C companies using Facebook to reach their target audience. There are far fewer concrete examples of successful use of B2B companies using Facebook. And I’d caution that it’s not a very good tool for B2B companies to use – as least not right now, anyway.

Why? One simple word: blocking. Those of us who dabble around in social media all day from our laptops, iPhones, or the comfort of our Web 2.0-crazed agency jobs can easily forget that many people work for companies who block Facebook at work. For B2B companies, their target audience is usually (obviously) other companies, but more specifically, it’s the decision-makers within those other companies. This could mean purchasing managers, marketing managers, IT managers or the C-suite. You can have the coolest Facebook fan page in the world for your business, but if none of your target audience can actually access it during the day while they’re at work (and making those decisions about whether to use your company’s product or service), then it’s probably not the best way to engage your potential customers.

It’s not as easy to see how Facebook might be useful in the business-to-business marketing context beyond personal connections and networking. That’s in part why the B2B answer to social networking is often “We are all on LinkedIn (or Twitter)”

What do you think?

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Posted by Tom Jacobs

Tech Marketers: Content Development Should Initiate The Conversation

January 6, 2010

One of the great benefits of developing and implementing a fully integrated marketing plan is the efficiency of re-purposing your content throughout the various marketing vehicles. As we know tech buyers are continually seeking information about their desired subjects and tend to rely on multiple forms of media consumption to obtain this information. Certainly re-purposing content not only saves time to market and has efficiencies by lowering your development time and cost, but can also ensure your messages remain consistent in all forms of delivery.

As you start the new year, add a goal to review all of your existing content. Like any other marketing asset, you should have all of your content in an organized fashion and at minimally categorized by subject, date created, and how the content is delivered by vehicle. Although re-purposing content can extend its shelf life, you want to ensure that your content is current and relevant to the conversations of your targeted audience. Use this exercise to weed out old information, up date your point of views and create more compelling messages.

Most important your content should be measured based on its ability to create a conversation. The true value of all of your marketing efforts be they on-line or off-line is the opportunity to initiate the conversation among your target audience. Let’s face it, a smart message that can initiate the conversation creates behavior like clicking to a link, referencing the point and perhaps picking up the phone.

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Posted by Tom Jacobs

Tech Marketers, it is time to evaluate your lead nurturing efforts

November 30, 2009

Whether you have a lead nurturing strategy in place or you are about to incorporate this strategy in to your lead generation activities, now is a good time to evaluate your nurturing approach.

A quick recap of the definition of lead nurturing: In a complex sales cycle, nurturing is a relationship-building approach utilizing multiple media to provide relevant information to prospects and engage in an ongoing dialog until qualified prospects are deemed “sales ready.” A smart nurturing strategy shortens the sales cycle and improves return on investment from lead-generation activities, so it is important to reconsider or re-evaluate your nurturing strategy frequently.

If you read about the effectiveness of well thought out lead nurturing efforts, you may have come across data that suggests some lead nurturing programs can yield anywhere from 15% to 200% in additional, new qualified leads.  Close ratios are higher.  Sales pipelines open up and are stronger.  Average sales cycles are shorter.  One company determined that its nurtured prospects bought from 100% to 250% more than those that were not nurtured.  Lastly, many nurtured prospects cited greater overall positive impression of the company.  Bottom line is that a properly planned lead nurture strategy can drive results.

Ardath Albee, a known B2B Marketing Strategist, recently outlined some basic evaluation criteria to evaluate your lead nurturing efforts. These are great thought starters and should be discussed among your team responsible for lead nurturing.

3 steps for evaluation that will help you create a baseline for building an effective nurturing program.

First – About your customers:

  • Who buys from us?
  • Why do they buy from us?
  • What do they need to know to make a purchase decision?
  • Who influences our buyers?
  • What could stop them from choosing to buy?
  • Is one kind of customer more ideal than another? Why?
  • What’s your best foot-in-the-door sale?

Second – Evaluate your prospect database:

  • Who’s in it?
  • Did THEY opt in or did YOU opt them in?
  • How do the prospects in your database match up with what you know about your customers?
  • How are you getting more prospects to opt in?
  • When’s the last time your database heard from you?
  • What topics have they responded to?
  • What’s your opt out rate?

Third – Audit Your Website:

See Ardath’s recent blog post about how to audit your web pages.

  • How much information on your website matches the answers to the questions in the About Your Customers step above?
  • What can be improved?

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Posted by Tom Jacobs

Marketing your technology to the C-suite

November 24, 2009

“We need to sell up to the C-Suite.” This is the ongoing discussion and challenge  among all marketing folks in technology. The thought that if we can get our message beyond the day-to-day executives that we currently have a relationship with, the sales people will have a better business outcome. Although the C-suite is a very important audience and can certainly influence the purchase decision, as a marketer, you cannot ignore those day-to-day executives. In many cases they have the direct line to the C-suite and can determine if your message is C-suite worthy.

Reality in many cases is that each prospective organization has very different protocols in terms of the C-suite influence. Many CEOs, CIOs and CFOs rely on these day-to-day executives to make smart decisions and at the end of the day they trust their talents. This would then suggest that the C-suite audience is simply going to forward your information right back to the day-to-day folks or perhaps simply discard your message. Worse yet, is if you have not developed your content specific to a C-suite audience you can potentially create a perception of irrelevance among this highly sought after group.

Should you be marketing to the C-suite…I believe yes!. There is still great value in creating awareness and building credibility for your technology solutions among the c-suite audience. But as with all other strategic marketing efforts these C-suite focused activities should be integrated with the rest of your marketing efforts against the day-to-day executives.

If you are looking to penetrate or increase your share of corporate budget and provide long-term value to a company you would be wise to plan your approach both tactically and via content development. Do some homework against each account. Meet with your sales team and map out the authority of the day-to-day executives as well as the influence of the C-suite. Find out how the organization tends to make decisions.  Figure out who is actually involved in the decision-making process. What information do they need? When do they need it? Who are the influencers?

Using this information, develop a content strategy to nurture both the c-suite as well as the day-to-day executive. Have your content developed so you may react appropriately based on response or feedback from these two targets. Every touch point should add value to the conversation and continue to build your credibility.

Keep in mind, you need to prove your worth to those who will immediately benefit: the day-to-day business-unit executives. With the right messaging and ROI, they may take the results directly to the C-suite, which will increase the impact of your C-level messaging. The effectiveness of your messaging to th e c-suite will increase if it is delivered by the very team they trust.

 

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Posted by Tom Jacobs

Technology and B2B Marketing Benchmarks for 2010

November 18, 2009

Planning season is continuing to heat up around marketing departments at technology organizations and many of you are looking for insights to justify your planned activities or perhaps inspire some of your upcoming marketing activities. Marketing Sherpa has recently released its annual B2B benchmarking report that I would encourage you to invest in. The report is probably the most comprehensive of its kind and addresses everything from trade shows to outsourcing and lead generation trends. There are several focus areas for technology marketing that may aid your marketing planning development.

I have listed some of the highlights below.

So the good news is that there is a lot of optimism for the upcoming year as many respondents of this study suggest that feel as thought there has been a turning point in the economy and there expectations for their business. This is good news for marketers trying to secure budgets and renew their limited marketing activity from the past two years. As the Marketing Sherpa study suggests, the expectation of better days ahead will mean a change in marketing objectives and the strategies required to achieve them for 2010. Those organizations that have learned to be efficient marketers on a lean budget will apply the lessons learned during these difficult times to become even more effective in the future.

Sales and marketing continue to debate quantity of leads over quality. Of course each of these department have performance measures that create this ever ongoing dialogue. Online search activities have become an ideal solution to balancing lead flow because, in many cases, the spigot can simply be opened or closed to control volume. The more complex challenge is controlling lead quality. This requires a much more strategic approach to optimizing not
only web pages for SEO, but in the case of paid search, carefully aligning the sequence of PPC keywords, ad listings and landing pages.

Tech Buyers are still consuming content at a rigorous pace, so whatever you are planning on doing, ensure you have outlined a smart content development process to feed into the various mead and outlets relied up on by these tech buyers. The chart below outlines the changing use of information resources by technology buyers in the past six months.

Aligning marketing and sales is still essential to creating a productive new business pipeline. As this chart demonstrates, many marketing and sales organizations are collaborating at minimum level by mutually engaging in best practices like defining what a sales-ready lead is – but few are developing a more complete process for sales to hand leads back to marketing for re-engagement and continued nurturing.

The website has also become an extremely efficient platform for integrating and automating the lead generation process. As a result, the role of a company’s website has been elevated from simply a spoke in the marketing mix wheel to the hub of the marketing strategy. While many website capabilities are being managed at a high level, or clients were at least doing a good job of managing them, the report suggests that system integration which enables the flow of leads generated on a website to the CRM system was a weak point.

 

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Posted by Tom Jacobs

10 strategic technologies for 2010

October 30, 2009

Smart technology marketing plans must be developed toward being relevant with the top industry issues in mind. Based on the latest Gartner symposium, cost optimization will reign in 2010 within the technology industry. CIOs have their work cut our for them as they ponder various solutions to make their enterprise more agile and elastic.  Other focus areas will include cloud computing (which will move from the discussion phase to small pilots), and process optimization around enterprise applications (ERP, customer relationship management, supply chain management) that will allow organizations to get more out of these investments.

As Marketers, your content should be developed to demonstrate how your technology solutions will integrate with these needs.

Gartner also identified the top 10 strategic technologies that will be within the mindset of tech buyers and CIOs throughout the upcoming year. The list focuses on technologies that have the “potential for significant impact on the enterprise during the next three years.” Here is the list:

1. Cloud computing. Organizations should think about how to approach the cloud in terms of using cloud services, developing cloud-based applications and implementing private cloud computing environments.

2. Advanced analytics. Real-time data analysis will enable fraud detection on one hand and prediction and simulation on the other, as organizations use data to look ahead.

3. Client computing. Enterprises need to develop a five- to eight-year client computing roadmap before making near-term decisions such as whether or how to upgrade client hardware or move to Windows 7. The progression of desktop virtualization technology and the range of devices available make this an important analysis. “Build a strategic client computing roadmap bringing all issues and devices together, or you will be following vendor roadmaps,” Cearley said.

4. IT for green. The “green” concept has moved beyond energy-efficient data centers to using IT to enable green throughout the enterprise. For example, an organization could use IT to analyze and optimize shipping of goods.

5. Reshaping the data center. A flexible “pod” model, where data center sections can be independently heated, cooled and powered, allows the organization to light up new sections only when needed.

6. Social computing. Organizations need to examine the use of social media by both internal and external constituents and figure out how to govern it. Social network analysis can be used both to detect fraud and to change business processes to boost internal efficiency.

7. Security — activity monitoring. As targeted attacks rise and cloud computing adds complexity, organizations need to identify a longer-term plan for how all of their security technologies come together. Security incident and event management devices, for example, are one approach that is becoming mainstream.

8. Flash memory. This technology, made ubiquitous by popular USB sticks, is a faster, although more expensive, storage alternative. Price drops mean it will offer a “new layer of the storage hierarchy in servers and client computers,” Gartner said.

9. Virtualization for availability. Live migration technology such as VMware Inc.’s VMotion will enable the use of virtualization for high performance, possibly displacing failover cluster software and even fault-tolerant hardware.

10. Mobile applications. Mobile is at a tipping point, given the proliferation of handheld devices and their power and storage.

If you think this list is accurate or believe that there is a technology that is missing, I would love to hear from you.

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Posted by Tom Jacobs

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